This goes back to my suggestion to strengthen their current offering instead of making a giant frankencloud. They're in an interesting unique position, if they play their cards right they could become a big player in the field, too many cards on AI might not be it though.
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps?
The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.
Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
I think variety is the key, and we've had really good outcomes by having a few pet shop toys (feather on wand, squeaky mouse, ball with bell) that we bring out for a few hours every few weeks and then put away, so it doesn't turn into something normal for them to ignore.
+1 after many failed attempts to buy useless cat toys, I’ve been really surprised that those are what we loves the most. He can play alone with it for hours and is absolutely crazy happy to play fetch with me. Maybe when I throw the elastic hair is kind of a bird like feature him.
I woke up early the other day. The house was perfectly silent until I got near the kitchen, when I heard a ping followed by an odd sound. As I got closer to see what was going on, an empty beer can casually rolled past my feet. The cats were nowhere to be seen.
Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.
Yep, archiving feature flags and deleting the dead code is usually thing number 9001 on the list of priorities, so in practice most projects end up with a graveyard of them.
Another issue that I've ran into a few times, is if a feature flag starts as a simple thing, but as new features get added, it evolves into a complex bifurcation of logic and many code paths become dependent on it, which can add crippling complexity to what you're developing
I also notice these cases tend to be missing good test coverage (at least in my experience)
I think part of the assumption is "hey there's a flag I can control if something goes wrong so manual validation is ok here" but that doesn't help when the thing is left for a period of time and everyone loses context.
Even disregarding CUDA, NVidia has had like 80% of the gaming market for years without any signs of this budging any time soon.
When it comes to GPUs, AMD just has the vibe of a company that basically shrugged and gave up. It's a shame because some competition would be amazing in this environment.
Nvidia has a sprawling APU family in the Tegra series of ARM APUs, that span machines from the original Jetson boards and the Nintendo Switch all the way to the GB10 that powers the DGX Spark and the robotics-targeted Thor.
The CPUs in their SOCs were not up to snuff for a non-portable game console until very recently. They used (and largely still do I believe) off the shelf ARM Cortex designs. The SOC fabric is their own, but the cores are standard.
In performance even the aging Zen2 would demolish the best Tegra you could get at the time.
You should note that the Switch, the only major handheld console for the last 10 years, is the only one using a Tegra.
And from everything I've heard Nvidia is a garbage hardware partner who you absolutely don't want to base your entire business on because they will screw you. The consoles all use custom AMD SOCs, if you're going to that deep level of partnering you'd want a partner who isn't out to stab you.
There has been a rumor that some OEMs will releasing gaming oriented laptops with Nvidia N1X Arm CPU + some form of 5070-5080 ballpark GPU, obviously not on x86 windows so it would be pushing the latest compatibility layer.
PlayStation and Xbox are two extremely low-margin, high volume customers. Winning their bid means shipping the most units of the cheapest hardware, which AMD is very good at.
I want to recommend a game you can pull out and explain in a couple of minutes that everyone tends to enjoy. I've played many a board games with people and this one has had unparalleled success in terms of enjoyment and replayability across broad audiences
It's called "So Clover!" and it's a word association themed game where each person gets four pairs of words, you write a one word clue for each pair, and then the rest of the group has to work backwards to figure out the original orientation of your cards (the cards themselves each have four words as well)
I'm hoping so. What's amazing is that with local models you don't suffer from what I call "usage anxiety" where I find myself saving my Claude usage for hypothetical more important things that may come up, or constantly adjusting prompts and doing some manual work myself to spare token usage.
Having this power locally means you can play around and experiment more without worries, it sounds like a wonderful future.
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