Badabinski

Yeah, the lifespan and ability to leave a flywheel “discharged” makes me wish I could have one for my homelab (as unrealistic as that might be). I have a solar generator as a battery backup, but it’s not a true UPS with a fast transfer switch (I needed at least 3kWh of capacity for long power outages, my max draw is like 600 watts before I finish load shedding). Most of my servers can tolerate the brief voltage sag, but my R640 chokes and dies. My battery is hooked up to one of my PDUs, and I’d love to have a flywheel hooked up to the other PDU. The battery would be fully transitioned by the time the flywheel was discharged.

On the point of safety, I have a question. I feel like it’s probably easier to prove that a flywheel system is deenergized, but there is the very slight risk of confinement loss. With a chemistry like Lithium Iron Phosphate that can’t sustain a flame and doesn’t produce flammable gasses, do you feel that batteries might begin to approach the safety of flywheels? It sounds like you have actual experience with flywheel systems, so I’m quite curious.

EDIT: holy shit, someone is actually selling a 300 KVA flywheel system on eBay for $30,000. I wonder who the hell would buy something like that used.

EDIT: I said “very slight risk” of confinement loss, and I should probably correct myself. The risk is ridiculously, stupidly small for a system like I linked above. Maybe the bigger systems that get buried and have concrete poured on them are riskier, but I don’t know if people even do that anymore for datacenters.

Full disclosure, I haven’t watched the video, I’m just going off of the other comments. Mechanical energy storage is definitely already a thing. Flywheels are the past, present, and future of energy storage in certain niches. My dad was a PM for IBM for many years and told me all about installing them while building out datacenters in the 90s. They’re great for powering large loads while a generator spins up. They’re, uh, not really that great for multi-day storage. You’re going to lose energy no matter what. Magnetic bearings won’t help this, they still have something analogous to friction.

Anything other than batteries or pumped hydro is probably a fool’s errand when it comes to grid-level storage. You’re not going to make a crane big enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. You’re not going to be able to make a flywheel spin fast enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. Do not try to compete with the water using your giant spinning death wheel or big dumb crane. Batteries get a pass because they’re dense as fuck and very simple to deploy.

Yep, I put hundreds of hours into Red Alert 2 as a youngun. I would absolutely play the shit out of a remake, provided a map maker was furnished or created by the community. I fucking loved custom RA2 maps.

I can definitely see how that’d be someone’s first thought. In general this is just a weird-ass question lol.

when you go to the dentist, the dentist and/or hygenist will usually work with two tools. If they need to rinse your teeth, they’ll first blast them with some ice cold water, and then they’ll stick a straw-looking thing in your mouth to suck up the water they just skeeted in. Similarly, when they’re drilling your teeth, they’ll use the little straw fellow to suck up the tooth dust so you don’t get weird shit in your lungs.

It’s like an oral shop vac, where your mouth is the mess. They use them so they don’t have to stop and let you spit. OP has Problems™ and wants to stick one of these things in their nose.

OP, please, just blow your nose or take a decongestant if you’re sick (NOT oral phenylephrine because that shit is useless). If you avoid blowing your nose because you get bloody noses all the time you can actually get that part of the inside of your nose cauterized. I used to get at least one nosebleed a day, and it was genuinely life changing for child me when the doctor stuck that swab in my nose. It was painful for a sec or two, but I only get nosebleeds once or twice a year now.

EDIT: netti pots are good, just make sure you practice good hygiene with those. Very hot and steamy showers and putting damp heat on your sinuses is also quite helpful in my experience as a lifelong severe allergy sufferer.

touch foo; tar cvf foo.tar foo

My fucking autocorrect decided that cvf should have been xvf. I caught it before I hit enter to close out the code block, but wtf? When did my keyboard develop opinions on command args‽

Hey there! I want to preface this by saying a couple of things. The first thing is that I don’t really have a horse in this race. What people run in their homelabs is their business, and I appreciate seeing diverse setups. The second thing is that we had a cordial conversation before about nuclear fusion. I’ve seen you around a lot, and I have a pretty high opinion of you. I’ve felt that if we interacted again, it’d be a mutually positive experience.

After reading this thread, I feel surprised and concerned. The tone of conversations in this thread seems different from what I’ve seen in the past when seeing the rainbow Starfleet badge. I hope I’m coming across genuinely when I ask—is everything okay? I’m not asking out of some oblique motivation to dismiss your point of view, but because I feel like there’s more anger and frustration in some responses than is (in my opinion, and only my opinion) warranted by the situation. Like, for example, have there been bitter arguments about this topic in the past? Is this topic similar to other ones that are frustrating/upsetting? Has today just been a really shitty day? The last one is pretty common for me, and I find that it can make me react with more anger and force than I would have otherwise intended. It doesn’t change my opinions or values, it just affects the way I express myself. I personally do not like to express anger on the internet (unless I feel that my anger is truly warranted), and I sometimes wish someone would stop and ask me “is everything okay?” in those moments. Being able to think about and express feelings about the thing that’s aggravating me is such a relief, and it helps me step back into myself. I’ve seen enough of your posts that I’m going to presume to extend that to you.

I want to reiterate that my intention here is not to dismiss or reduce your points, nor is it to change your mind. I’m not trying to tone police, because the tone people use on the internet is their own damn business. I’m totally accepting of a “please go away,” if all of this is off base or unwanted in any way. I’ve just grown fond of seeing your comments, and this thread seems like an outlier. If that’s intentional, then I apologize for my presumption.

I used to have this problem all the time, I think it’s pretty normal. I did many years of therapy, and part of what I got out of that was an understanding of how people deal with pain and anger. The best way to change someone’s mind is to try to empathize with their position and show your understanding. Once you share context with them, you can gently explain why you feel the way you do. Sometimes, you do this and find that the other person’s point of view is a more accurate reflection of your values and you change your mind instead.

Don’t do this with bad faith actors though. just block them.

I used to have this problem all the time, I think it’s pretty normal. I did many years of therapy, and part of what I got out of that was an understanding of how people deal with pain and anger. The best way to change someone’s mind is to try to empathize with their position and show your understanding. Once you share context with them, you can gently explain why you feel the way you do. Sometimes, you do this and find that the other person’s point of view is a more accurate reflection of your values and you change your mind instead.

Don’t do this with bad faith actors though. just block them.

I’ll throw in “folks” as another gender neutral option. I say “you folks” all the time, especially in professional contexts. I’m not from the South, but I have family there so y’all is a part of my vocabulary. I use it in more informal situations pretty commonly.

Based off of your comment history, it seeeeems like you live in the US, although I could deffo be wrong. That’s where I live, so I may have good news. It’s illegal to sell tritium products in the US, but it’s not illegal to buy it as an individual. There’s a Taiwanese company that sells all kinds of cool little tritium widgets: https://www.mixglo.com/

that’s where I got my vial from. It wasn’t cheap for what it is, but I think it’s cool.

edit: looks like they also ship to Canada if you live there. I’ve no idea what the laws are up there, but I’m assuming it’s legal if they’re willing to ship.

God, what a wonderful thread that was. I’ve decided to follow and star @mizu@lemmy.world so I can follow up on their future exploits.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that they’ve posted in quite some time. Hopefully they’ll come out of hiding one day and ask more ridiculous questions.

I have a little tritium vial on my keys because I am a clumsy oaf with ADHD and the little greeny glow has been useful a couple of times. It’s great when I’m out at night and my keys yeet themselves out of my pocket and land in the darkest possible area.

I mostly got it because it’s cool though. Radioluminescence is fukken rad!

Right, but I can’t require a second factor on a different device that operates outside of my primary device’s trust store. I’m sure there is some way to make my desktop hit my phone up directly and ask for fingerprint auth before unlocking the local keystore, but that still depends on the security of my device and my trust store. I don’t want the second factor to be totally locked to the device I’m running on. I want the server to say, “oh, cool, here’s this passkey. It looks good, but we also need a TOTP from you before you can log in,” or “loving the passkey, but I also need you to respond to the push notification we just sent to a different device and prove your identity biometrically over there.” I don’t want my second factor to be on the same device as my primary factor. I don’t know why a passkey (potentially protected by local biometric auth) + a separate server-required second factor (TOTP or push notification to a different device or something) isn’t an option.

EDIT: I could make it so a fingerprint would decrypt my SSH key rather than what I have now (i.e. a password). That would effectively be the same number of factors as you’re describing for a passkey, and it would not be good enough for my organization’s security model, nor would it be good enough for me.

I just don’t get why I can’t use something like TOTP from my phone or a key fob when logging in with a passkey from my desktop. Why does my second factor have to be an on-device biometrically protected keystore? The sites I’m thinking of currently support TOTP when using passwords, so why can’t they support the same thing when using passkeys? I don’t want to place all my trust in the security of my keystore. I like that I have to unlock my phone to get a TOTP. Someone would have to compromise my local keystore and my phone, which makes it a better second factor in my opinion.

EDIT: like, at work, I ssh to servers all over the damn place using an ssh key. I have to get to those servers through a jump box that requires me to unlock my phone and provide a biometric second factor before it will allow me through. That’s asymmetric cryptography + a second factor of authentication that’s still effective even if someone has compromised my machine and has direct access to my private key. That’s what I want from passkeys.

This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.

My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.

EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.

It already is. My company runs hundreds (possibly thousands) of ARM64-based instances right now. It’s done great things for our cloud spend. We still have more x86 stuff than ARM because some applications just don’t perform as well on ARM, but I can imagine that ratio will change as software gets more optimized (specifically the JDK, golang’s compiler, and GCC/LLVM) and Ampere releases new systems with better single thread perf.

EDIT: Ampere, not Alterra. God damn tech company names.

You can run Asahi Linux on M1 MacBooks right now. If you didn’t see the news, they’ve even been able to run some relatively modern AAA games with decent enough frame rates. Granted that’s only the M1 macs, but there’s at least one relatively modern ARM laptop that you can run Linux on.

I’ll totally concede that the new Snapdragon laptops aren’t running Linux yet. It seems like Qualcomm is taking Linux support seriously, but I’m a bit skeptical as someone who has been absolutely fucked by a shitty Qualcomm kernel module.

I just wish that companies enabling passkeys would still allow password+MFA. There are several sites that, when you enable passkeys, lock you out of MFA for devices that lack a biometric second factor of authentication. I’d love to use passkeys + biometrics otherwise, since I’ve often felt that the auth problem would be best solved with asymmetric cryptography.

EDIT: I meant to say “would still allow passkeys+MFA.” hooray for sleep deprivation lol.

https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/flightgear/ci/next/tree/

This random git repo I picked from their source forge page seems to have some pretty recent commits. I’m guessing they just have a slow release cycle.