391–400 of 553 posts
High accuracy long read DNA sequencing. The new chemistry for Oxford Nanopore is getting close to where you can use it exclusively without polishing (down to ~1 in 100 base errors), and the price per gigabase has become competitive with Illumina (but with reads in the 10s or 100s of kilobases in lengths). On the other hand, PacBio HiFi reads are really reliably high accuracy and still long enough to resolve complex v…
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Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in general? (As an example) * Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc. Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead of a vendor co-opting.
There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end attacks and promote productivity." https://mnmnotmail.org/ https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail
Support for MNM by way of Patreon is requested on the home page.
There's also JMAP, with credible standards people involved:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/photos/
Serious industry involvement however appears limited to FastMail.
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A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting. There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.
Tesla also patented a wiring harness rigid enough to be robotically manipulated.
Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.
They are good. But not in very cold environments. I have one and when there is more than two degrees of frost it struggles. So for a lot of continental areas they are almost useless since they do not function when you really need them. For temperate climates and coastal regions they are wonderful.
This depends on what you mean by "cold" and there are several other factors as well.
For one, they work great below 28 degrees. For the area between 28-34, there can be issues. In this range, water will more readily condense out of the air and form ice on the outdoor unit. And if it is raining and it is 34 out, you'll really have some ice.
But below 28 degrees... any water in the air is already "frozen" and you aren't going to have as big of an issue of ice spontaneously forming on a colder surface.
As long as you can get air flow across the coils on the outdoor unit you are fine, in one sense, "the colder, the better".
But that leads to the next issue: what to do when you do have ice blocking air flow? And this is when price comes into play. To my knowledge, all of the lower tier brand names (goodman, payne, bryant, maybe even ruud and rheem) will use a timer based defrost control. Basically, once the outdoor coil goes below 32 degrees, a switch is tripped and a defrost cycle will be forced after 60 minutes, whether there is ice on the unit or not. When temps are below freezing, a defrost cycle could easily take 20 minutes of extra runtime to recover the temperature. Even worse, if snow is drifted up against outdoor unit, a defrost cycle will cause it to melt into the coils which will turn into ice once the defrost cycle is over. So an unnecessary defrost could take a completely ice free outdoor unit and leave it with one side caked in ice.
To combat this issue, most of your top line brands (Trane, American Standard, Lennox, Carrier) will have "on demand" defrost so you might very well go 4+ hours of runtime and never see a defrost. However, each brand has their own quirks and can still end up with unnecessary defrost cycles if the air flow through the indoor unit (dirty filter) is poor or if the system refrigeration charge is not 100% perfect.
The other thing that seems to get people is run times. In the south in 100+ degree temps, you can expect your A/C to run for 12 hours in a 24 hour period. Yet for some reason, when a heatpump runs for 2+ hours straight when it is 20 degrees outside, people flip out that it's running too long and going to blow your electric bill up so they flip it over to electric only/emergency mode.
Let's do the math... your heat pump is running for hours on end, drawing 3kwh every hour. You freak out and flip it to emergency mode which turns on a 20kw electric heater and the unit now runs for 30 minutes followed by a 30 minute off cycle. You think it is only using "half" the electricity because it is running half as much. But the reality is, you are now using 10kwh every hour.
Call me crazy, but I don't think it was politics or frozen natural gas that lead to the 2021 Texas blizzard power outage, but people with heat pumps that have no idea what they are doing. Even before temps were freezing, several local community groups on facebook had people spamming "it's going to get below 32 tonight, so for you heat pump users, make sure you put it in emergency heat mode!". And then to make matters worse, local HVAC companies, with the large influx of people complaining their heat pump had been running for "hours on end", start chiming in saying "it's too cold, go to emergency mode"... Meanwhile, I'm somewhat new to heat pumps myself, but I had forced mine to only use electric heat when in defrost mode. It ran flawlessly, I was very impressed. The vents were blowing 90 degrees all the way until it was 20 degrees out. Once it was 6 degrees out, it was blowing 81 out the vents, but still enough to hold temperature in the house (66). On the worst day, I had a combined runtime of 16 hours with 7 defrost cycles. My bill for the whole month was $140 (the highest ever), while all my neighbors that tried to "save" money by going to emergency mode had bills of $300+.
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What happens today when some kids move road cones so they point to oncoming traffic as a prank? You can have a car react the same way I did in that situation - slow down, take in the entirety of the situation ("cones say X, but that leads you into oncoming traffic") and ask the operator for directions or maneuver accordingly. Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't…
You’re actively paying huge dollar figures to experiment with your survival. Which I don’t judge even if I find it too risky for my taste. But your giant expensive experimental hunk of alloys and minerals is also a death sentence for others when it messes up.
Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.
I suppose you're writing this on a 1982 Commodore 64...
1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every…
Regarding the boring company, i have seen at least one engineer's breakdown of their tech and it appears they are using off the shelf tunneling equipment and their costs are in line with and sometimes higher than several other established companies that dig smaller tunnels like the Boring Company does. It seems the only competitive advantage they have is the bully pulpit that is Elon Musk and his blind followers that…
Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.
“Better application” + “old tech” ≡ “new tech”.
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> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight. I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings. since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all.…
> I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. When you sell the rocket and not the launch on cost plus contract, it's indeed not cost-effective.
But ULA was stuck with their approach for several reasons, only a couple of which were in their control.
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Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.
Notepad? Amateurs and your IDEs. REAL developers work without single-level undo, conveniences of vi or emacs. Real developers use `edlin`.