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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I designed my heating system around a fairly efficient non-condensing NG boiler that takes 40W for the fan. I can run it and the circulators off my battery bank no problem, and handle a sustained power failure. But only because of the natural gas.

    I’ve been integrating a water-water GSHP into it to provide summer cooling and a supplemental heat source from my solar panels. It works well, but in my climate (Rural Canada) I would be insane to completely remove my gas boiler IMO. Heating demand is just way too high on the sort of days where the power goes out. I’ve been working on plans for a wood boiler but insurance has put their foot right down on anything that burns wood in the last couple years.

    Here in Canada we can’t get lithium at a reasonable price so I have 10kWh of lead-acid (which as you know is actually 5). Doesn’t go very far on a cold winter day with 4 hours of sun and snow on the panels!

    On the upside I haven’t had to hook my generator to my house in years, I’m really happy with my “grid-independent” system.


  • Double would be a COP of over 10. That’s a stretch for an overbuilt GSHP and not even slightly feasible for air-air.

    High COPs are usually easy on a compressor as they represent low compression ratios and low differential temps. For example I can hit around COP 7 in cooling on my scrap heap GSHP, with an evap temp around 10C and condenser temp around 20C. That’s a high side pressure around 100 psi and only 30 psi of differential, “barely working” as far as the compressor is concerned.

    The only way I know to get high COPs is to have an oversized condenser and a way to get your refrigerant below ambient, like evaporative, ground source or overnight radiant so you can get the compression ratio down, unless you know a secret in which case I’m not afraid to burn out a compressor or two trying it out!



  • Is agriculture land based transport? Short of an actual nuclear tractor, nothing but diesel has the energy density sufficient to run modern scale farms.

    Chatting around the fire we’ve tried to imagine a solution like dragging a cable but with tractors pushing close to 1000HP now that’s about a megawatt. That’s a long, fat cable or an extremely dangerous voltage to drag around a field, probably both. And an insane grid infrastructure to get power to the field borders.

    You wouldn’t believe how much fuel goes into agriculture, to the point where I believe it makes up nearly a third of emissions (possibly including land clearing, can’t remember the details). Synthetic fuels are the only net-zero option.

    Well I’m kind of a fan of the nuclear tractor honestly but I kind of doubt it :)


  • No I’m serious, I’m here in SK and we’re trying to push Moe and his cronies out for the NDP this fall, and our biggest problem is the federal NDP damaging the brand by backing Trudeau. All we say all day is “The SK NDP is not affiliated with the federal party, we stand for working Canadians, vote Moe out”

    If you think $500 for low income and seniors is anything other than a bone thrown to pacify the poor then Singh has pulled the wool over your eyes.

    The requirement for “no access to insurance” absolutely torpedoes the entire thing. Private insurers need to fall, universal coverage is the only way. Dental is the Canadian equivalent to the entire USA health insurance racket.

    Congrats on living in the one green riding, which does give you some power over your single seat party… Which ultimately holds no power at all in our broken system.

    I’m sorry to say I voted Trudeau on the promise of electoral reform, which he then told us we didn’t want. I’m in a safe blue riding which means my vote is pointless, so I’m going full protest vote next time for the PPC 🤣 Max is laughable, especially his obsession with dairy supply management, but enough votes for “burn it down” will hopefully send a message.


  • Trudeau over Biden?

    Trudeau is importing the world’s problems in the name of propping up the real estate investor class (of which he is a member) and pumping up fake GDP numbers. GDP per capita is plummeting in Canada with excess immigration.

    Singh is in his pocket, a waste of a vote. I was an NDP voter all my life, I’m done.

    Polliviere is an absolute idiot who will ride a wave of hatred for Trudeau into office.

    Voters in Canada have no power and no representation as all votes are whipped. Your MP is a seat filler. We have no ballot initiatives or direct democracy options that America has, and reform will never come.

    Biden listens to people who know what they’re doing and stands out of the way… Passed legislation supporting workers and unions, energy infrastructure etc. meaning he’s both more left than Singh and more business-friendly than PP



  • evranch@lemmy.catoHumor@lemmy.worldHistory repeats itself.
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    7 months ago

    The volume could definitely be higher now, since the box sides are so bloody high that you can’t actually put anything in the truck without a ladder.

    As a farmer and actual truck user everyone I know has a beat up farm truck from the 80s for actual truck use, modern truck is just a big car for comfortable city trips


  • America needs some perspective. You complain that your only choices are a doddering fool or a toxic narcissist who wants to actively destroy the nation.

    Here in Canada we look at our options and think “America is so much better, I wish we had an option to vote for a doddering fool. All we have are narcissists”

    No joke I wish we had a leader as good as Biden. The bar is so low that the devil is doing the limbo with it down in Hell.



  • It’s complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50’ tower with booster.

    However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.

    So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.

    Now the issues. RCS won’t work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there’s no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.

    This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I’ve got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.




  • Right, we need to come up with better terms for talking about “AI”. Personally at the moment I’m considering any transformer-type ML system to be part of the category, as you stated none of them are any more “intelligent” than any others. They’re all just a big stack of tensor operations. So if one is AI, they all are.

    Remember long ago when “fuzzy logic” was all the hype and considered to be AI? Just a very early form of classifier network but everyone was super excited at the time.


  • I’m just stating that “AI” is a broad field. These lightweight and useful transformer models are a direct product of other AI research.

    I know what you mean, but simply stating “Don’t use AI” isn’t really valid anymore as soon these ML models will be a common component. There are even libraries and hardware acceleration support for tensor operations on the ESP32-S3.


  • evranch@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
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    8 months ago

    It’s possible for local AI models to be very economical on energy, if used for the right tasks.

    For example I’m running RapidOCR which uses a modern transformer architecture, and absolutely blows away traditional OCR at capturing data from character displays.

    Doesn’t even need a GPU and returns results in under a second on a modern CPU. No preprocessing needed, just feed it an image. This little multimodal transformer is just as much “AI” as bloated general purpose GPTs, but it’s cheap, fast and useful.



  • Liftoff is fun, I’ve always recommended FPVFreerider for serious training, it’s more stripped down and focuses on absolute core flight functionality. Less tuning, more flying.

    The graphics are basic but that means you’ll never drop a frame even on a potato at 165Hz, the flight controls are insanely tight. Likewise this was the software I paired my radio with and learned to fly.

    It’s also only a couple bucks and there’s a freeware/demo version floating around out there too.