They are direct AC bulbs, no inverter needed. They do have smoothing capacitors so they don't flicker, and I think a slight redesign of the drive circuitry could add ~10% more efficiency...
Yup. It's why even in fairly red states like my own (Idaho) solar, wind, and battery are going up everywhere. Even without significant subsidies the economics are really good for renewables.
They'd be even better if we didn't have extreme tariffs on China.
That's actually what's convinced me that renewables are a better choice than nuclear. I still like nuclear, but renewables are just so much easier and faster to deploy while being a lot cheaper. To make nuclear competitive requires regulatory changes along with a government that's simply willing to tell it's NIMBY citizens YIMBY.
Government literally has to get in the way of renewable deployments at this point to stop them.
IMO, this screams the need for both tort reforms and something like a nationalized representation system.
Perhaps something like a standard set of filings for a given case. Maybe automated rulings on less consequential motions. Maybe some sort of hard limits on the amount of billable hours a law-firm can work on a case. Anti-slapp laws for sure.
Like, for example, maybe we allow a total of 100 billable hours worked, with an additional 10 billable hours allowed per appeal. The goal there being that you force lawyers and lawfirms to actually focus on the most important aspects of a case and not waste everyone's time and money filling motions for stuff you are allowed to get, but ultimately has 1% impact on the case. Perhaps you could even carve out a "if both sides agree, then you can extend the billable hours". You could also have penalties for a side that doesn't respond. For example, if you depose them and they fail to follow the orders then they lose billable hours while you get them credited back.
The main goal here being avoiding both wasting a bunch of court time on a case but also stopping a rich person that can afford an army of lawyers from using that advantage to drive their opponent bankrupt with a sea of minor motions.
That $100k is also on the cheap side. If the other side has a lawyer and a lot of money to burn, they can easily hike that way up. Filing a billion motions that your lawyer has to respond to, deposing everyone you've ever met, going after every document you've ever looked at. The more money someone has, the easier it is to make you spend more money, even if you are right.
Right. My case was a very simple contract dispute with very little discovery and only a couple of people to depose, so I was lucky there. And the other side did have more money than me, but not so much that they could burn several hundred K on it without feeling it.
$50k is going to be on the cheap side for any case that ultimately involves the court. Anytime a case goes to trial, you can easily be looking at $1M+.
There's a reason companies keep lawyers on staff. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a lawyer an annual salary than it is to hire out a lawfirm as the standard rates for law-firms are insanely high. On the low end, $150/hour. On the high end, $400. With things like 15 minute minimums (so that one draft response ends up costing $100).
Take a deposition for 3 hours, with 2 lawyers, that'll be $2400.
Doubt that. There's no point of bringing in a litigator on day 1 of a trial save for the fact they are probably a better public speaker. Whatever needed to get done needed to be done well before trial started.
Sure there is, if you can send back a strong response to a challenge, a potential litigant may back down ultimately saving money.
On staff legal council is there to be able to make the call when a more expensive firm should be hired and brought in. There's a lot of BS lawsuits, however, that flow through. For example, every software company that gets big enough will likely get sued for some BS patent infringement. Having on staff legal will be able to make the call of "yeah, you should just give them $10k to go away". That's a lot cheaper than hiring a firm to come in and then tell you "Yeah, you should give them $10k to go away".
Particularly for a business, it takes years before any case gets close to going to trial. Plenty of time for your council to make the determination on when bigger guns should be brought in.
>Sure there is, if you can send back a strong response to a challenge, a potential litigant may back down ultimately saving money.
Do you litigate? Hiring a new attorney to show up day of trial only communicates to the other side that it's clown-city.
>On staff legal council is there to be able to make the call when a more expensive firm should be hired and brought in. There's a lot of BS lawsuits, however, that flow through. For example, every software company that gets big enough will likely get sued for some BS patent infringement. Having on staff legal will be able to make the call of "yeah, you should just give them $10k to go away". That's a lot cheaper than hiring a firm to come in and then tell you "Yeah, you should give them $10k to go away".
Do you litigate? Do you know what's involved to actually get to a trial? Let alone the day of trial? In house is going to take depositions and brief summary judgment? In house is going to prepare the pre trial order? Get proposed jury instructions? Again, do you litigate?
>Particularly for a business, it takes years before any case gets close to going to trial. Plenty of time for your council to make the determination on when bigger guns should be brought in.
You said, in particular, "up until the point where you start a trial."
> You said, in particular, "up until the point where you start a trial."
That was wrong of me to say.
My intent was more to communicate that there's a lot of legal work before a case gets close to going to trial or even discovery which an in-house attorney can and will handle. Including evaluating if a case needs the big guns called in.
For what it's worth (to you), I've only ever dealt with one in-house litigation team and they were monsters. Typically, once a suit is filed, you get someone serious on it. It'd be pretty crazy to have a non-litigator draft responsive pleadings like an answer or a motion to dismiss.
It still biodegrades within the pit. In fact, that's actually a problem because it can generate fire starting temperatures! (Crazy I know) It's also a problem because a part of biodegrading is producing CO2 and CH4.
But I generally agree. The big issue here is we as a society have moved away from biodegradable packing and distribution. I get it, plastic prevents waste and mold. That's why we use it. It's also dirt cheap. It's a byproduct of oil refining (literally cheaper than water).
The ultimate solution to the plastic problem is making plastic more expensive, and the way to tackle that is by reducing oil consumption. Fortunately, that's sort of just naturally happening.
I'd be interested in knowing what the CO2 emissions were from these. You still need to feed the yeast, so you'll have the CO2 emissions involved in growing a crop associated with this. And if you look at the chart in the OP, you'll see that grain production is about half the CO2 emissions of milk. That's likely part of the milk CO2 production accounting.
In addition, you'll need more cleaning/sterilization/mixing. I'd guess that it's lower, but I wonder how much lower.
And then there's the other products that generally get thrown into the mix to make up for things like missing fats. For example, a vegan cheese based on bacteria will often include coconut oil, probably to get the same fat profile.
Whey is an interesting product in general because it's a waste product of cheese making.
Feed efficiency is critical when doing these calculations as cows inherently need energy to survive not just produce milk. As such even if you use the same crop two different sources of protein can have wildly different levels of CO2 emissions embedded in their creation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
I think it is likely more efficient. That said, cows do have the advantage that the food they consume needs little to no processing in order to produce milk. The yeast needs pretty precise processing of the incoming mash both to make sure a wild yeast strain doesn't make it's way in, and to make sure the yeast ultimately produces the right proteins.
You can't just throw in grass clippings into a vat and get whey. You can throw grass clippings into a cow to get milk (though, TBF, I dislike grassy milk).
I agree it’s likely to be more labor intensive per lb of feedstock, but only 21% of calories in milk are protein and overall milk has ~10% of the initial energy. So you’re looking at ~2% of the energy from these crops ending up as milk protein.
That’s a lot of room for improvement which then means far less labor on growing crops.
Cows are pretty terrible because of methane from their burps (not farts; burps). People are working on that but it's still real. A 50% drop would be very significant
Ok, so a lot of this boils down to the fact that this sort of software really wants to be running on linux. For both windows and mac, the only way to (really) do that is creating a VM.
It seems to me that the main issue here is painful disconnects between the VM and the host system. The kernel in the VM wants to manage memory and disk usage and that management ultimately means the host needs to grant the guest OS large blocks of disk and memory.
Is anyone thinking about or working on narrowing that requirement? Like, I may want the 99% of what a VM does, but I really want my host system to ultimately manage both memory and disk. I'd love it if in the linux VM I had a bridge for file IO which interacted directly with the host file system and a bridge in the memory management system which ultimately called the host system's memory allocation API directly and disabled the kernels memory management system.
containers and cgroups are basically how linux does this. But that's a pretty big surface area that I doubt any non-linux system could adopt.
Given that Claude Code runs without issues on macOS, I'd guess that it's more about sandboxing shell sessions (i.e. not macOS applications or single processes, for which solutions exist).
Unfortunately, unlike Linux, macOS doesn't have a great out-of-the-box story there; even Apple's first-party OCI runtime is based on per-container Linux VMs.
The upgrade to the native installer gave me some issues, I had Claude fail to return any responses and continuously eat memory until my computer crashed! The only fix I could figure out is nuking my entire .claude dir, losing all my history etc with it
It’s a solved problem in the VM world too. Memory ballooning is a technique where a driver inside the VM kernel cooperates with the hypervisor to return memory back to the host by appearing to consume the memory from the VM. And disk access is even easier; just present a network filesystem to the VM.
The network file system to host is usually pretty slow no? That was my impression.
As for memory ballooning, the main issue with it is that it (generally) only gets triggered when the host runs out of memory.
For a host which is only running VMs, this is fine. But for the typical consumer host it becomes cumbersome as you still need to give the VM a giant memory block and hope that your VM of choice is good enough to free on time. It's also uncoordinated. When swapping needs to happen, if the VM was using the host for allocation the host could much more efficiently decide what needs to go into swap.
And if the host was in charge of both the memory and file system, then things like a system cache could be done more efficiently on top of all that.
> The network file system to host is usually pretty slow no? That was my impression.
NFS doesn't have to be slow. If you avoid traversing the TCP/IP stack, performance is fine. Linux guests can use vsock to communicate with the hypervisor directly, and macOS hosts can use the Virtualization framework to map a guest vsock to a host UNIX socket.
In my state (idaho) at night the power mixture is primarily renewable/clean because of this.
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