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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible


  • Super rich for me is being able to run a motor yacht that’s typically way over 100 feet with 4 or more crew on average of 100k each. Captain might be on anything up to 250k with a decent tonnage license and experience. High chance of a chase boat with its own separate crew.

    The running costs of that boat would bankrupt even a decently wealthy millionaire in a year or two.

    Rich is being able to run a modern 50 foot plus motor yacht for coastal cruising without a crew. Or a recent 50 foot sailboat with all the trimmings like an oyster.

    But those are just my definitions.

    I think idiots like bezos with his pathetic cosplay of a sailing boat that can’t even sail with more than one mast unfurled really don’t help the perception of sailing with the super rich.

    We need more boats like the black pearl that can actually sail and be off grid on renewables for proper ocean crossing. Shame that most super rich just fly to their boat rather than actually crossing the oceans on them.




  • So I was talking about hydro generators that go in the water rather than a wind turbine that rely on direct wind. I prefer the former as it doesn’t muck up the aero on the boat (sails can rob it of power with their dirty air) nor does it get in the way of the deck space that is often limited on a smaller boat. You could use both but I am not fan of wind turbines except at anchor.

    With a normal sail boat its common to have more wind that you can safely handle with the boat, you can use the drag of a hydro generator, which goes in the water only when you need it, to help slow the boat down rather than reefing or reefing as much (intentionally making the sails smaller). As wind is the only thing generating motion for the sail boat, its free energy that you otherwise would not be using.

    Motor boats rely on the motor to move them, so any drag means the motor has to work harder, imagine dragging a drogue (water parachute used as an anchor), its the same thing, its no longer free energy and you are actually spending more energy moving the same distance as the hydro generator doesn’t generate as much energy as it costs to use. Its the same problem for a wind turbine, as that increases aero rather than water drag for the motor boat, requiring more effort from the motor for the same speed & distance.

    Motor yachts would be better switching their engine over energy generation as a generator for recharging the EV batteries. Indeed there are some bigger motor yachts that do exactly this as a backup to their solar and dock derived power.



  • Super rich all have crewed boats, so its mostly to do with living space per foot of boat length or them as they just pay their way around the skill issue. Those who do like to occasionally pilot or race their own boat tend to have sailing boats as they are much more rewarding to sail.

    The bits that are different between a motor and sail yacht is really just the sails, that part is actually pretty simple to learn (mastering is something else). In mast/boom mains, electric furling head sails, hydraulic or electric winches, all make operating the sails push button.

    The navigation and marina skills are the same, if you have bow thrusters. As everything else is at a slower pace, sail boats are easier to get to grips with when under way and new to sailing.

    I completely get that not everybody wants to tack their way upwind, but its the pleasure in actually sailing in silence rather than a noisy and smelly motor that is the reward here. That, and the cost saving. I can do two weeks sailing covering hundreds of nautical miles for £50 in fuel for a 40 foot sail boat and that’s with having to run the motor as a generator to charge the batteries (charter boats suck for house electrics and solar), vs. £500 ish for a motor yacht.


  • Big part of this would be that its a foiling boat and that massively reduces drag from the water. Keeping weight and drag down are the secret to improving efficiency for EVs be they boats or cars. Any decent marina its easy to get multiple 22kw shore supply as well, it can be expensive and metered but you aren’t going to be waiting that long to recharge your boat.

    Electric makes the most sense on sail boats as they already have a green source of energy, and thanks to hydro they can convert some of that motion generated by the wind into charge for the batteries. Couple with solar and you start to look at a decent amount of energy generation.

    Sail boats also tend to have far less powerful ICE than your average motor yacht, so you need less powerful EV motors to achieve the same speed, and in the right conditions you only really need the motor getting in and out of the harbor so your battery bank is smaller and lighter. Plus you could make the batteries do double duty as the house batteries as well.

    The trick will be to get the super rich out of their shitty super yachts that burn a couple of thousand dollars of fuel per hour, they could already have sail boats but choose not to for the increased living space that they can get out of the same length of boat due to being able to build much higher due to no masts.


  • I’m only ever logging on because there’s a problem, so i login infrequently, like may be every few months.

    So i want want to see the os version as I have some downgraded on purpose, and that’s helpful to see. I also want to see uptime, disk space, ip address, ram, and kernel version. These all help me understand basic issues if the box is rebooting or needs a reboot or it out of disk space very quickly.

    Obviously, there are a million and one other ways to get this information, I could even stick them in my .zshrc to auto start on login as I’ve done with fastfetch, but why on earth would I do that when fastfetch works, takes less than a second to run on sign in, and looks pretty?

    It’s not like I am not launching a connection to them 100s of times a day.








  • One of the key reasons traditional manufacturers were reluctant to build EVs is because of the batteries needed and their lack of ability to make these themselves. A battery on a brand new EV can be half or more of the total cost to build the car, who wants to pay somebody else, who is going to expect to make a profit on the batteries they sell, half the cost of the build to a competitor or third party for any true mass market car? You cannot start to compete on price or volume till you make your own batteries and cut out that profit of the third party.

    When it became clear that the Traditional Manufacturers could no longer avoid ramping up EV production as Tesla and latter China/Korea were stealing their future market they have shit the bed, begging for subsidies to build their own battery factories and recruiting staff with experience. Its going to take a few years before these factories come on line, but till then you will see them pushing things like PHEVs and halo EVs like the F150 that they do not plan in selling in large volumes in favor of ICE that they make the engine.

    There is also an element of the speed of development of EVs, they were clearly caught out how fast the market moved with efficiency and thus range. As an example, the early VW group EVs were awful, at least a generation behind the best from Korea or Tesla. The latest ID7 and A6 etrons show that VW have acknowledged their mistake, the saloons made on that platform (the SUVs on the same platform just cannot compete due to worse drag and weight) seem to be aiming around 4 miles per kwh, which is extremely impressive for such large saloons.

    Improving efficiency is the key to reducing battery sizes, which reduces weight, which further improves efficiency, but most importantly reduces the cost of EVs. We need to move away from 100kwh+ batteries, they are a crutch for inefficient, bricks of SUVs that are far too large and heavy. Manufacturers just up the battery size to counter their poor design decisions, which leads to disappointment when you realize you struggling to get 2 miles per kwh from your 2.5 ton EV9 and its only doing low 200s out of a 100kwh battery.


  • I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

    However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.


  • I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.

    I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.


  • With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.

    Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.

    This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.