But arguably those have a single point of failure, the company owning the data. In theory Filebase is storing your data on a distributed system (that you can verify) that has no single point of failure. You can make this even more reliable by using two filebase-like providers to store the data. Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way and transparently use both providers so that if any single one is up you can access your data.
Of course it isn't perfect, if filebase goes bankrupt you need to scramble to get another set of pins for your data. But I think it does provide a much better system overall.
You can also imagine shifting the data around providers over time much like S3 storage tiers, maybe on provider provides cheaper storage but more expensive access, you can pin cold data there and remove it from your hot data provider. This would be completely transparent to any users.
It also provides interesting opportunities for bring-your-own storage. Users can just give my the CID and use it on my app/service. It will be around as long as they keep it alive. Or they can pay me and I can pin it for them.
> Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way
I think this is a big feature that I hadn't recognized until you phrased it this way. It allows a strategy of guaranteeing *at least 1* pin of your data if it's important, but from the application side, you can forget about the details of the data storage.
I doubt IPFS is fast enough to justify it over other strategies today, but it makes me think of a type of cache where if a CID can't be found, you might rehydrate some slow, cold-storage data and push it back out to the network.
You do, when you pin it to a service you're paying for. When/if it becomes unimportant, you unpin.
But what's cool, is even if it's unpinned, it may still be in the network so long as the data is getting active use. It opens up a whole field of seed and harvest style information flows.
So. A centralized service responsible for keeping your data. How is this different from literally anything else?
> it may still be in the network so long as the data is getting active use.
"Maybe" makes this essentially useless.
> It opens up a whole field of seed and harvest style information flows.
It really doesn't. It's literally the same problem that torrents have had for ages: anything "unpopular" doesn't exist for a very very very broad definition of unpopular.
>> when you pin it to a service you're paying for.
>So. A centralized service responsible for keeping your data. How is this different from literally anything else?
Because in addition to being like anything else, your data has a lifecycle in the network. Even if you as an initial provider of data lose interest in it, the network can hold onto it for their own purposes. The question of what data is important becomes decentralized and democratized. So long as at least 1 person says something is important and is willing to pay the resources to pin it, the data exists and can be utilized by any consumers.
>> it may still be in the network so long as the data is getting active use.
>"Maybe" makes this essentially useless.
No, it doesn't. Computer systems are built on a long stack of maybes.
Yes, many cloud providers do. However those redundant copies are typically located within the same datacenter.
Simple example: You have 1TB of data stored in a us-east-1 AWS S3 bucket. Virginia gets hit with a natural disaster, and all of us-east-1 goes offline. You no longer have access to your data. The only "easy button" way you could have prevented this scenario is if you had setup backup or bucket replication policies prior to the event. You decide to follow AWS docs. Disaster recovery 101 typically calls for 3 copies of your data at a minimum. You are now paying $70.66 for storage ($23.55 per TB x 3 regions) and $40.96 for inter-region bandwidth ($20.48 per TB x 2 replicated buckets) for a grand total of $111.62 just to store 1 TB of data. These costs don't even cover you or your customers downloading any of that data either.
At Filebase, we store your data on the Sia network. A 10 of 30 erasure coding profile is used, effectively creating a 3x redundancy overhead. Datacenters and clouds have been using EC for a while too. The critical difference here is that each shard is stored on a different server, spread geographically across the world. An entire portion of the internet can go down, and Filebase can simply fetch the shards it needs from other parts of the world. With a 10 of 30 profile, we only need 10 of those shards to fully reconstruct the file - we can suffer 20 servers or hosts going offline all at the same time.
If Filebase's infrastructure goes down, our health checks fail, and our DNS-level load balancer seamlessly redirects your HTTP requests to another Filebase edge location. And since all Filebase edge locations talk to the same decentralized Sia network, your data is magically available, and you may not even realize you were redirected. That same 1TB of data storage on Filebase will cost you $5.99, a ~95% cost savings.
In addition, the size of patches can also vary quite a lot on what the author considers a "thing". Some developers fix multiple things at once, while some others think every nut and bolt should be it's own separate commit
Yes I believe in save early save often and don't bother squashing and have multiple commits usually in my branch before a merge request. We have another team member that religiously squashes everything down to a single commit on his feature branch before requesting a pull from his branch. We don't have micromanagers so that's just the way things are.
A total shift to electric vehicles in less than 20 years sounds quite optimistic if I'm being honest. Not signing something you know you can't meet sounds like a fair choice.
I'm pretty sure it's phasing it out on new cars not completely replacing old ICEs.
If anything I think 20 years is too long. Specially since these drafts always get diluted and things like hybrid motors are probably also going to be deemed 'electric'.
Yeah, 20 years is way too long. If the last ICE is sold in 2040, that car is likely still on the road in Germany in 2055 and is then sold to some poorer country where it will drive on for another ten years. How are we supposed to reach net-zero in 2045 like that?
This isn't about banning ICE cars altogether, but about banning the sale of new ICE cars. Which should hopefully basically be achieved by 2030 or so, or we are screwed. And I think it is realistic. In the last month, about 17% of all new cars in Germany were electric. Sure that has been helped by low production due to chip shortages, but I really hope that the majority of all new cars will be electric in 5 years from now.
Honestly I think it's doable. If the cost per kWh and the energy density of batteries follow the trend we currently have it will be much more convenient to own an EV. Some countries already banned the sale of ICE vehicles in less than 10y [1] if these conditions are met.
The problem will be recharging in cities. In the suburbs/countryside it is very likely you can plug your car at night in your garage or similar. This is not true in cities since owning a parking spot with access to electricity is expensive. So, if cities will start putting plugs in "normal" parking spots I don't see any major issue in shifting completely to EV.
Total shift? No. It's possible for urban areas in developed countries, assuming we solve the current energy distribution issues. Nuclear is slowly getting back on the agenda, and renewables are slowly taking market share from fossil fuels, so that might actually happen if combined with massive upgrades to local and regional public transport systems.
Even in places like the Nordic countries and Western Europe, massive infrastructure upgrades needs to be put in place to allow people in the rural areas to get rid of ICE's. And that's personal use. Getting forestry and agriculture to switch to electric will take many decades.
We need synthetic fuels produced with renewable/nuclear energy, and we need them fast. Yes, EV's are nice and they will cover a lot of the use-cases, but they're not a silver bullet to end all worries.
Absolutely, especially given the state of European electrical power production and grid, most of all Germany's. France at least has got the memo and is trying to do something about it, while Germany seems totally paralysed in this regard, which I doubt will improve with the coming administration.
Nothing like a good winter of blackouts to... energize political momentum.
Even this winter, clearly still pre-EV dominance, is going to be interesting - if it's cold in europe for long, and if Russia decides to use their current position of power for a nasty short-term shock, that could really shift people's willingness to accept a few sacrifices in the coming years.
I wouldn't count them out just because they've got issues; those things might change quite quickly - some of the needed infrastructure can be built in just a few years, once the political will is there, which currently is lacking. Sure, it's a problem, but on this topic: what else is new.
What do you mean? I cannot remember the last time we actually had a power outage here. It is also not like we aren't working on making the grid ready for increased loads. A more known example for that is Suedlink that is meant to connect the wind farms in northern Germany to the south of it by moving 4GW of power (that's 5-10% of total power generation in Germany alone) over hundreds of kilometers.
The german car lobby tries something different: Why not using the combustion engine with clean sources of energy?
I think its a rather clever choice to be against the end of the combustion engine when you can fuel them with something like: hydrogen, e-fuels or methanol. In Ingolstadt (Audi HQ is there) a former Audi engineer invented a car with 800 kilometres (500 miles). So there are alternatives to electric-only.
The efficiency numbers for e-fuels are simple too bad. Fuel cells might maybe be made to work, but there is no Hydrogen infrastructure available.
Any e-fuel that can use normal petrol infrastructure and is burnt in an ICE has absolutely atrocious efficiency. Not only do you lose a large fraction of the energy going from electricity to fuel, but then you burn it in an engine that has 40% efficiency is a lab and 15% efficiency in city traffic. It just makes no sense outside of niche applications.
There is also no comprehensive infrastructure for charging your e-car everyhwere, at least in Germany. Also if all cars would be replaced into e-cars we simply do not have enough juice. So there has to be a infrastructure development no matter what way you choose.
You also have charging losses which electric cars, they are just not that high as with e-fuels. E-fuels have the advantage of being easily transportable and refuel is done in 1-3 minutes. So why not create them in countries that have much sun (free and endless energy) and convert this into something useful.
> So why not create them in countries that have much sun (free and endless energy) and convert this into something useful.
Because that's not economical. It's cheaper to ship in the electricity directly, or if you don't want to build the HVDC lines (there are good reasons for that), turn it into Hydrogen, ship that and turn it back into electricity. Electrolysis is reasonably efficient (>70%), and the round trip to electricity can be done at 40% efficiency or so. Charge an EV with that elecricity and you're still much better off than first turning the electricity to Diesel (<30% efficienct) and then burning the Diesel (<<40%).
And that's not even taking into account all the health benefits of not burning stuff where people want to breathe.
If you just argue economical we should continue to burn fossile energy, because its pretty cheap. In smaller countries the amount of space for solar panels and sufficient amount of wind is not given. Not if you also want to produce food in your country. So there you need an alternative and hydrogen that comes from country with nearly unlimited energy and much space is inevitable.
Fossil fuels are not cheap if you properly price in the externality of causing global warming (and other pollution).
You don't need a lot of space for wind and solar. Take Germany for example. Using just the area currently used for "energy crops" (around 2.4 million hectares) for PV you could cover most of the primary(!) energy demand of the country. Wind is even more space efficient in Germany.
E-cars and other technology have also "hidden" costs, your cobalt does not grow on trees.
Yeah perfect idea using farmland that could be used for growing food wasting on PVs. Do not get me wrong, there has something to happen but perhaps only solar and wind will not safe us as long as we have no good battery technology. Therefore it would be better to store this in some fuel.
Oil doesn't grow on trees either, remember the oil spills we have regularly?
We already use that farmland to grow fuel instead of food, and we also have the technology to store the energy: electrolysis. But because that is relatively expensive you don't want to burn that fuel in shitty tiny generators, you want to burn it in efficient combined-cycle plants.
In my opinion, we need stop burning things. When we have the technology to heat, cook, or move without burning stuff we need to use it and kill the old technologies.
In theory, hydrogen fuel cell is perfectly fine. But then we reach the other problem: there won't be any infrastructure. Hydrogen, e-fuels, etc. It is just too expensive. Maybe fine for a few rich people driving on a track.
As far as I can see, this is a nice prototype but not a practical concept. This car is using a methanol fuel cell. They seem to be quite rare yet and not ready for mass production. And there is no mass production of green methanol yet. It would of course be much more storeable than hydrogen.
My old Peugeot Partner (2003), can easily go 650 km with plenty of petrol left in the tank. I don't think 800 km would be out of the question.
Edit: according to the specs, it should have a range of 960 km (597 miles) under optimal conditions. It sounds more than I would expect, but then the car is almost 20 years old. Still, the low fuel consumption is one of the reasons I keep it -- it uses less fuel than modern hybrids do.
>Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.
Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can.
CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.
Which is why I covered them in my comment about CHP, which recoups a large portion of those "losses". Either way other power sources also require logistic challenges and/or big equipment installs to use, so it isn't exactly 1:1 comparison.
I feel this is a bit disingenuous, because using the same logic burning wood is thousands of % effective, or even ∞% if the system only uses convection, making heat pumps seem like a poor choice even when they're perfectly valid.
I was going give Mozilla as an example, thanks for pointing that out. Now please go and check how Mozilla is doing financially :) Even Mozilla is having hard time making profit, Vivaldi is sure is an ambitious project but my point is sorts of income mentioned on the site doesn't mean anything, they need more than bookmarks...
I don't think this argument makes any sense. Just because there can be better uses for additional clean energy, does not make the additional energy any less clean.
By this definition, no source is clean, because there are always "better uses" for energy.
The honest way is using the average CO2/kWh for the grid you're plugged into (including the CO2 emitted for constructing the power plants with some discounting function) to estimate how much carbon your synfuel releases.
I feel the obvious solution wouldn't be to handicap your own product, but simply sell the same processors cheaper when they stop selling.
I've never heard of farmers who intentionally make their produce worse before selling it, they simply sell it cheaper if there isn't enough demand. If you make a lot of houses that don't end up popular, do you go and smash the roof and take away the plumbing, or sell the same house at a lower price?
Some farm products get sorted too, mostly because produce for human consumption needs to be eye catching (people don’t buy ugly food). Industrial clients don’t really care (who cares if the apples are uggly if I’m making juice anyway). This means good looking fruit sells at a premium.
If this year is particularly benevolent with your crops, but no one will buy your pretty apples, what are you supposed to do? Just let them rot? You ship it to the juice producer and call it a day.
