domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
laxam
1hr ago
Also AIUI cable providers often pool their customers' downlink and provide much less that advertised speeds at peak times; is the FCC looking into this?
Requiring providers to not oversubscribe their link bandwidth would make broadband multiple times more expensive than it currently is and be wildly inefficient.
mdurak
1hr ago
That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.
Folamh3
1hr ago
False entomology is identifying as a caterpillar (soon to be a butterfly) when you're actually just a worm.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
Prediction: "Generation Z" and "Zoomer" will be given a false entomology of "person who used Zoom to attend school during the COVID 19 pandemic" within the next couple decades.
I've had home internet since the mid 90s and I've never, ever had an ISP provide the advertised speeds. Not even in off-peak times. At this point I don't really expect them to either; I've just accepted that this is part of the business model.
Also, the FCC have been overt culture warriors for my entire life. They're one of the least accountable federal agencies and they know it.
zeke5123a
2hr ago
Sure one could in theory conclude A is better than B. But would you be on that? 9/10 B is going to be better at the end of the day and if you are going with the 1/10 you really really really need to show “here is the unimpeachable crystal clear rationale.” Especially when you have an admin that has been hostile to Person B.
Skulldrinker
2hr ago
I remember "Musk Man Bad" starting before he tried to buy Twitter, I could believe that from his perspective the leftists started gunning for him back when he was nominally apolitical.
I know I saw some screed about colonizing mars being bad because it was colonialism, and colonialism bad, in 2020. When there's genuinely no native people to exploit, or even a biosphere to damage, all that's left is tall-poppy slave morality and braindead word-association snarl.
FiveHourMarathon
Just a Wawa Stan Account
2hr ago
I agree, but once we get into legal technical questions it's realistically beyond the ordinary person's ability to parse. You get dueling experts and the result is mostly determined by burden of proof.
Simple spherical cows a=5% b=85% sure, it's simple. But what if there's evidence that B has maxed out their approach at 85% while A is working on infrastructure that could eventually deliver 100%? B is a mature company while A is a startup? Or if the experts argue that one or another of the statistics turn out to be massaged? Etc etc.
I tend to agree with your comment that Musk/Tesla's achievement in creating a new standard setting luxury car company cannot be overstated. How many other manufacturers have poured cash into trying to make Cadillac/Lincoln/Infiniti/Chrysler/etc into legitimate luxury competitors and failed? Tesla has upended the upper end of the car market in a way comparable to the quartz watch's impact on horology.
But it's never going to be easy to figure out who gets government grants, which is why I tend to oppose them.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
Dosage and tolerance on weed is kind of ridiculous and all over the place. Low tolerance and low dosage can take you places high tolerance users simply cannot reach anymore with any amount of THC.
Glassnoser
2hr ago
These things sometimes go the other way though. For example, in Canada, but only in some US states, it is legal to resist an unlawful arrest. It's also legal everywhere in the country to secretly record a conversation that you are a part of, which makes easier to defend your rights.
We also have far more reasonable laws regarding age of consent. We don't have people being put on the sex offender registry for urinating in public or for sleeping with someone a few months younger.
Glassnoser
3hr ago
This is not consistent with what I understood the law to be in Canada.
AvocadoPanic
3hr ago
You could go talk to a recruiter about your diagnosis and see what they say. You need to do more things in general and talking to a recruiter is an easy goal to set and accomplish.
Trades can damage your health but it's not a given. Sitting in an office all day does it's own sort of damage.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
Starlink is almost certainly a 100b plus company standalone. You almost wonder if they will be spun out to go public at some point.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I think in some cases, she’s somewhat a hinderance. Not that it isn’t nice to have your nest to return to, but that’s a catch 22. For some people, the fact that you can afford to fail means that you don’t take things seriously enough. If not working means possibly sleeping in the car because you can’t pay rent, you’ll find the muscles to work full time. If failing out of college means poverty, class becomes much more interesting. I would actually suggest getting your own apartment or split Trent somewhere so that if you’re not working or doing the minimum it will be a risk to you.
I’d also recommend that if you’re not making it to class, maybe try either trade school or community college. If you’re doing community college, you can generally pay your way. That way the fact that you spent $400 a course might motivate you a bit more.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
This feels like a legal technical answer. If person A fulfills 5% and person B fulfills 85% it would seem per se corrupt to cancel Bs without cancelling As.
Glassnoser
3hr ago
They should subsidize public goods, which it is not.
Glassnoser
3hr ago
Why does a small fledgling industry ne a boost from the government? Isn't that what venture capital is for?
zeke5123a
3hr ago
Have you drive a Tesla? I own one and they are great cars (and honestly not that expensive). I don’t think they are anymore a toy compared to any other car. It truly was a feat building a new freaking car company and yes they did benefit from subsidies but so did a lot of other EV cars that failed. Musk is great at building companies.
Similarly SpaceX gets a lot of government contracts. So does Boeing. One is a good company. The other is Boeing.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
The question isn’t “did Starlink underdeliver.” The question is did Starlink underdeliver compared to other parties that didn’t have their funding yanked.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
I agree but if you are going to dole out contracts it can’t be partisan which it seems here clearly to be. Starlink is the only game in town for the most part and is much closer to completing their contract compared to the others but the FCC is crystal balling it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
I think this is the fruit of the deep state long since being removed from any serious accountability for its decision making. It is now so partisan and blatantly so that a company that qualifies for funding doesn’t get it because of who runs it. An agency held to account for results would at least fear the wrath of elected officials for having done so. The FCC has so much protection from the official state that it can punish Musk’s company for his public crime think.
As there seems to be interest in my coming bitcoin mining startup, I thought I’d lay out some of my basic assumptions here, and go over a few (simplified) numbers and the steps I anticipate going through in the next few months. If desired, I’m happy to answer more questions or get more specific, within reason.
Legal:
Here in Russia, the government recently legalized bitcoin mining, and is matching this with opening new crypto exchanges in Moscow and (possibly) St. Petersburg. There will be a new company code in the tax system specifically for miners, and there will be a registry of legal mining companies created in the coming months. For those not in Russia, this is meaningful for a couple of reasons. First, Russia moving in a pro-crypto way implies that there will at least be a few years of trying this liberalized regulatory state, decreasing the risk to an incipient startup of regulatory changes (albeit, not making them zero). Second, this is a trade with the miners to agree to pay relatively higher energy prices ($0.048/kWh) in exchange for legality. This is important because there are many ‘grey zone’ miners operating now; they leech subsidized power from civilian energy grids ($0.0176/kWh), driving up the prices for people and contributing to difficulties in the energy grid. There are also larger political considerations at play; increasing Russia’s connection to the crypto payments system allows them to (potentially) move away from the USD in terms of international trade, with the obvious advantages to both Russia and BRICS in general.
Engineering:
I will be beginning with the S21 Immersion Miner. Immersion mining is an interesting technology; the electronics are submerged in dielectric fluid, an insulating fluid that prevents electrical shorts but is far more efficient at heat transfer than air. Additionally, the miners can be sealed away from the air, preventing dust buildup and the gradual erosion of circuit boards, as well as decreasing the extremely loud sound inherent in bitcoin mining. I see this project as consisting of three parts: the tank, the heat exchanger, and the miners themselves.
The Tank:
This is the easiest part from my perspective, because I don’t need to make it. I will be organizing the miners two deep to make removal from the tank easy. They are individually fairly heavy, even when they aren’t full of oil, and I don’t want to deal with the potential for injury to either personnel or the miner itself when lifting it out of the tank. The tank will therefore be fairly narrow in the Z axis, very long in the X, and about half a meter in the Y. I’ll have it fabricated of thin steel plate to minimize weight and cost, and will have a series of holes drilled in and fittings for copper pipe installed in a U shape around each column of miners. On top, I will cut and fit large sheets of acrylic to cover the miners. This decreases the chance for dust to accumulate in the oil itself, at the cost of adding slightly to maintenance requirements (in terms of taking off the acrylic shell each time). The tank will extend approximately 10 cm above the top of the miners, and I will fill this space with nitrogen gas. Nitrogen will displace the air, decreasing the already admittedly low risk of the oil gradually absorbing water from the air via hygroscopic effects.
The Heat Exchanger:
This will be the fun part, from my perspective. All the electricity I use is turned into heat, which means I need to dissipate a lot of heat. I will install pumps in parallel, flowing heat transfer fluid through the tank to absorb heat and to the outside, where I will build a matching number of heat exchangers from copper pipe and variable drive fans. Both the fans and the pumps will be controlled via a programmable logic controller (PLC), automating their speed to match the heat transfer requirements. I note that the location where the facility will be, Irkutsk, is extremely cold. The average yearly temperature is 0C, with expected average monthly average temperatures in the negative teens over the winter. The record low temperature is -49C, which means that I need a heat exchanger that can be switched off or have very minimal flow to avoid overcooling the liquid. I have looked into special cold-weather bearings for the fans to avoid them seizing, and am planning to wait and see if they are necessary. At the moment, the plan for the external heat exchangers is essentially to run the copper pipe back and forth in an outside duct (a serpentine heat exchanger), and then place the fan at the outer end of the duct (‘sucking’, not ‘blowing’), so that the air actually hitting the fan will hopefully have been warmed beforehand. I will be monitoring pump speed, fan speed, heat transfer fluid flow speed, heat transfer fluid temperature, and tank oil temperature. I am currently learning PLC control logic to attempt to automate this process.
The Miners:
This is a bit of an unknown for me. I have never mined cryptocurrency before, and will have a lot to learn when setting them up. I would like to use BraiinsOS as their operating system, but Braiins does not currently support the S21 Immersion. This should change in the next few months, but in the meantime I will use the stock firmware.
Beyond this, I expect interesting challenges with hiring, security, and leasing industrial space with sufficient available power. The facility will begin as a smaller, proof-of-concept business, but if successful we will raise investment and scale.
I leave for Irkutsk in 9 days and want to hit the ground running. I’ll update next Tinker Tuesday with my progress finalizing things here before spending a winter in Siberia.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
5hr ago
Reminds me of a friend who wanted to get slapped in the face before every HEMA tournament fight.
Specifically, the FCC collected Ookla data from 2021 and 2022, highlighting that "that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022", and then cited a single drop in average-monthly-speeds in one month of 2023 during appeal. The FCC analysis quoted by Rosenworcel in that section was from August 2022.
By late 2023 those numbers were already vastly improved (median 79/9.2 Mbps). It's currently October 2024; while I can't find a specific Ookla report, tomshardware cites them saying in September "Speed test analysis by Ookla shows Starlink seeing major gains in speed in the past few months. Median download speed has jumped from 65.72 Mbps to 97 Mbps."
Anecdotally from those who've use it in rural areas near me, they've consistently seen 100/20 or higher. I can't say for sure what the current Ookla numbers area, but I'm not seeing any good evidence otherwise.
These are compatible claims. It's just one of them is stupid: taking a two data points and extrapolating with a ruler is the sort of thing I'd caution a high schooler about.
Contrast other RDOF defaults: the Starry (bankrupt), GeoLinks (blocked by California regulations) or LTD Corporation (severe financial chicanery, heavily delayed regulatory compliance mandated in the contract), all have far clearer and more certain problems.
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