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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)M
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7 mo. ago

  • You may have misunderstood - I got all four of the devices for a total cost of $15 including taxes and shipping (I think they were $2.99 each, including USB-C port rechargable batteries.) Direct from China prices aren't always that good, but for some stuff they become mind-bogglingly cheap.

  • My kids are occasionally rough on their bedroom "remote" keyboard with touchpad. I got a stack of 4 of them from AliExpress for under $15 including shipping (same thing from Amazon sells for $20 each, still not too bad but why pay extra?) Of course, now that I have the stack of spares, the first one has lasted over a year....

  • a compatible remote controller.

    I use VNC on my phone... it's not as "clickable" as a traditional remote, but then I hate that form of TV browsing anyway. That's one of the strengths of using a real PC: more direct and powerful search capabilities. We have a couple of others setup (Family room, one bedroom) which use touchpad keyboards as remotes.

  • For screen sizes over about 42", yes - there are few "dumb" options. Basically, you end up in the computer monitor market and you end up paying 2x-3x for the same screen performance. I spent a weekend in a rental home with a "Smart" TV just now, it confirmed for me I'm glad I spent the 3x to have a "dumb" monitor with a PC attached. For one thing, the remote controls now do voice recognition, and they were suggesting YouTube videos related to the conversation in the room - without having activated the microphone button.

  • They do draw more power than a Pi-5 even, but they are still practical in fanless mode and interfaces are significantly smoother and quicker. Of course, if all you care about is the streaming video you can get a PiZero to do that for you.

  • I love Raspberry Pis, I have about 6 of them running around the house right now, but for TV work I prefer a beefier computer like the newer N100/N150 fanless models.

  • Answer: get a "dumb TV" (or more cheaply: a SmartTV you don't grant internet access) and tape a fanless N100 PC to the back. They're far more capable and responsive than the cheapo processors that come in a SmartTV and just as silent. They're going for well under $200 these days, and run Linux very well.

  • I believe Florida's recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.

    However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their "whole home, natural gas powered" generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.

  • Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: https://www.wtsp.com/article/money/consumer/south-tampa-generators-fail-during-hurricanes-teco-peoples-gas/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b00

    The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners "didn't register" their generators, but... now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?

    Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I'm curious...

  • Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn't even make a good faith effort to start.

  • Seriously, this is in the "well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime."

    Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.

  • Me, personally, we have trees and shade. So many subdivisions don't, and they have dark colored roofs, and then homeowners do bone-headed things like adding "sun rooms" - lots of those in Houston.

    We get upset when our electric bill passes $300 for the month, but our neighbors with the 3500 sq ft? They never see it under $400.

  • The average (US suburban 2200sq ft) home's A/C does consume 4kW while it is cycled on, and in the hotter than normal months of summer it can run continuous duty cycle for hours on end.

  • Arguably, a great deal more than the energy you lose from opening the door to your house in the summer, once while the A/C is running.

    Or, looking at it another way, an AI query+result can be just as valuable as a Tik Tok post / view.

  • Depends on your electric rates, of course. The gotcha in this statement is "per thousand requests" which cranks up the power usage from 40 watt-hours to 40 kilowatt hours. Say you've got "affordable" electricity at 12.5 cents per kilowatt hour: 40 * .125 = 5.

  • This figure is already not bad. 40 watt hours = 0.04kWh - you know kWh? That unit on your electric bill that is around $0.18 per kWh (and data centers tend to be in lower cost electric areas, closer to $0.11/kWh.) Still, 40Wh would register on your home electric bill at $0.0072, less than a penny. For comparison, an average suburban 4 ton AC unit draws 4kW - that 40Wh request? 1/100th of an hour of AC for your home, about 36 seconds of air conditioning. I don't know that this article is making anybody "look bad" in terms of power used.

  • FFS, I have been using Claude to code, not only do you have to tell Claude to fix compilation errors, you have to point out when Claude says "it's fixed" - "no, it's not, the function you said you added is STILL missing."

  • Which is why they're giving everybody free access, for now.

  • I was just thinking, in more affordable electric regions of the US that's about $5 worth of electricity, per thousand requests. You'd tip a concierge $5 for most answers you get from Chat GPT (if they could provide them...) and the concierge is likely going to use that $5 to buy a gallon and a half of gasoline, which generates a whole lot more CO2 than the nuclear / hydro / solar mixed electrical generation, in reasonably priced electric regions of the US...

  • World News @lemmy.world

    FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

    arstechnica.com /security/2025/03/computer-scientist-goes-silent-after-fbi-raid-and-purging-from-university-website/