I think we may have a language barrier here. Solar panels on a car are a gimmick. They do not do not make significant energy to power the vehicle or charge the batteries. The panels made are a sales gimmick to influence people that do not understand the technology and scales of the system. This is like putting the solar cell for a calculator onto an electric bicycle as an equivalent ratio of size and scope. The calculator runs on 3 milliwatts and the bike needs 300 watts.
The amount of power from built in panels is negligible relative to the battery. Solar panels are not vinyl film. They are actual semiconductors. They can be thin but are fragile. One can design a panel into some form of shape, but that is not a small task and is only possible with economy of scale for the tooling. Ultra thin solar panels have no real durability.
I am a pro automotive painter and have owned my own shop twice. I would not want this. Just reproduction body work is expensive. The custom stuff is even more. To make it into frivolous tech, that would cost orders of magnitude more, and the market to make it is so insignificant it would be a massive vanity project and loss. Then it is a nightmare when cars start burning from a few chips to the hood or roof on the highway because someone did not account for the short circuit potential in software and management circuitry. The total power of an optimal solar panel of equivalent size is irrelevant to the scale of an EV battery. Dave on the EEVBlog YT channel has covered this in years past with cars. Use the EEVBlog forum to search and learn more. That is the goto place for EEs.
Use offline open weights.
K&R?
Graduated pacman emerges… and we all know emerge is Gentoo. This one doesn’t compile.
Not in terms of kernel supported encodings and long term kernel support, from what I have seen. I have not looked into this in depth. However, looking at git repo merged pulls, issues raised, and the lack of any consistent hardware commitments or consensus, implies to me that the hardware is very unstable in the long term. When I see any hardware with mostly only base Debian support, it screams that the hardware is on an orphaned kernel and will likely never get to mainline. The same applies to Arch to a lesser degree. Debian has the primary tool chain for bootstrapping and hardware hacking. When it is the primary option supported, I consider the hardware insecure and unsafe to connect to the internet. I’ve seen a few instances where people are talking about the limited forms of encoding support and the incomplete nature of those that do exist. It is far more important to have hardware that will be supported with mainline kernel security updates and is compatible with the majority of encodings. It would be terrible to find out the thing could not support common audio or video codecs. IIRC there was an issue along these lines with the RISC-V PineTab.
I know the primary goto for RISC-V is SiFive, but I have not seen a goto LTS processor from them in terms of third party consistent use.
Plus, while more open is mor betterer, RISC-V is not full proof from a proprietary blob either. The ISA addresses the monopolistic tyranny and extortion of players like Intel, but there is nothing preventing the inclusion of 3rd party proprietary module blocks. The entire point is to create an open market for the sale and inclusion of IP blocks that are compatible with an open standard. Nothing about these blocks is required to be open. I don’t know if such a thing could be set to a negative ring more privileged than the kernel, but I expect this to be the case.
Most people’s routers are already up 24/7.
We should be able to do our own DNS. Who cares if it is on the wider clearweb. You are paying for an IP address with your internet connection. If you are running a server with verified hardware and signed code, all we need is a half dozen nodes mirroring our own DNS. There must be a backup proxy for the few terrible providers that cause issues with IP. The addresses are not static, but they do not change very often. At worse, you hit a manual button to reset or wait 10 minutes before the DNS updates.
Rπ is proprietary. You really need a hard drive for storage. The point is a TPM based encryption with no user configuration or worry about securing the thing. It just works with no excuses.
It is not about the people that already host. It is about enabling many more by giving them an option to buy a path of least resistance. In exchange, it creates a potential revenue source in a completely untapped demographic. The subscription/donations demographic is like a very unique and niche market. The vast majority of people do not exist within that space. Most people do not have the financial stability to engage like this. It is not that they are unable to accumulate adequate funds, it is that their pay fluctuates over time and their baseline constraints are far more stressful than spending from times of surplus and opportunity. Catering only to those with such surplus and gatekeeping the complexity of self hosting is massively limiting adoption.
The rule in managing a chain of retail stores is that, no matter how you select products to stock in stores, it is impossible to only select products that will all sell on one platform. How you manage the overburden always determines your long term success. You must employ other platforms and demographics to prioritize the mobility of cash flow.
Similarly but inverted, this place has a slice of all demographics. Efforts tailored to the various subsets should tap entirely new potential. A fool imagines they can convert the unstable poor*'r* into a reliable stable income source via donations. Someone like myself has means but not a situation that is compatible. If I have some tangible thing to purchase, I can make that happen. I do not have any subscriptions in life for anything at all. Heck, I won’t even shop on any of my devices I use regularly because I only buy what I intend to go looking to purchase with intent. That is not common, but what is common are spontaneous people that need time to align their finances with their desires. That person is likely to dread paying $5 every month compared to $250 in May when they get a couple thousand dollars on a tax return. Expecting the public to float the stability is stupid. That is not how the real world works. Real businesses always float the overhead. I’m talking about how to free the masses to self host everything for the cost of a nice router spent once with no techno leet filter.
K kid. Too deep for you to understand.
What in the hell made you think it would be a requirement? That is insane. An option is not a requirement.
Because 99.9% of people will never self host. They would much rather just buy a product that is not setup as a scam. The scam part is less important to most people than the lack of effort required.
This isn’t a thing to get into for the money. It would be about the FOSS aspect. Doing something like this would not break even for the time and labor involved. It might be worth doing for positive digital neighbors, but I am not at all interested in doing anything for negative or rude people.
I come from a background of being a buyer for a chain of bike shops where I spent millions of dollars based upon knowledge of how such markets work. The entry level customer is all that really matters. The extra stuff is just to woo them into the store.
In a place like this, if you engage, you’re actually irrelevant. If you want to target growth, get a lurker to engage for the first time. Getting some random lurkers to buy into the hardware to self host because they care about software freedom is far far more effective than the current ecosystem. When servers are not updated, and people shut down because of administration, it says this is not viable for the average person with a life. So make this easy for the individual. It is such an obvious thing to do.
The present system is basically like go compile OpenWRT for your router and people whining about how it is not fucking hard. It is not, but most people just do nor care to try it. They just want to buy a device, plug it in, and be done. Half of these devices are on factory original passwords. This is the real scope of what people are capable of and expect. The mismatch is easily solved by packing the fediverse as a device. The alternates are great for the 0.1%. I am not talking about you all. I am talking about something that could go from 0.1% to 5% of the fediverse is self hosted, and likely much larger. The whole endeavor would be like a coop socialist kind of thing from the ground up.
👐🙇💆 “good girl” 👮👹👮
Yeah, fuck that. Devs need to change that bullshit yesterday. I sign all my mod actions with my name because this fascist fuckwit nonsense is garbage. If you can’t post your name to your actions, you are a coward with no right to lead.
I think it was ask hilarious chaos and news, but I couldn’t even figure out what instance it was on.
I was the buyer for a chain of bike shops. Unfortunately, distribution is the market bottleneck that is nearly impossible to break through.
So, at scale, no one is capable of predicting global demand accurately for any type of retail. Almost all products that are sold by small retailers are made and sold by the real manufacturer to distributors for 30-35% of MSRP. These distributors then wholesale the inventory to retailers with a 15-20% markup. This is absolutely necessary because it distributes the burden of inventory commitment to a hierarchy where local conditions are accounted for. The distributor is actually buying the inventory and taking on the risk of overburden that does not sell.
Likewise with retail. The markup is called keystone which means 50% margin. Most retailers will barely break even if the whole store averages 40% margins. Retail property and labor are extremely expensive and hard. In almost all small businesses, overburden is what kills them eventually. Overburden is what does not sell and becomes unmarketable over time.
Another aspect that is not intuitive here is that no matter how you select inventory, you will never sell that entire selection on a single platform. If you are not actively attempting to recuperate cash flow from overburden, the business will slowly drown. Sales in retail are not about overburden at all. Statistically, getting new people in the front door is the only metric that matters. Loss leaders and sales are about traffic not overburden. A good buyer plans and negotiates their loss leaders for sales within their preseason ordering.
Over the last couple of decades, more and more products have been created that bypass the big distributors. Most of it is because the product is just not worth the markup required for scaled independent distribution and middlepersons margins. However, now there is an issue of global demand where the manufacturer has the impossible task of financing scale and the inherent risk. If the product is not made at very large scale, it is uncompetitive to manufacture. You need someone willing to take that risk. As a person that has made these types of decisions at smaller scales of a few million dollars, go bet all that money on a hand of single deck blackjack because those 47-48% winning odds are outstanding by comparison.
Retailers place preseason order commitments to get slightly better margins, but primarily because the distributors are more like banks in retail. They offer credit and repayment options that mean the retailer is not required to pay up front in cash. With bicycle stuff, I placed all of my preseason orders between September and October for the following year. Stuff started arriving between December and January. I then had a first payment due in April, but I had to pay it back by the end of July. So I had to predict the summer market a year in advance and have all of my plan detailed by autumn.
This is how mom and pop independent retail actually works. It was not competitive with big box retail because those are not actually retailers. Those are rogue distributors selling directly to the public. The actual products are still the same 30-35% of MSRP.
The worst product trends in retail have been the tendency for companies to market themselves as exceptions. Like I despised GoPro in my stores. The margin on the cameras was 20% and each one costs a fortune. They constantly tried to deprecate models too. They tried to pitch that all the accessories were keystone and it made up for the terrible return on investment. In reality that inventory of accessories was overburden suicide of niche garbage for special use cases.
All electronic devices people want have fallen into this trap of low margins that are impossible for sustainable retail. When you see factory direct stores, that means the product has no margin for scale distribution. It is a neo feudalistic, brute force approach where someone is dumb enough to believe they will be able to predict global demand indefinitely without making any major errors. The public is dumb enough to follow along. Few realize the enormous power that is consolidated from cutting out the democracy of distributors and retailers. This consolidated monolith will eventually enslave everyone when they must overcome the inevitable mistakes they make. They will not just eat the loss or go out of business because they own your right to choose in a market without competition. It is surrendering choice to the dictator that makes their own demand by force.
Yeah, so, we don’t want that. - said no one. What you want is irrelevant. The lowest common denominator dictates the market. Democracy requires a well informed and skeptical citizenry. We live in an era with the smallest information bottleneck in several centuries. Search results are not deterministic and there are only two relevant web crawlers that all providers query. These are not deterministic. Two people searching on separate devices with identical queries will get different results. All major media is owned by less than a dozen people. You have absolutely no chance of informing the citizenry to make better decisions that may cost a good bit more money. People cringe if you tell them they are slaves, but do nothing if the word citizen is redefined as functionally equivalent.
The only way you will ever see such a product sold in any traditional independent retail scenario, is if some exceptionally altruistic billionaire were to chose to fund the thing with no concern over the loss. The only way to be competitive in price is to build at competitive scale of manufacturing. If someone else is doing this and using factory direct retail to stay in business with just a 30% gross margin in total, you will never find the necessary slice for regional distribution and retail. Your device will be $1000 at MSRP to their $600 equivalent. There is no solution to this issue. It is raw capitalism where the biggest fish makes the rules. The only counter balance in the system is an informed citizenry. This is why information and education are all that really matter. If the average person is too stupid for independent thought, it is the ultimate pwn as citizen means slave, and the peasantry are too stupid to recognize the situation where they own nothing and have no outlet to tell anyone or hear the plight of all the others.
I pick the shower… as is
what HP printers really do
Still mostly on AI since July 2023
I haven’t kept up with things, but that has to be like bicycle level light and lab conditions. I remember people talking about bicycling with solar and the required area was the size of a pickup truck just to power a basic hundred pound-ish touring kit, and even then it was only pedal assist on a cloudy day or hills. That was only 10-13 years ago. The main issue is that panels are not in any way optimally directional in practice. I expect 40 miles is down hill from the continental divide on I40, after parking the thing in the beam of a solar molten salt energy storage array for a day, during peak solar storm activity, but the fuck if I know bugger all. I know Dave did the math about one of the cars back when he was looking at various EVs. IIRC, no solar panels are more than 30% efficient, most are around 20-25% under optimal conditions. Then you half that or more when they are not directional. That gives a best case baseline for the energy they can produce based upon the sun’s output. I know panels have been improving, but we are well past any large scale optimizations and into the phase of scaling production to reduce cost. Do you know what they claim to have changed?