> With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.
I know, hence my question about the pronunciation. If I had thought the spelling was more important, the “X” would have settled it so I wouldn’t have asked.
There are words that some British accents pronounce with an initial consonant while Americans it with a vowel sound, so accordingly Brits use the 'a' article while Americans use 'an'. A case where accent changes the grammar of a sentence.
Similar to the name 'Herb' vs the vegetative 'herb'. A Herb vs an herb.
There's plenty of work happening with adapting non evaporative cooling loops for data centers. Maybe that can be applied here too, even if to mitigate some of the cooling needed?
2:1 implies 33% thermal efficiency to the grid which is commonly achieved in normal operations.
Unfortunately engineering means you can’t work with such overly simplified models. Many ways of dumping heat run into issues from solar gain prevents dumping significant heat under the employe parking lot etc.
I don't disagree but am having a hard time parsing the second half of your comment.
In my experience we saw some losses when taken as a system that prevented us from hitting 2:1, but they weren't anywhere near 50%. We also ran closer to 40% than 33% thermal efficiency in the power generating loop, so many of the system thermal costs are baked into that 33% efficiency to the grid.
Basically, each reactor install will have it's own minor issues. Overall they should be hitting around 2:1 as an entire system. If they aren't there is something going on that I haven't come into contact with (which is quite a lot, I'm sure).
> hard time parsing the second half of your comment.
I’ll put it as a spherical cow engineering problem. Let’s suppose the temperature is 30C and you want to dissipate 2GW of heat across a 1kmx1km flat plate, what temperature will it get? That’s a relatively straightforward calculation if you don’t need high precision.
However in the real world it wouldn’t have a single equilibrium temperature. 30C at night the heatsink would be one temperature and in the daytime it would be a different temperature due to sunlight.
Evaporative cooling largely sidesteps this issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind why that’s chosen over other seemingly cheaper options.
I own a dedicated 48vCPU with even 160GB RAM.. its not that expensive, check ebay, maybe now with mem prices it will be a bit more steep but as a hobby it's not crazy to think one owns such a piece of hardware.
My dual GPU setup was more expensive I think.
When I looked into this a year ago, it was like €60/mo through Hetzner auction. Might be more now but even if it's double or triple it's not that crazy for a hobby.
If you built yourself out of used parts you could do it for under a grand back then too.
The wand building community is also a fun dive. The reddit and discord is filled with people doing things like animating the rickroll music video to exploiting int overflows to kill all loaded enemies.
As a side note, I absolutely cannot imagine being upset of having a machine lasting long.
Sure it's nice the shiny new thing but has capitalism infiltrated people's mind that much? All my previous laptops died on me several times and became frankestein's monsters before I let them rest for a final time (to be often repurposed to other family/friends' machines).
With intermittent use one may get a lot more life out of the SSD than other users, but eventually flash will run out of spare-sectors and start to fail.
Most M1 systems I saw use on-board BGA110 NAND flash, and thus maintenance/upgrades on the SSD are difficult. Most users don't have a hot air rework station or x-ray inspection machines to do this modification correctly.
The SSD don't last forever, after about 3 to 4 years of daily use the drive/system should be replaced. At >5 years, one could hit retention issues and corruption losses.
Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3
I removed my anecdote and flash wear explanation, because of cranky folks like yourself.
The corrosion inhibitors in petrol engine oil get fully depleted within about a year with most brands. One may certainly sell the machine before you see acidified lubricant related problems, but the motor will not reach its full operational lifespan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve .)
I do agree that anyone with a CVT style transmission likely won't have to worry, as that entire section will probably need replaced before you see significant hydrodynamic bearing damage.
With “a” vs “an”, the pronunciation is more important than the spelling.