I've been meaning to do some data mining on how much PM2.5 differs with even a few hundred feet of elevation. I have a theory that even around Silicon Valley, living even up a little bit in the foothills would have you breathing massively cleaner air most of your life vs living in the pits of the valley. I see it all the time when I'm out there for recreation or just driving, the smoggy haze all over that just sits in the valley and the Bay. It's probably not too tough of a data processing challenge to compare the stats on Purple Air AQI sensors in reasonably close geo proximity vs elevation to get some statistically-significant data on this.
I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
Power supplies - regardless of quality - die pretty regularly at scale. Only disks fail more often. They are the #2 component we replace in the datacenter.
Are data-center power supplies comparable to higher-end desktop power supplies? And how much do you oversize them compared to the load they will actually handle? E.g. for a desktop buying even double the power supply capacity you need won't really affect the overall PC price that much but I somehow doubt data center operators are willing to not optimize away that cost.
They typically are made by the same OEMs and I would say at par or better quality in general. I’ve had (percentage wise) more consumer grade PSUs fail on me over the past 20 years, and I don’t buy cheap stuff. Although the sample size of failure is low single digits vs thousands on the datacenter end.
I’d say on average DC PSUs are vastly overspeced for most machines. Most machines we work with are not sitting at peak load 24x7, and might be drawing half or so of their max rated power draw. Plus every server is redundant - so the modules themselves are operating at around 20-40% of full rated capacity most of their life. The only time they ever spin up past 50% is during power maintenance or a power failure of some sort that brings one of the redundant power sides down.
They do probably operate in slightly hotter conditions on average, but in much more stabilized temperature environments. Plus of course 24x7x365. But that goes for all components.
I’d say other than fans, failure rates in the PC world vs datacenter world are relatively comparable it terms of what fails most. Dust and temp swings are the large variables the average PC needs to contend with vs the datacenter.
Storage of course is the one that stands out the most - everything else is kind of a rounding error. Here though, datacenter work really does beat on the hardware more than most consumer gear so that’s expected. For every 100 disk swaps we do, I figure we do about 2 or 3 power supply modules. And maybe 1 fan swap.
They just rebrand PSUs, not all of them are bomber. But they have 10yr warranties on PSUs and are good about honoring them. I wish they still sold gpus. I would only buy evga for every component if I could specifically for the painless warranty. Had to warranty an asus mobo and it was like pulling teeth.
Yeah I also had an EVGA 1080 Ti die on me, and got a better GPU as upgrade. Their warranty was worth the premium price for sure.
Overall I have made very good experiences with long hardware warranties. Soldered RAM on my ThinkPad died once and I got an entire new mainboard after almost 3 years (it died 2 months before warranty expired.) New one still works today but the hardware is just too old.
Funny, just had an 8 year old 1600W Corsair Titanium efficiency power supply go. Generally very high quality, GaN transistors, all japanese caps, etc etc. It was still under warranty, and Corsair refunded the original price, stand-up company. Too bad 1600W power supplies have apparently inflated ~50% since then, but still.
There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against
Totally inane post. Why does he need to justify his opinion by gambling on the stock market? Having a belief about the way things are going doesn't mean he knows when the tower of corruption and graft is going to collapse
AngularJS aka Angular v1 was the worst thing I've ever worked with in my career, other than all the BigCo apps I've had to touch that were using it.
Macromedia made ActionScript in 1998 and we still somehow haven't standardized on a good solution to this problem across the industry, everyone just adds ever more layers of abstraction.
Is it really this hard to make a decent GUI lib that runs on bare metal with a good-enough API and a mode to drop to drawing, moving, and applying a texture to triangles in 3 axes if that's what you need?
Leave it to PHP oldheads to continue to make dummy simple stuff that works well for decades. It's amusing to watch everyone reinvent everything every decade while the actual responsiveness of the UI that humans must interact with doesn't ever seem to get faster. Now we wait a few seconds for air vents in cars to adjust because it's all done with laggy, bloated software that was poorly-architected even though it has tens of cores and dozens of GHz of CPU and many many FLOPS of GPU behind it.
I don’t use php much, I was recently researching a few parameters of how I needed an app to be structured and maintained, and after neutralizing any bias towards verbose or complex and brittle setups maintenance wise (which can happen with things like Javascript), it was interesting to see how many things popped up that were worth and work and maintain, after neutralizing the bias towards the rest.
Simple scales, complex tends to fail.
The livewire technology in Laravel though seems at least one order of magnitude simpler for the same baseline effectiveness or more that I’ve seen in many popular stacks.
Everything old is new again: "The SSE mechanism was first specified by Ian Hickson as part of the "WHATWG Web Applications 1.0" proposal starting in 2004.[3] In September 2006, the Opera web browser implemented the experimental technology in a feature called "Server-Sent Events""
This, and it's murky because a good chunk of that used directly by ICE will move over to power generation to power EVs -- it's not as if we're anywhere close to 100% renewable power even just for EVs here.
For both transport and home heating you need to remember that the electricity is hugely more efficient in these roles. So not only is some of that electricity from a renewable source, you also need much much less electricity than you did liquid fuel in the first place because it was more efficient.
Because it'll get declined after a few attempts once it's past the limit, then your account would likely get marked for fraud. Try it and report back, but repeated method of payment failures get accounts suspended pretty reliably at any place that does CC processing, since it's also a risk to their merchant account to have a higher percentage of declined payments (ie higher fraud risk) and it's far safer for them to cut you off / blacklist you vs giving you more chances and the sure bet that they'll invoke higher merchant account / payment processor fees. If they make it to the "high risk" category, they're cooked too; Mastercard for example has MATCH that once you're added, you're considered high-risk at ANY other place you try to get CC processing going again. You can read a bit more about that here: https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/match Payment processors can fully drop merchants that have too high of a risk / too many chargebacks / too high payment failure percentages.
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