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Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?

Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course


A late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any Electron app from 2020 should do it.

I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.

I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.


I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though.

[1] https://21energy.com/products/ofen-2


You might prefer a heat pump.

I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...

My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.

However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.


Does that mean the heat pump gets less efficient as the outside warms? Because that would be fine. 7kW to make you home a constant temperature seems wonderful.

No, they get less efficient as the outside gets colder.

This problem is called Coverage Path Planning.

One option one could use is eg. https://fields2cover.github.io/ but that doesn't work too well if there's lots of obstacles in the fields like in this case. I'm having the same issue at work right now in agricutrural robots, covering the area between rows and rows of trees. Some implements on our robot hang off to one side so paths can't be bidirectional, etc. Lots of interesting constraints.


A bit like HomeAssistant Voice? https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/


I expected something about cryptography keys hidden in a decoration somewhere (kinda like LoTR Gate of Moria style), article was not quite what I expected. Although it is in a sense


The Gate of Moria inscription was plaintext. The first person to not try to interpret it as a riddle solved it.


Impartant context: EU demands US follow EU law on EU soil for EU consumers.

EU stuff must abie by US law when going to the US, vice versa as well.


The article mentions > If the worst happens and the dome is punctured, 2,000 tonnes of CO2 will enter the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 15 round-trip flights between New York and London on a Boeing 777. “It’s negligible compared to the emissions of a coal plant,” Spadacini says. People will also need to stay back 70 meters or more until the air clears, he says.

So: 70 meters


> or more

I guess it just depends on how much oxygen you really need.


I'm not a gamer, so honest question: what is PITA with HDMI for gamers?


Before HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort already supports high refresh rates (greater than 120Hz) at high resolutions. Also many high-end PC graphics cards offer more DisplayPort ports than HDMI.


I think most graphics cards nowadays come with roughtly 3 DP ports and 1 HDMI port. It might be different for things like the Multi-media cards that are on the low-low end of the spectrum (think of GT 730 level in a generation) might have more HDMI ports since they are more intended for such an audience.


Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein.

The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)


Yep, was just lookin up their recent news on this: https://www.allseas.com/en/who-we-are/news-and-media/allseas...


You can carry more cargo if you don't need all those batteries. If that difference makes economic sense is not yet known of course, as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.


> as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.

Even if you built one, as some people have proposed designs, it doesn't get you nuclear reactors you can just stack up on a ship or something. Containerized reactors could be convenient for getting a reactor to a remote site where it's needed but once there you'll have to provide substantial shielding for it; usually the way this is meant to be done in these proposals is digging a big hole and/or putting up earthen berms around it. And those earthen berms will be subjected to a lot of neutron radiation, so you need a plan to deal with the site after you run this reactor for any substantial amount of time; the whole site will be radioactive.

There's really no getting around this, and most of the people pitching container-sized nuclear reactors are hoping investors don't realize it. The amount of shielding that you could ever hope to place in an ISO container isn't anywhere near enough.


You can use the reactor in the open ocean where shielding is not a big deal, and switch to conventional fuels when needed.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers already exist in pretty good numbers.


Reactor fuel remains radioactive even when the reactor isn't operating.

And the proposal was a containerised nuclear reactor, so you're going to irradiate the surrounding containers in the process.

Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are completely different beasts. The reactor core is very heavily shielded, is built into the ship/boat, and is tended by a team of expert operators, and (at least in the case of US/UK subs) uses bomb-grade uranium as fuel.


> as there are no containerized nuclear reactions that I know of.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-...


Many in design, a few under construction, 2 in operation, by China & Russia. My point being still: the economics aren't clear yet.


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