Hello.

As someone who’s in the space and has been around Qcomm and their deals before.

It won’t happen.

They will flirt like you can’t imagine, they will propose, make offers, etc.

But closing the deal? No.

They are very smart, and Intel is too big for them to dismantle and exploit with value.

Their interest is not in Intel belonging to them, but in a large, Intel shaped hole in the market that they can attack, and their discussions are more likely about Intel’s roadmaps so they can understand how they could best exploit Intel’s fall.

They are unlikely to even hire some of Intel’s spoils, maybe a few strategic VPs, but… they’re just smart and ruthless and Intel is the dregs and bloated nowl.

The only way they’d do it is if the government sweetened it such that Intel was basically free, and they could fire as many as they want in a reasonable period, basically letting them own Intel without any cost at all. That is possible depending on how desperate the government is to prevent their fall, but I don’t think anyone can make the right promises in time.

Oh, my bad. That makes perfect sense and I have no objections for purely thermal storage.

It said steam to customer, my brain filled that in with turbine.

I can buy all of it, near perfect heating, but 2% for their forced air circulation combined with turbine and generation losses? Seems too good to be true.

Chatgpt (because we’re all lazy) :

Total Thermal to Electrical Efficiency

The overall thermal-to-electrical efficiency of a power plant, often referred to as plant efficiency, is the product of the steam turbine efficiency and the generator efficiency. Typical overall efficiencies for fossil-fuel-based steam turbine power plants (e.g., coal, natural gas) range from 33% to 40%.

In more advanced configurations like combined cycle power plants, which recover waste heat from the steam turbine exhaust to generate additional electricity, efficiencies can reach 50% to 60%.

Calculation Example:

If the steam turbine has an efficiency of 40%, and the generator has an efficiency of 98%, the total thermal-to-electrical efficiency would be:

\text{Total Efficiency} = 0.40 \times 0.98 = 0.392 \text{ or } 39.2%

So, for every 100 units of thermal energy input, 39.2 units are converted into electrical energy.

And that’s if you’re just heating the water before it hits the turbine, including the air circulation and basic entropy (there’s a limit to how much you can pull out via heat differential), it seems like it should go down from there.

They use hot air warmed by gas burners.

Since we’re using electricity here, and this was mentioned in the study linked elsewhere, they used ceramic heaters.

Fine, but given … everything, it seems like you could do some smaller system with channels in the bricks for conduction, it’s the hot air that bothers me, that’s not great to try to use for conducting energy everywhere, you get turbulent effects.

Ok, they’re claiming 98% rt efficiency.

I don’t think we have 98% rt efficiency in anything, ever. That’s miraculous. Batteries are around 92% at best? Pumped hydro is 85% or so.

That even sounds high for raw carnot efficiency.

I mean, if so, wow, that’s awesome, and I don’t really doubt their 1% daily decay, that seems attainable.

But 98% rt? I’m still skeptical.

I would think molten metal would be more effective for this, molten sodium or lead or something? Maybe some kind of Tin/Lead eutectic like old solder?

Firebricks just seem inefficient somehow, particularly since the heat isn’t going to be uniform, while molten metals or salts can circulate and convect the heat more efficiently than… air.

They also have 100x we many executions as we have, probably closer to 1000x.

To absolute morons who make sure it comes with a bed cover they never take off.

2 things:

1. This seems to be a specific attack for their IM protocol if the entry node was compromised, and could be placed nearby the client. To make this much easier, you’d want to compromise both the entry and exit nodes (in this case exit node is TOR native, so it’s more like internal node).

This has never been unknown, this is one of the fundamental attack vectors against TOR, the IM protocol seemed to make correlation easier due to its real time nature.

They added a protection layer called Vanguard, to ensure the internal exit nodes were fixed to reduce the likelihood that you could track a circuit with a small number of compromised internal exit nodes. This seems like it would help due to reducing likelihood of sampling.

2. TOR has always been vulnerable, the issue is the resources needed are large, and specifically, the more competition for compromising nodes the more secure it is. Basically now the NSA is probably able to compromise most connections, and they wouldn’t announce this and risk their intelligence advantage unless there was an extremely valuable reason. They definitely wouldn’t do so because a drug dealer was trying to make a sale. Telling normal law enforcement basically ends their advantage, so they won’t.

Other state actors might try, but they’re not in the same league in terms of resources, IIRC there are a LOT of exit nodes in Virginia.

tl;dr - The protocol is mostly safe, it doesn’t matter if people try to compromise it, the nature of TOR means multiple parties trying to compromise nodes make the network more secure as each faction hides a portion of data from the others, and only by sharing can the network be truly broken. Good luck with that.

I’m considering it, but only just, my 5800x is good enough for most gaming, which is GPU bound anyway, and I run a dual xeon rig for my workstation.

zen 2-4 took care of a lot of the demand, we all have 8-16 cores now, what else could they give us?

They probably moved it to somewhere under /usr or /var/lib.

They’re working on HK.

Xi thought he had HK under control and could move directly on to Taiwan. His navy explained to him they were decades away from actually trying to invade.

It’s their worst case scenario: An educated, wealthy population with good relations to everywhere that didn’t exterminate 50m of their own citizens through their stupidity.

You’re delusional, they’ll defend it by saying ‘the Chinese Communist Party has lifted blah blah blah people out of poverty!!!’ notwithstanding it’s the major reason they were in poverty, Taiwan had become one of the richest and freest countries decades earlier, and they didn’t murder 50m+ of their own citizens for lulz.

So long as the CCP isn’t murdering them at that exact moment, they’re 100% on board because their whole life is built around everything the west doing must be evil (closer to 40/60 imho, but that beats the 80/20 of the ccp).

and I trust them as a company enough that I have no interest in self hosting vaultwarden.

I pay the subscription, but I trust no company that much.

Have nginx for all my reverse proxies, it wasn’t trivial, but I used it for a lot of other things so it’s fine.

I back it up manually to encrypted json, it’s not the right way, but I never had much of a proper backup system, other than zfs snapshots and occasionally mirroring to another zfs pool.

It’s not a lot of extra work once you have the rest of your apps running, it’s fairly low maintenance and mostly just works, but again I haven’t bothered with backups really.

Edit: Running most if not all my services on freebsd as jails, that might have made it easier.

Meh, gaming pc of theseus, you replace the mobo less often than a console Gen, more if you want.

I think that’s overkill, but a Steam Deck is on par with a PS5, but portable, and for a cheap dock and a ps5 controller you can play it like a console.

Linux has made such leaps though, have a container with lutris and vulkan and it can handle most basic gaming that doesn’t deal with modern AAA titles.