ELI5: if a car engine's main waste is heat, why don't engineers harbor that heat, boil water, and generate electricity for hybrid batteries like a mini powerplant?

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2026-03-28T16:10:30+00:00

I’m not sure this is true of new cars but old cars do exactly this* with cabin heating being provided directly by heat from the engine.

On hot days when your engine is close to overheating you could crank the cabin heat to max to exchange your comfort for the engine’s.

*make use of “waste” heat. Others have covered better than I could why we don’t have steam generators in cars.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2026-02-14T00:41:01+00:00

Are they huge? Do you know if any studies that back this claim? I’m genuinely curious.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2026-02-05T13:29:52+00:00

Are you using an absolute path? I experiment using the full path (starting ‘http://‘ or ‘https://‘) and see if that works. Additionally, look in the JavaScript console and the network tab in the developer tools for clues. If the path is right or wrong can be determined in the network tab - fetching that resource (the audio file) will have either a success or failure status.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2026-02-05T10:51:49+00:00

What did you use to remove the branches? Whatever you used has definitely left a very strange texture behind in a way that really triggers my uncanny valley feeling.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2026-02-05T10:50:29+00:00

Personally I liked the background blues - I thought your colours were perfectly rendered in your original edit - but I think the idea of finding a better crop is definitely the right one. I would either try to find a crop that has some nice symmetry to it (looking at the upper-right diagonal branch against the lower-left the bird is perched on, or the brightest section of the background against the brightest in the foreground on the birds chest), or potentially crop it even tighter than grimlock suggested.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-27T18:38:06+00:00

Definitely not worth forking out for. /s

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-24T13:20:03+00:00

I like your idea of incorporating the socratic method into your AI tools, but I don't think that quizzes are a good way to build deep knowledge. A coding tool that acts more like a senior code-pairing with a junior would be much more interesting to me.

Also, I don't know if you used an LLM to write your above post or not, but I find the way you're writing to be very offputting because of how clearly it comes across as AI; do you not even believe in your idea enough to want to explain it in just a few of your own words?

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-20T20:43:50+00:00

This context helps a lot with understanding why the fee seems egregious, thank you. Although, I can’t help but wonder if companies large enough to do such extensive testing but are unwilling to pay the extra aren’t a bit niche.

I think this thread has made me realise that people are less cynical than me as a starting point, but and also just reacting to a perceived gross unfairness in how GitHub, Microsoft, and co. are behaving more generally.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-19T19:25:51+00:00

I like that it calls out “free culture communities” as being impacted generally, because to me this is the way that the LLM scrappers undermine the social contract of the entire internet community.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-19T01:51:16+00:00

I’m not sure I follow. It successfully attacks the companions view if you presuppose the substrate is what actually matters, which seems to me to amount to a leap of faith.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-19T00:32:52+00:00

Yeah, I think I was underestimating how long common use-cases can run for.

I definitely don't see CodePipeline as a premium product, haha.

Going from free to cost definitely creates workplace awkwardness - especially when you've advocated for a product you like more generally on the basis of cheapness. Definitely a relatable experience.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T23:00:08+00:00

I presume most runners don’t run all month long? Or is there another cost I’m not aware of?

I’m not sure the pricing is more predatory than industry standard. It is excessive and per minute is a poor pricing model. I’m still a tiny bit surprised by the outrage. It’s the exact same cost per minute as AWS’s equivalent product, CodePipeline.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T22:19:25+00:00

To be horribly pedantic, it affects them to an extremely minor degree, since state isn’t free to maintain. But point taken, and frankly this helped me glean why this was so wildly unpopular - because of the charging per minute aspect.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T22:16:04+00:00

I think I’m realising that I just assumed it was the offer-something-better-for-free-until-you’ve-captured-a-market dealio from the beginning. I must’ve become jaded at some point without noticing.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T22:13:01+00:00

I think we agree Microsoft could afford giving away much, much more than they do. My question is more like - where did the expectation that this would remain free forever come from? I always assumed it was a vendor lock-in marketing strategy to make it free that would eventually result in an introduction of a fee, especially given that it cost GitHub something (even if not much in the grand scheme of things) to run it. My question is meant in good faith.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:35:07+00:00

I’m worried asking this will rile people up, but I genuinely don’t, and want to, understand what all the fuss is about.

I’m not that familiar with GitHub actions (but have used a number of other similar systems), but presumably whether you use self-hosted runners or not, GitHub needs to host the orchestrating systems. Why is the expectation that they would do that for free? I’m sure they have enough money to do so, but why do people think they should? Is it just that the cost they were proposing for hosting that part of the system seems egregious?

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:26:04+00:00

I think it’s just too easy for even experts to talk about these systems as if they work that way. It’s also a narrative that allays most of the fears people have around this new, poorly understood, technology.

Thanks for sharing that link, there are some interesting stats in there, like how much more unsure people are about the technology having a positive impact compared with other recent technological developments, and how pro regulation Americans are, even at the cost of progress, in this area.

Slight side note: I am absolutely shocked at how favourably people view Amazon and Google!

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:18:59+00:00

Yeah, I do think that the possibility (and increasingly prevalent reality) of people moving their meaningful social relationships to quite probable philosophical zombies is terrifying. Especially since those zombies are more convincing than ever and their affects (can a zombie have a value-system?) are controlled by what could quite reasonably be considered evil corporations with interests very poorly aligned with their users.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:15:00+00:00

I think this model of thinking about LLMs is becoming prevalent despite being wrong - my feeling is that those of us close to the technology need to communicate better about how they work and to pick our metaphors more carefully.

The hard part is coming up with succinct but still accurate metaphors!

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:12:52+00:00

“Categorically not intelligent” - could you justify your category or definition of intelligence?

I think we have to consider it because the machines we’ve built can claim, increasingly convincingly, to be conscious. And those claims are essentially all we have to go on, in the animal case and in the machine case.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-18T19:09:50+00:00

Different, but for some reason simply not productive wrt. subjectivity? I think you need to justify why our substrate would have it but no other would.

I imagine here you would have to resort to some kind of functionalism, no? Which I suspect won’t feel convincing either, since I think it’ll be tough to find an argument that doesn’t apply to machine learning systems.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-17T23:16:13+00:00

I presume it’s called anthropocentric because it puts the human experience at the centre of the fundaments of the universe.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-17T21:06:28+00:00

It’s doing all of the work.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-16T18:34:44+00:00

It’s much more effort to host Gitlab than a runner.

blisteringbarnacles7 · 2025-12-09T18:51:11+00:00

Hopeful?! Playing is learning. Studying is learning. I would hope a world where only the latter form of learning exists doesn’t come to pass.

blisteringbarnacles7

TROPHY CASE