Does anybody think Aluminium as a brand name is a good choice? Especially considering the intended expansion towards the premium market.
To me it sounds cheap, second-rate, ersatz. What you use if you cannot afford a better metal. Chrome is shiny, aluminium surfaces soon get dim again after any polishing attempt.
Aluminium is also what you built aircraft out of back in the day, and they could very shiny.
I also don't think it's ersatz anything. It's what you use if you build large, stiff objects that aren't supposed to rust. It's certainly less ersatz than steel, with a less martial character.
So I don't agree. I think it can signify something clean, light, unburdened by heavy and unnecessary things. I don't intend to use it though, for reasons everybody else gives, app-stores etc.
“Aluminium was difficult to refine and thus uncommon in actual use. Soon after its discovery, the price of aluminium exceeded that of gold. It was reduced only after the initiation of the first industrial production by French chemist Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville in 1856.”
I think that the general concensus is as long as a name doesn't start with a V, and is not taken, it's a good brand name. You can substitute W for V though, as in Waginium.
If you have a south (or SE or SW) facing wall without much shadowing from nearby buildings or trees, vertikal mounting does work OK. Do not expect to reach the panel's nominal Wp rating though, output will peak at 50-70% of that. But panels are cheap - if there's enough room, just overprovision twofold. Just take care to buy an inverter that is OK with such a bigger configuration.
And vertically mounted panels will generate more power off-season than tilted ones.
Loooking closely, the shop does not seem to be located within the EU. And the 50€ discount does not apply to the 128GB config.
Also, if you are interested, it might help to have a look into the user forum: https://de.gmktec.com/community/xenforum
Interesting - do you need to take any special measures to get OSS genAI models to work on this architecture?
Can you use inference engines like Ollama and vLLM off-the-shelf (as Docker containers) there, with just the Radeon 8060S GPU? What token rates do you achieve?
This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution.
The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.
OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.
One of the first Spectrum emulators (JPP?) used a VGA text mode with 2 pixel high font where each character was its own ordinal, i.e. 65 was two rows of 01000001 pixels. That meant you could draw individual rows bytewise exactly as the Spectrum did, and just take care of the Y offset bit shuffle, and fake the colour clash.
It is true that Denmark has a large district heating system - their national system is nearly as big as that of, say, St. Petersburg. But I think the Danes should be honest with themselves about the reality. The heat comes from burning stuff (wood/biomass, trash, and fossil fuels), the overwhelming majority of biomass is imported - and about 40% of those imports are from non-EU countries. If Denmark burns a tree, that is considered to be zero emissions, because - they argue - those emissions have already been accounted for in a change in _Danish_ land use and forestry. If you are deforesting a foreign country to warm your house, that’s a) not accounted for in your national emissions statistics and b) often not accounted for in the foreign country’s emissions either. So you get heat for free. Of course, if you forget to replant the trees, or they fail to grow back, then the emissions are worse than coal, because coal is underground, trees are not, and thus the surface albedo changes are significant.
The steel-man case for Denmark is that trees usually do grow back, and indeed, global _tree_ cover is substantially higher than it was 35 years ago. But global _forest_ cover is still shrinking, and much of the wood entering Denmark comes from forests. Forest cover is more important than tree cover - for the aforementioned reason of albedo changes, but also biodiversity.
Where things really get absurd is when you begin to calculate the area of land you have to turn into a tree farm to keep your homes warm. Or when you calculate the market effects of buying a huge amount of trees - even if all _your_ trees were good ethical trees from a farm, you have just consumed a large amount of the supply and thus financially incentivized cutting down old-growth forests elsewhere - for example look at the history of Ikea’s wood use. If there were more Denmarks, and it was not just a small country with the population of the Chicago area, there would be massive worldwide devastation.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not an absolute opponent of biomass. It is true that burning things is a great source of high-grade heat. It can play a small role in a sustainable energy mix. But it is not the free lunch Danes think it is, and certainly not at the scale they consume it.
"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."
"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"
Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.
An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.
You might find Stanislav Lem's Golem XIV worth a read, in which a what we now call an AGI shares, amongst other things, its knowledge and speculations about long-term evolution of superintelligences, in a lecture to humans, before entering the next stage itself.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10208493
It seems difficult to obtain an English edition these days but there is a reddit thread you might want to look into.
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