Also location. In my country, saunas at home aren't as common in Finland, but basically every gym has one. So the people that use the sauna the most, are likely to be the most active.
I just want to say thanks. Finding out about these kind of projects that people are working on is what I come to HN for, and what excites me about software engineering!
The Apollo program had a big impact on the development of integrated circuits, turning software engineering into a real discipline, and fly-by-wire technology. Could this have happened without? Probably yes, these technologies aready somewhat existed, but the program pushed them much harder than they would have done otherwise. Same thing for later space missions, they pushed technology to the limits of the time.
A good example here is solar panels. They were invented before the space race, but for what, why do you need them on earth? We had cheap oil and fossil fuels, nobody cared about renewables. But for the first 50 years after they were invented satellites was what kept them alive, as it made sense to use that technology there. That gave them a real use case, which continued investment and development into them.
I doubt today we would have the same level of satellite technology today if the space race didn't happen, so it's unlikely we would have the same level of solar panels either.
These are not just circuit breakers/MCBs, they are RCBOs which combine an MCB + RCD in a single unit. RCDs traditionally only measure - and protect - current flow is one direction, so if you are using them for solar you need a bi-directional unit for full protection. The device will not be damaged, it just won't protect you.
However in the case of a UK home, where you may have a single ring circuit connecting all the sockets on the whole floor, what's in the breaker panel isn't going to protect you with plug-in solar anyway. Better hope what you are plugging in meets UK standards and isn't just some Chinese rubbish that claims it does.
Outside the UK, neither RCDs nor RCBOs (type A/AC) are generally distinguished by bidirectionality (all search results about this being .co.uk), since the RCD part of these devices is just a current transformer driving a trip solenoid; there is nothing in it that's powered by the line, nor something which could sense net power flow direction. The situation is different for AFDDs or type B RCDs, since those have active, powered electronics in them which need to be fed from the line side.
After some research the main reason seems to be two-fold:
Answer #1: Many UK RCDs/RCBOs are actually single-pole devices and don't disconnect the neutral. In the simplest case, this means pressing the test button might burn out the test resistor when backfed. I don't imagine this to be a problem in practice, since grid-tie inverters shut down very quickly if the grid disappears under them, especially plug-in inverters. RCDs/RCBOs elsewhere are virtually always disconnecting the neutral, so don't care about this.
Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them, even if type A, because they're actively driving the trip solenoid of the MCB part, and if you sketch this out and do it in a very cheap way it's easy to see how you could burn that out if backfed (i.e. powering the trip solenoid during a fault is assumed to disconnect in a very short amount of time, but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver).
Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
> Answer #1: Many UK RCDs/RCBOs are actually single-pole devices and don't disconnect the neutral.
This is not correct; all type AC and type A RCDs used in British consumer units disconnect the neutral as well. Some RCBOs do not disconnect the neutral and this is a problem in some circumstances. The datasheet I linked for Wylex NHXS1 RCBOs explains that these ones do disconnect the neutral.
> Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them [...] but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver
This is correct. For an example of this construction in an RCBO, see [1]. This illustrates that if the supply is connected to the "To Load" part of the schematic (toward the end of the video), as it would be if the supply is a solar PV inverter with battery storage, then it can continue powering the electronics and be shunted out by the thyristor after it has supposed to have tripped, very quickly burning itself out.
Bidirectional RCBOs are not designed in this manner. They have more complicated circuitry that makes them more expensive to manufacture, but are absolutely required in situations like this if you don't want your protective devices to burn and/or explode when they operate.
> Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
Yes it does, because if the power is flowing backwards to how they designed it, that is backfeeding it, keeping its circuitry powered after it should have been disconnected.
The US produces much more natural gas than it consumes, so changes like this don't really make sense.
Europe started implementing these initiatives a couple of decades ago, it makes sense there as they are a net importer, with residential prices around 3x higher than the US. In my country a newly built house (very low energy demand) is often cheaper to heat with a heat pump than natural gas, especially if combined with solar PV - but that's still more expensive than a home in the US.
The most impactful usages are transportation, as everywhere basically everything is transported by road, and renewable electricity generation, so fossil fuels can be used elsewhere (residential, industrial, etc).
The problem is all these platforms in the first place, instead of trying to invent something new, if they would all just use Android with their own UI on top, then it would be possible to have native apps.
Imagine how many "TV" targets Netflix builds app for. I would not be surprised if it's in the hundreds. They are not going to build and maintain a fully native app for some obscure platform which 0.03% of their customers use, when they can just build a wrapper around their web interface.
I'm building a house (in Europe) and lead times on things are ridiculous now.
I ordered some plumbing parts from a well known German manufacturer in February and am still waiting, the retailer can't give me an exact date yet.
Same thing happened a few months ago when I tried to order a network switch, after a month and a half I cancelled the order.
I've just ordered appliances, that I won't need for a few months, just because I don't know how long they will actually take, and maybe on a month the price will have shot up.
It's an interesting way to think about it. For every word you say, every message you write, every task you do, every thought you have, every subtle cue you give, there is a statistically best response / follow up / output.
And all of that can distilled and stored into such a small amount of data. If that's really how consciousness works in our mind (just another representation of "output") it's fascinating.
The repercussions though could be concerning. On one hand it means things like consciousness upload will be possible. On the other hand it means security agencies can monitor people and figure out who is (literally) committing thought crime. They'd just need to search the space and figure out what weights a person's internal model runs on - and you wouldn't actually need that much reference material to do it. Basically Minority Report.
I think you are mixing two concepts. I was just talking about having an LLM that is able to replicate human thinking, which is different then having a precise person's brains turned into LLM weights.
In that second case the problems you are saying emerge. But I can understand why you conflate the two, since having a model that works like a human may unlock the ability to dump the brain into model weights.
reply