would it be possible to use a heat pump to increase the temperature to a more efficient range? Or would all of the efficiency gained be lost by operating the heat pump?
I have wondered about this as well... If your heat pump uses say 1kW, and they usually provide 4x-5x heat out, so say 5kW of heat out and your able to extract 50% of that as energy using say a turbine, you would get 2.5kW out? or maybe 1.5kW (subtracting the initial 1kW used to run it?) so maybe not great but maybe possible?
given perfect heat pumps/engines in that circumstance, you would get exactly as much energy out as you put in. Theoretically perfect heat engines are called 'reversable' for that reason: they give you the best possible exchange between heat and work. Said another way: heat pumps can give you 4-5x the heat out as work you put in precisely for the same reason you can't get much work out of that heat: the temperature increase is small. If you were to heat something up to a temperature where you could more efficiently extract work from it, it would require more energy to do so.
Yes you can use a heat pump, but that requires work to run. Think compressors and whatnot. So even with a perfectly efficient heat pump that limit still holds because you are using some of the energy gained from your new hot temperature to run the heat pump.
In the bigger picture this kind of behaviour would destroy the market for innovative tech. Why would anyone still invest in making something innovative if your work gets taken away from you the moment you become successful?
This sort of behavior has destroyed my incentive to innovate. I have had multiple patentable ideas stolen and patented by others. I’m just one guy and can’t afford the process, but a patent just gives me the right to sue someone that infringes. Which also would be leagues out of my budget. The result is that I no longer want to create anything of value, because it will just be stolen. This exceptional case only underscores that rule.
Is this anecdotal or based on widespread publicly available evidence? Not meant as an accusation, but it’s the first time I’m hearing this and it’s slightly alarming
Tbh, many comments here are FUD and downvotes by big tech employees. And somehow DO is HN’s little baby or something. They did have great ads during their launch period.
Why in the world do you think “big tech” would single out one shitty German hosting company not even covered by the post in question, and I can't just be one pissed off ex-customer warning others to stay far away?
I should do a write-up but basically it was a combination of running tailscale (which sends a packet to an unroutable UDP destination nonstop [1]) and my game taking off at the same time. It triggered their false-positive-laden DDOS protection. I responded to the email straight away explaining it was fully under my control and not being attacked. I filled out their attestation form of the same, which is supposed to grant you 24 hrs before they block all traffic. I had responded within a couple hours.
They blackholed my server right when things were starting to hockey stick and took until the following day to unlock it. I lost a ton of users to a full outage while I had an unplanned migration to AWS.
When they finally unlocked my server their tech responded to my ticket begging them to unlock my server with an extremely condescending “It’s unlocked but I’m certain you’re not in control of this server”
Anyway, never again. I’ll pay a premium for stability and intelligent support staff and systems that don’t automatically blackhole your server.
How ironic would it be if we doomed ourselves to a bad AI overlord by feeding it dark sci-fi that causes the AI to self identify with the AI in those stories
You could argue that there is more economic incentive to invent new things as discoveries are worth more if you alone have the right to use them. This in turn could lead to more investments in research that lead to more inventions that increase disruption.
I know that that has been one argument in favor of patents since forever. But that ignores the part where competing parties are not freely allowed to build on another person's patent, which is essential for making good improvements.
And you can see this play out in the history of invention. For example, Edison stopped other people from doing research on the light bulb. Meanwhile the Netherlands was a country without IP laws at the time so Phillips quickly ended up producing the superior and cheaper product. No patent laws, bigger disruption. Similarly the Wright brothers were notorious for holding back aviation with their patents.
James Watt and his patents on steam engine are also an interesting case. Efficiency gains basically stopped for duration of the main patent patent and exploded later.
On the other hand it is also case for more innovation due to necessity, e.g. his patent on beam connection to a shaft (linear-to-rotary movement) required others to come up with a different solutions (e.g. sun and planet gear).
Great. Point me to the next closest open source/hardware car that's not a jalopy, is road-worthy and crash-safe, is globally available, and that doesn't cost 2x the retail price of a "consumer" car.
The point isn't that a particular closed source car is available, but that there are always a few locally-available models that do the basic things well no matter where you are in the world. With open source cars, this is unlikely.
No one said it would be easy, but offering a software suite to a hardware company shouldn't be too hard of a sell. Not like any of them really want to make software.
