mikerickson

[mikerickson]

Everything I have ever learned about that woman has been against my will.

[mikerickson]

MechaRobin

[mikerickson]

I need to make more unemployed friends that will drive me to the airport for a 6 AM flight

[mikerickson]

Not yet. |220825 -

You want to see WIPs, exclusive content and artworks earlier? Consider supporting me on Patreon ✨

[mikerickson]

My coworkers and I went out to a local hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on my recommendation and everyone loved it. Therefore I won the social interaction, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

[mikerickson]

✨THE MAGICIAN✨

Of energy. Potential. Transformation through action. To manifest one's desires.

[mikerickson]

I can probably guess how most people would respond, but do any of you currently have a subscription to a physical magazine? I remember I used to have multiple subscriptions back in high school in the mid 2000's, mostly video gaming, wrestling, Men's Health (for the pictures, let's be honest), Popular Mechanics, etc. I had to drop them when I went to college and money was tight/I didn't have a consistent mailing address, but I never picked them up again.

[mikerickson]

please look at the name of this drink i saw at a boba place the other day

[mikerickson]

Mesa Verde, Colorado, USA

[mikerickson]

Last selfie at 34 // First selfie at 35

[mikerickson]

I was messing around with a local LLM program yesterday that only uses my own desktop hardware rather than outsourcing a prompt request to an external data center. Granted, this is a 9-year-old computer by my math, but I was still surprised that it took 43 minutes to (correctly, I'll concede) tell me how many 'r's are in the word 'strawberry'.

[mikerickson]

Best Cinematography: Conclave (2024) — cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine

[mikerickson]

This can likely be chalked up to hometown bias, but growing up I was always told by grown ups around me that NYC was the biggest city in the world and I don't think it wasn't until after high school I learned that hadn't been true since the 1950's. It's not even the biggest city in North America.

[mikerickson]

[mikerickson]

In July there was an across-the-board electric rate increase for the entire state of New Jersey, regardless of which utility company you have. It's due to a combination of 1) we're closing/powering down more power plants than we're building/powering up, and 2) we're building tons of new data centers near NYC that require massive amounts of energy. Residents have been pretty uniformly pissed and it's the topic du jour for the past few weeks now.

In the NJ subreddit you see daily rants complaining about massive bills that are making me scratch my head. People are sharing bills that use twice the amount of kWh that I use (a household with two EVs mind you!) and houses/apartments with half the square footage. And every time people in the comments try to figure out how that's possible, the original poster eventually responds with something along the lines of, "well, yes, I keep my air conditioning set to 60ºF and it runs 24/7 between May and September, obviously."

[mikerickson]

[mikerickson]

In looking for battery storage options for their solar projects, the two developers realized the first wave of commercial EV batteries were beginning to wrap up their roughly 10-year automotive life. Aware of research that these batteries’ state-of-health, measuring the difference between a new battery and a used one, circled up to 80 percent, Hall and Stern hypothesized that they could build technology to use the battery packs as they came from the vehicle, avoiding any repurposing costs. So the two solar developers purchased 300 Nissan Leaf batteries. The carmaker had run into a powertrain warranty issue with the world’s first mass-market EV, as the range they promised in the lease with the customer fell short. To fix the warranty and guarantee, Nissan swapped out the battery packs and found themselves with thousands of batteries that were still useful, Hall said, just not for driving. The batteries still had thousands of cycles left in a less-demanding scenario, like stationary storage for renewable energy.

This feels like a, "why didn't I think of that?" solution to the problem of what to do with a solar panel farm when the sun's not shining.