“you don't even need to plug an external storage device, you can just pull out the disk, copy the files in the EFI partition, put it back and it will still work. That's how bad it is.”
‘More power than an entire state’. Yep - take the Stratos data center project in Utah, the first phase of which is expected to consume 3GW and at full capacity is expected to be 9GW. By comparison, the entire state of Utah currently uses about 4GW.
For a less rural example, I am finding different numbers, but all of New York City is estimated at somewhere between 5-10GW. So, some 9 million people vs one data center.
My understanding is that is why they are limiting to 800w (~4A) at least in the UK's BS 7671 Amendment, which they consider well within the designed safety margins.
I think that's the reason why the total allowed panel power is only 800W, any more than that and you have to get it properly installed. At least that's ~ the way it is in Austria, it's also pretty easy to check whether you have ~800 or way more hanging on off your balcony.
Ah yes, the good old "let's eat into the safety margins". This is why our motorways no longer have hard shoulders. OK, so cars break down less now. What justification is there for eating into electrical margins? The wiring in people's houses isn't getting any younger. And we still use the ridiculous ring system even in new builds in 2026.
Plus it increases equity because this primarily opens up solar for those in rented accommodation and apartments/flats who otherwise couldn't access it. Personally that feels well worth pursuing if it's deemed safe.
Great, but electricity is really quite dangerous and eating into the safety margins seems very short sighted. I've seen all kinds of horrors in home wiring. This might seem fine in a world where all wiring is completely up to standard, but in the real world it's done by busy electricians or clueless DIYers. The safety margins are there because in a real installation something will probably be not quite right. It's very common to find wires buried in insulation (the insulation installers don't know or care about electricity), wrong size breakers in use, old/worn out breakers/RCDs, loose connections, the list goes on...
How exactly? Meta isn’t doing this out of generosity to society. They’ll be consuming this and vastly more energy to ultimately increase their own profits?
Technically yes. It depends on whether you consider the account ID to be a secret or not (AWS say "sensitive but not secret" which doesn't help much). But also it can make sense to treat all environment variables as secrets by default just so you don't accidentally end up putting something somewhere that turns out to have been Wrong.
And even better can scope assuming an AWS IAM role to a specific branch name & workflow filename so only code/workflows that have been through review have access to CD secrets/prod infra.
IE no prod access by editing the workflow definition and pushing it to a branch.
Until recently, the geographical locations where geothermal is feasible and economic was very limited. Ironically it is tech from fracking/shale gas that is starting to open up a far wider range of possible sites at lower cost.
True DC grids avoid this stability issue by not having a phase and allowing power flow to pretty much just self-balance through voltage gradients and clipping of connections/devices to whatever current they can handle.
With enough voltage range that wouldn't even need the tricky loops of voltage regulation common in incandescent-targeted legacy AC grids.
“you don't even need to plug an external storage device, you can just pull out the disk, copy the files in the EFI partition, put it back and it will still work. That's how bad it is.”