Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Yeah, the lifespan and ability to leave a flywheel “discharged” makes me wish I could have one for my homelab (as unrealistic as that might be). I have a solar generator as a battery backup, but it’s not a true UPS with a fast transfer switch (I needed at least 3kWh of capacity for long power outages, my max draw is like 600 watts before I finish load shedding). Most of my servers can tolerate the brief voltage sag, but my R640 chokes and dies. My battery is hooked up to one of my PDUs, and I’d love to have a flywheel hooked up to the other PDU. The battery would be fully transitioned by the time the flywheel was discharged.

    On the point of safety, I have a question. I feel like it’s probably easier to prove that a flywheel system is deenergized, but there is the very slight risk of confinement loss. With a chemistry like Lithium Iron Phosphate that can’t sustain a flame and doesn’t produce flammable gasses, do you feel that batteries might begin to approach the safety of flywheels? It sounds like you have actual experience with flywheel systems, so I’m quite curious.

    EDIT: holy shit, someone is actually selling a 300 KVA flywheel system on eBay for $30,000. I wonder who the hell would buy something like that used.

    EDIT: I said “very slight risk” of confinement loss, and I should probably correct myself. The risk is ridiculously, stupidly small for a system like I linked above. Maybe the bigger systems that get buried and have concrete poured on them are riskier, but I don’t know if people even do that anymore for datacenters.


  • Full disclosure, I haven’t watched the video, I’m just going off of the other comments. Mechanical energy storage is definitely already a thing. Flywheels are the past, present, and future of energy storage in certain niches. My dad was a PM for IBM for many years and told me all about installing them while building out datacenters in the 90s. They’re great for powering large loads while a generator spins up. They’re, uh, not really that great for multi-day storage. You’re going to lose energy no matter what. Magnetic bearings won’t help this, they still have something analogous to friction.

    Anything other than batteries or pumped hydro is probably a fool’s errand when it comes to grid-level storage. You’re not going to make a crane big enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. You’re not going to be able to make a flywheel spin fast enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. Do not try to compete with the water using your giant spinning death wheel or big dumb crane. Batteries get a pass because they’re dense as fuck and very simple to deploy.



  • Hey there! I want to preface this by saying a couple of things. The first thing is that I don’t really have a horse in this race. What people run in their homelabs is their business, and I appreciate seeing diverse setups. The second thing is that we had a cordial conversation before about nuclear fusion. I’ve seen you around a lot, and I have a pretty high opinion of you. I’ve felt that if we interacted again, it’d be a mutually positive experience.

    After reading this thread, I feel surprised and concerned. The tone of conversations in this thread seems different from what I’ve seen in the past when seeing the rainbow Starfleet badge. I hope I’m coming across genuinely when I ask—is everything okay? I’m not asking out of some oblique motivation to dismiss your point of view, but because I feel like there’s more anger and frustration in some responses than is (in my opinion, and only my opinion) warranted by the situation. Like, for example, have there been bitter arguments about this topic in the past? Is this topic similar to other ones that are frustrating/upsetting? Has today just been a really shitty day? The last one is pretty common for me, and I find that it can make me react with more anger and force than I would have otherwise intended. It doesn’t change my opinions or values, it just affects the way I express myself. I personally do not like to express anger on the internet (unless I feel that my anger is truly warranted), and I sometimes wish someone would stop and ask me “is everything okay?” in those moments. Being able to think about and express feelings about the thing that’s aggravating me is such a relief, and it helps me step back into myself. I’ve seen enough of your posts that I’m going to presume to extend that to you.

    I want to reiterate that my intention here is not to dismiss or reduce your points, nor is it to change your mind. I’m not trying to tone police, because the tone people use on the internet is their own damn business. I’m totally accepting of a “please go away,” if all of this is off base or unwanted in any way. I’ve just grown fond of seeing your comments, and this thread seems like an outlier. If that’s intentional, then I apologize for my presumption.




  • Right, but I can’t require a second factor on a different device that operates outside of my primary device’s trust store. I’m sure there is some way to make my desktop hit my phone up directly and ask for fingerprint auth before unlocking the local keystore, but that still depends on the security of my device and my trust store. I don’t want the second factor to be totally locked to the device I’m running on. I want the server to say, “oh, cool, here’s this passkey. It looks good, but we also need a TOTP from you before you can log in,” or “loving the passkey, but I also need you to respond to the push notification we just sent to a different device and prove your identity biometrically over there.” I don’t want my second factor to be on the same device as my primary factor. I don’t know why a passkey (potentially protected by local biometric auth) + a separate server-required second factor (TOTP or push notification to a different device or something) isn’t an option.

    EDIT: I could make it so a fingerprint would decrypt my SSH key rather than what I have now (i.e. a password). That would effectively be the same number of factors as you’re describing for a passkey, and it would not be good enough for my organization’s security model, nor would it be good enough for me.


  • I just don’t get why I can’t use something like TOTP from my phone or a key fob when logging in with a passkey from my desktop. Why does my second factor have to be an on-device biometrically protected keystore? The sites I’m thinking of currently support TOTP when using passwords, so why can’t they support the same thing when using passkeys? I don’t want to place all my trust in the security of my keystore. I like that I have to unlock my phone to get a TOTP. Someone would have to compromise my local keystore and my phone, which makes it a better second factor in my opinion.

    EDIT: like, at work, I ssh to servers all over the damn place using an ssh key. I have to get to those servers through a jump box that requires me to unlock my phone and provide a biometric second factor before it will allow me through. That’s asymmetric cryptography + a second factor of authentication that’s still effective even if someone has compromised my machine and has direct access to my private key. That’s what I want from passkeys.


  • This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.

    My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.

    EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
    UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.




  • I just wish that companies enabling passkeys would still allow password+MFA. There are several sites that, when you enable passkeys, lock you out of MFA for devices that lack a biometric second factor of authentication. I’d love to use passkeys + biometrics otherwise, since I’ve often felt that the auth problem would be best solved with asymmetric cryptography.

    EDIT: I meant to say “would still allow passkeys+MFA.” hooray for sleep deprivation lol.





  • I think they’re all top-level responses too. I took a random sampling of their comments, and they never respond to anyone else’s comment. That smells like someone being lazy and not bothering to iterate through comments when writing their dumb AI commenting script.

    Like, just, what the fuck is this shit? There’s one comment from 8 months ago that looks real. Everything else is from the past week and reads like LLM drivel. Why would you bother? Is it just someone who is bored and wanted to see how long they could convince people?


  • Thank god for projects like Valetudo thar let you break your stuff away from the cloud.

    Semi-related story time. I bought a Midea Cube dehumidifier for my laundry room. My dryer has been broken for years, and I’ve found that air drying clothes makes them last a lot longer. It’s hard to air dry inside, hence the dehumidifier. My plan was to control the dehu automagically with Home Assistant along with some fans, so people could just click a button to turn all the shit on to dry their clothes.

    After buying it, I realized that the dehumidifier could only be controlled via the cloud, and the cloud control was unreliable as fuck. With the exception of tech people, nobody is willing to deal with my flaky bullshit. If the button doesn’t work consistently, my partner, her other partner, and my FIL aren’t going to bother. Luckily, a very industrious person made this thing that let me rip out the hardware responsible for cloud connectivity and replace it with a cheap microcontroller. Now, my dehumidifier talks to my Home Assistant server directly via MQTT and it just fucking works.

    Give me local-only control or fuck off, I’ll take control myself. It’s not much to demand, and shit like what this article describes absolutely deepens my conviction around local-only control.



  • I was looking for this comment so I can vent my extreme irritation to the world.

    God, can this concept please die already‽ If you want to put solar panels where the cars/trains are, just 👏 fucking 👏 put 👏 them 👏 on 👏 top👏

    Do not put them on the ground where they will get smushed and covered in dust and snow and dirt. do not. Just make a little roof for the train tracks/road/bike path/sidewalk/game trail/snail raceway and then put the panels on top of the roof and then if you’re feeling fancy angle the panels to point towards the sun and if you’re feeling really quite fancy then you can use bifacial panels to capture the backscatter from the ground and shit and then we can all be happy. solar ground no, solar roof yes, ground no roof yes. do not play the trolley problem with solar panels on the railroad tracks. we have been doing solar energy for decades and have fucking minmaxed this shit so why are they still trying to do this just STOP.

    Fuck.

    Person I’m responding to, please know that none of this is directed at you. I’m just sour right now and should get off the internet.


  • I feel this is a reductive argument. Parents should help their kids avoid harm while also encouraging growth. Phones and the Internet can absolutely encourage growth. The parent’s job is to ensure that the phone isn’t harming them. If the kid isn’t on the phone too much, isn’t picking up bad shit from the phone, and isn’t harming anyone else, I don’t think it makes sense to deny them.

    If the kid is being harmed by being on the phone, then the parent should try to figure out what the problem truly is so they can find good solutions. I was on the computer too much as a kid and missed out on important shit. Rather than ripping out desktop out of the desk in a rage (which is what happened), my dad should have thought about why I felt the need to escape from my life so much (e.g. being afraid of a father who would do shit like rip out a computer and threaten to throw it off of a second floor balcony, self hatred, intense bullying at school, or alllll the crazy shit my mom did). He didn’t try to help me fix the things that were harming me, so all I had was my computer and the few people who didn’t seem to hate me.

    I spent so many hours browsing Wikipedia, learning about scientific concepts. I talked to people who had lives like mine and were able to commiserate. I found a place and community that I was lacking in my everyday life. I learned skills that eventually translates to a successful career in software development. I don’t think that it’s good when kids feel like they need to escape to the Internet, but I think that having access to all the great stuff out there is worth it. For the kids who have awful lives because of shitty fucked up parents, the internet (or any escapist coping mechanism) can literally save them, albeit at a substantial cost.

    The internet can be harmful, but we only seek out harmful things when the alternative is going without things we need. I think this is also true of children, so the question I feel parents should ask is “what does my phone-addicted kid need?”