There is a lot of money to be made from this kind of trolling, or simply producing low quality poorly researched videos. The textbook example is Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. He makes a small fortune off YouTube and Patreon, mostly producing videos of himself reacting to headlines and articles that he didn't read. Imagine Slashdot comments in video form.
The only way to deal with it is human oversight. Any automated system will be gamed instantly, like the strikes system and DMCA take-downs are. Trolls tell their minions to false-flag videos they don't like.
Of course humans make mistakes too, so they are like the least bad solution. But given that people will devote huge amounts of time and energy to beating the system, and that all it needs is for one of them to find a flaw in it, this is a very hard problem to solve. Much harder than spam, because processing text is much easier than processing video.
The algorithm isn't nearly clever enough to recognize the content of a conspiracy theory and a matching debunking video. Instead it goes off things like what videos are linked to (back/forward links), what people who liked/disliked it also enjoy, channels that it thinks are associated with that one somehow...
The only solutions seem to be really strong AI or human intervention.
The content creators also escalate things themselves. In a sea of videos about running if you want to be noticed the easiest way is to do an extreme ultra-marathon with a thumbnail of yourself being carried away on a stretcher.
TV news is the same, printed news is the same.
Also, conspiracy theories about secret government organizations and 9/11 are "leftish" now? Seems like the article author has some bullshit to peddle.
Quality UPS units use the USB UPS spec. It's actually part of HID for some reason but whatever, it's an open standard.
On Windows such devices just work, plug in and the driver is automatically loaded. I don't know about Linux, but it should be possible to support easily enough.
That's not a bad idea. Given that it would be stepped from the battery voltage anyway, making the output voltage programmable wouldn't be hard. There are already 12v and 19v PSUs out there.
OpenUPS2 and NUC-UPS can only provide about 60W, maybe 100W peak for short periods. And they are DC only, so you can't run your workstation monitor from them making saving your work and shutting down a bit tricky. ESR specifically says he wants to run a 150W monitor from it.
Those little things are great for low power DC servers, but useless for workstations.
Can Powerwall act as a UPS? For example, if the grid goes down will it switch over fast enough to avoid your computer rebooting?
I was kinda interested in the Nissan car-to-grid system but the switch over is not that fast. The food in your fridge will be fine, but not the unsaved masterpiece on your PC...
Do you mean the OpenUPS? It's DC only, and one of the hardest parts of ESR's UPS is the AC part. He needs it to run things like monitors that typically are not available in DC versions.
The AC part can be designed a number of ways, but from ESR's requirements it sounds like line interactive is required. The simplest way to do that is to take AC mains and convert it to DC. Use the DC to feed a DC to AC converter that produces the output AC voltage, and have a switch over mechanism in case the AC input goes away. Big caps to cover the gap during the switch over period. The DC also charges the battery when required.
As well as providing very good isolation of the output from the input, this method also makes it easier to handle various AC voltages and frequencies. The down side is that it is less efficient and much more complex than a simple switch-over system.
Designing such a system that can safely handle 1000W peak and say 500W continuous is not trivial. Getting it certified as safe is very expensive. Even the equipment to test such a design seriously will run into many tens of thousands of Euros/Dollars.
I'll start by pointing out some issues in ESR's current plan.
He is aiming to supply 230W for 15 minutes, which he says will power a "typical desktop system with 4k monitor." It won't, for that you need at least 500W and unless you want to play a careful balancing game more like 1000W. Sure, you system might average 230W, but peak load...
He also wants to use Upverter for electronics CAD. Upverter is a proprietary, web based (!) schematic capture and PCB layout system. It makes no sense at all considering that Kicad is both Free and better in pretty much every way. Kicad and git are a proven solution.
The other issue is lithium batteries. There is a reason SLAs are used, and it isn't just greed. They are cheap, easy to use and robust. You don't really get issues like one bad cell making your whole pack die, or needing to balance them and manage charging carefully. He complains that vehicle batteries last much longer, but they have complex battery management systems that are not at all trivial to design. Cheap lithium batteries like you find in toys and phones only last a couple of years, worse than SLAs.
The reason they use SLA batteries instead of lithium is safety. The equivalent size lithium battery needs careful balancing, charging and venting capability in case of a fault.
It's by no means impossible to do, just much harder than with SLA that will take all kinds of abuse.
There are already lots of open "power wall" systems that provide home energy storage. Most are open (not enclosed) to avoid venting issues, and use off the shelf BMS and inverters. They would be a good place to start though.
Jones' meter isn't really open, as the core part that does all the measuring is the proprietary HY3131 chip. It's the same one used in a lot of other low cost, mid range meters. The only bit you can program is the micro that handles the user interface.
What we need are truly open designs that are modular and give the community high quality measuring systems. Anyone can throw one of those HY3131 chips into a project, there is nothing interesting or valuable about that.
Sub Reddit dedicated to conspiracy theories thinks there is a conspiracy against them, and then does the most trump thing possible by launching an ad hominem attack.
I agree that the best option would be promoting rebuttals, but as a general point blocking is very effective.
The far right gets very upset when they are kicked off popular services because they know that no one reads gab.ai, no one watches Vimeo. They need to be on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook to get their message out of the bubble.
That's why they have made YouTube a target.
Normal people won't seek this stuff out, the neo Nazis need to get it on to mainstream platforms and near the top of search results. They need to use things like GamerGate and pop culture rant visits as a gateway.
Apple started the island key bullshit. Flat tops so your fingers can't sense when they are well centred without feeling for the edges. Difficult to clean, very little travel or tactile feel... And more work to replace if it breaks.
Lenovo had better, liquid proof keyboards in the 90s. They still do.
iOS has a lot more lock in. Try to switch away and you need to re-buy all your apps, your HomePod is a brick, you need to re-upload all your cloud data, your dongles and peripherals are bricked...
Switching Android phones doesn't have so much lock in.
First, go to YouTube and search for things like the "Jewish question" and you will find plenty of neo nazi material. Then try searching for things like AntiFa and you will find only more neo Nazis.
It would be great if YouTube did actually throw up some counter views. They are out there... But the Nazis have been working hard to crowd them out, down vote them and are good at gaming the system.
In addition, YouTube lacks almost any tools for blocking that stuff. There is YouTube Kids but that's about it, and even that got spammed with those nightmare Elsa videos. You can't block channels and it's even hard to just make it stop recommending Nazis to you. They like to throw in video game and news videos to bleed into other subjects.
If YouTube offered counter views that would be a good start.
If you have perfect 1 hour timezones then noon with be with the sun overhead +/- 30 minutes. In practice timezones are not perfect by any stretch, they tend to follow political boundaries.
A few countries have fractional timezones, like +8 hours 15 minutes or something, but I imagine they also have a lot of problems with broken software.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of money to be made from this kind of trolling, or simply producing low quality poorly researched videos. The textbook example is Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. He makes a small fortune off YouTube and Patreon, mostly producing videos of himself reacting to headlines and articles that he didn't read. Imagine Slashdot comments in video form.
The only way to deal with it is human oversight. Any automated system will be gamed instantly, like the strikes system and DMCA take-downs are. Trolls tell their minions to false-flag videos they don't like.
Of course humans make mistakes too, so they are like the least bad solution. But given that people will devote huge amounts of time and energy to beating the system, and that all it needs is for one of them to find a flaw in it, this is a very hard problem to solve. Much harder than spam, because processing text is much easier than processing video.
The algorithm isn't nearly clever enough to recognize the content of a conspiracy theory and a matching debunking video. Instead it goes off things like what videos are linked to (back/forward links), what people who liked/disliked it also enjoy, channels that it thinks are associated with that one somehow...
The only solutions seem to be really strong AI or human intervention.
At 50Hz one cycle is 20ms, I think it's difficult to get much below that, unless you go line interactive. 100ms would be fantastic though.
The content creators also escalate things themselves. In a sea of videos about running if you want to be noticed the easiest way is to do an extreme ultra-marathon with a thumbnail of yourself being carried away on a stretcher.
TV news is the same, printed news is the same.
Also, conspiracy theories about secret government organizations and 9/11 are "leftish" now? Seems like the article author has some bullshit to peddle.
I prefer Emacs actually.
Quality UPS units use the USB UPS spec. It's actually part of HID for some reason but whatever, it's an open standard.
On Windows such devices just work, plug in and the driver is automatically loaded. I don't know about Linux, but it should be possible to support easily enough.
That's not a bad idea. Given that it would be stepped from the battery voltage anyway, making the output voltage programmable wouldn't be hard. There are already 12v and 19v PSUs out there.
I've done multiple projects in Kicad, hobby and commercial. It's easy to use, better than Orcas, CadStar and Eagle.
In my experience a 500W PSU running at 20% load (idle) will cope with a 0.25 second interruption okay. How far you can go I don't know...
OpenUPS2 and NUC-UPS can only provide about 60W, maybe 100W peak for short periods. And they are DC only, so you can't run your workstation monitor from them making saving your work and shutting down a bit tricky. ESR specifically says he wants to run a 150W monitor from it.
Those little things are great for low power DC servers, but useless for workstations.
Can Powerwall act as a UPS? For example, if the grid goes down will it switch over fast enough to avoid your computer rebooting?
I was kinda interested in the Nissan car-to-grid system but the switch over is not that fast. The food in your fridge will be fine, but not the unsaved masterpiece on your PC...
Do you mean the OpenUPS? It's DC only, and one of the hardest parts of ESR's UPS is the AC part. He needs it to run things like monitors that typically are not available in DC versions.
The AC part can be designed a number of ways, but from ESR's requirements it sounds like line interactive is required. The simplest way to do that is to take AC mains and convert it to DC. Use the DC to feed a DC to AC converter that produces the output AC voltage, and have a switch over mechanism in case the AC input goes away. Big caps to cover the gap during the switch over period. The DC also charges the battery when required.
As well as providing very good isolation of the output from the input, this method also makes it easier to handle various AC voltages and frequencies. The down side is that it is less efficient and much more complex than a simple switch-over system.
Designing such a system that can safely handle 1000W peak and say 500W continuous is not trivial. Getting it certified as safe is very expensive. Even the equipment to test such a design seriously will run into many tens of thousands of Euros/Dollars.
I'll start by pointing out some issues in ESR's current plan.
He is aiming to supply 230W for 15 minutes, which he says will power a "typical desktop system with 4k monitor." It won't, for that you need at least 500W and unless you want to play a careful balancing game more like 1000W. Sure, you system might average 230W, but peak load...
He also wants to use Upverter for electronics CAD. Upverter is a proprietary, web based (!) schematic capture and PCB layout system. It makes no sense at all considering that Kicad is both Free and better in pretty much every way. Kicad and git are a proven solution.
The other issue is lithium batteries. There is a reason SLAs are used, and it isn't just greed. They are cheap, easy to use and robust. You don't really get issues like one bad cell making your whole pack die, or needing to balance them and manage charging carefully. He complains that vehicle batteries last much longer, but they have complex battery management systems that are not at all trivial to design. Cheap lithium batteries like you find in toys and phones only last a couple of years, worse than SLAs.
The main issue with DC power is that vital peripherals like monitors are usually AC only. ESR wants this thing to be used with workstations.
The reason they use SLA batteries instead of lithium is safety. The equivalent size lithium battery needs careful balancing, charging and venting capability in case of a fault.
It's by no means impossible to do, just much harder than with SLA that will take all kinds of abuse.
There are already lots of open "power wall" systems that provide home energy storage. Most are open (not enclosed) to avoid venting issues, and use off the shelf BMS and inverters. They would be a good place to start though.
Jones' meter isn't really open, as the core part that does all the measuring is the proprietary HY3131 chip. It's the same one used in a lot of other low cost, mid range meters. The only bit you can program is the micro that handles the user interface.
What we need are truly open designs that are modular and give the community high quality measuring systems. Anyone can throw one of those HY3131 chips into a project, there is nothing interesting or valuable about that.
Sub Reddit dedicated to conspiracy theories thinks there is a conspiracy against them, and then does the most trump thing possible by launching an ad hominem attack.
Any comment on the actual story, by the way?
I agree that the best option would be promoting rebuttals, but as a general point blocking is very effective.
The far right gets very upset when they are kicked off popular services because they know that no one reads gab.ai, no one watches Vimeo. They need to be on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook to get their message out of the bubble.
That's why they have made YouTube a target.
Normal people won't seek this stuff out, the neo Nazis need to get it on to mainstream platforms and near the top of search results. They need to use things like GamerGate and pop culture rant visits as a gateway.
Apple started the island key bullshit. Flat tops so your fingers can't sense when they are well centred without feeling for the edges. Difficult to clean, very little travel or tactile feel... And more work to replace if it breaks.
Lenovo had better, liquid proof keyboards in the 90s. They still do.
ThinkPad keyboards have been liquid proof since the 90s. They have channels for the liquid to drain through. Tough book/Dynabook keyboards too.
iOS has a lot more lock in. Try to switch away and you need to re-buy all your apps, your HomePod is a brick, you need to re-upload all your cloud data, your dongles and peripherals are bricked...
Switching Android phones doesn't have so much lock in.
Do you have any examples? If you search for something like "AntiFa" all you get are the alt-right complaining about them.
First, go to YouTube and search for things like the "Jewish question" and you will find plenty of neo nazi material. Then try searching for things like AntiFa and you will find only more neo Nazis.
It would be great if YouTube did actually throw up some counter views. They are out there... But the Nazis have been working hard to crowd them out, down vote them and are good at gaming the system.
In addition, YouTube lacks almost any tools for blocking that stuff. There is YouTube Kids but that's about it, and even that got spammed with those nightmare Elsa videos. You can't block channels and it's even hard to just make it stop recommending Nazis to you. They like to throw in video game and news videos to bleed into other subjects.
If YouTube offered counter views that would be a good start.
Presumably it gives you creators... I mean, there is no apostrophe there, so it must update some fall creators I guess.
If you have perfect 1 hour timezones then noon with be with the sun overhead +/- 30 minutes. In practice timezones are not perfect by any stretch, they tend to follow political boundaries.
A few countries have fractional timezones, like +8 hours 15 minutes or something, but I imagine they also have a lot of problems with broken software.