In episode 69 of Access On, the story of accessibility for early Apple devices is told. Including how many of the modern tools that are taken for granted, such as speech synthesizers and VoiceOver, came to be.
I think the Matter standard is going to cause IPv6 adoption to increase significantly in the coming years. People will demand it, without even knowing what Matter or IPv6 are. They just want to be able to turn their lights off from their phone without any extra hardware or software.
Matter is only local networking. Essentially everyone has IPv6 on their local network.
That said, I disagree with the parent statement that v6 isn't going to happen. It's already happening at a steady rate. From the Google stats it's steadily rolling out. Some countries are reaching 100% v6 deployment. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see some countries with high v6 deployments see services which are v6 only.
They've had years to demand it, I don't see why it would suddenly change. Most users who buy "smart" appliances are not power users, don't set everything up themselves and just rely on manufacturer's servers anyway and don't need a direct connection - and are okay with it.
Many quality of life improvements. Timeouts and hooks have been revamped. Quirks related to base URLs for custom instances have been solved. Every known bug has been fixed.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think!
Ky was written to use fetch from the beginning, whereas Axios tries to adapt itself to fetch, which doesn't always work well. We also have much better TypeScript support, including built-in schema validation with type inference.
Is there anything left in a modern home that really needs or is better on AC?
We have some old ceiling and exhaust fans, but I know those can be replaced. Our refrigerator is AC, but extended family with an off-grid home has a DC refrigerator that cycles way less, probably due to multiple design factors but I’m sure the lack of transformer heat is part of it. I’m not as sure about laundry machine or oven/cooktop options but I believe those are also running on DC in the off-grid home without inverters.
Most of these AC appliances also have transformers in them anyway for the control boards. It seems kind of insane to me that we are still doing things this way.
Of grid homes are vastly more concerned with the energy efficiency of their appliances and thus DC refrigerators generally have more insulation. Most AC customers prefer more internal volume for food over slightly increased efficiency.
AC motors are using way more power than the puddly control boards in most home appliances. So you lose a little efficiency on conversion but being 80% efficient doesn’t matter much when it’s 1-5% of the devices energy budget. You generally gain way more than that from similarly priced AC motors being more efficient.
I agree with everything you said, except it seems like a false dichotomy. We can clearly build DC refrigerators with more or less insulation. We can clearly build them large or small. If you want to prioritize volume, then surely you could do that with DC. Right?
I know that a long time ago DC-to-DC voltage converters were very large in size, which meant AC would win on space efficiency. But unless I’m mistaken, that’s no longer the case. Wouldn’t a DC refrigerator with equivalent insulation and interior volume have nearly identical exterior dimensions as an AC refrigerator?
> Wouldn’t a DC refrigerator with equivalent insulation and interior volume have nearly identical exterior dimensions as an AC refrigerator?
Sure, but it’s important to separate what could be built from what is being built based on consumer preferences and buying habits. The average refrigerator could be significantly quieter, but how often do people actually listen to what they are buying? People buying Tesla’s didn’t test drive the actual car they were buying so the company deprioritized panel gaps. And so forth, companies optimize in ways that maximize their profits not arbitrary metrics.
Any appliance with strong motors should be more efficient with AC supply. But almost anything else can be regarded as a heater that doesn't care much as long as it is fed with the correct voltage. Which is actually the core issue.
A DC household would have to choose a trade-off between multiple lines with different voltages or fewer voltages that need to be adapted to the appliances. And we're right back at the AC situation, but worse since DC voltages are more difficult to change.
But consumers like datacenters can very well plan ahead and standardize on a single DC voltage. They already need beefy equipment to deal with interruptions, power sourges, non-sinus components, and brownouts, which already involves transformers, condensators, and DC conversion for battery storage. Therefore almost no additional equipment is required.
What qualifies as a strong motor here? Are you comparing to a brushed DC motor? Do you think a washer/dryer would have worse overall efficiency with a BLDC in a DC home compared to what we have today? If so, that’s news to me. Where can I learn more about that?
The trade-off between, say, one (relatively) high voltage DC bus throughout the home vs many branches with lower discrete voltages is indeed a problem. With AC, we took the bus approach, running 120v everywhere (in the U.S., higher elsewhere). I’m inclined to say we should keep doing that for flexibility and predictability. But it’s a trade off, like you said. It would obviously help if regulatory and standards bodies came out with official recommendations.
Things like washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, air conditioners, or fridges spend a lot of energy by running powerful electrical motors, which should benefit from AC.
Everything else I can think of in a typical household is basically a mere heater that in principle works equally well with AC and DC of the correct voltage. Even computers can be said to mostly care about the correct voltage since AC->DC conversion is vastly easier than voltage conversion.
>Things like washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, air conditioners, or fridges spend a lot of energy by running powerful electrical motors, which should benefit from AC.
No, they don't, not at all.
Most modern appliances have variable-speed motors these days. You can't do that by just connecting AC to a motor; you need a control board to generate the waveforms necessary to make the motor turn at the speed and direction you want. That control board has to be fed with DC power. (Source: I used to design BLDC motor control systems)
Only really simple appliances, like old-fashioned horribly-inefficient clothes dryers, still use AC induction motors, and those are mostly being phased out. (Bathroom fans also need AC; they're usually cheap synchronous reluctance motors.)
So it really doesn't matter much whether the incoming power is AC or DC these days, unless you have a bunch of ancient appliances that still use induction motors. If it's AC, it's going to be rectified and fed into a DC-to-DC converter to create the lower DC voltages needed. If it's a higher DC voltage, we can skip the rectification step and not worry much about ripple.
Probably 90% of my devices run 5V DC or similar, but you can't run that through a home so you're back to needing AC. If you're going to have AC and DC then you might as well just have AC.
> Probably 90% of my devices run 5V DC or similar,
Indeed. And that’s quite normal. Our electrical system should serve our modern needs.
> but you can't run that through a home
5V might be too low for that length of wire. But you could most definitely have a low voltage line in your house that we could design around, maybe 12V. Electric vehicles are moving towards 48V for accessories. It seems like lack of a standard is holding us back more than anything else.
Or we could just keep doing 120V in the walls, with a DC supply. Modern DC-to-DC voltage converters are very efficient and small. But maybe I’m wrong. A lot of people seem to believe they are still not good enough yet for such a change to make sense.
> If you're going to have AC and DC then you might as well just have AC.
I arrive at the opposite conclusion. Most things are natively DC. So therefore, power in the walls should be DC and we should covert it to AC near the endpoint where necessary.
There are plenty of free public STUN servers and ways to share the information they return.
The real problem is the port randomization if any client is behind a symmetric NAT. The search space for randomly trying port numbers is too large.
There are some ways to reduce the search space, like port prediction. But ultimately, a large dose of port scanning is the only way I know of to make the connection reliably. And there’s only so much of that you can do before triggering IPS or overwhelming the NAT.
A lot of the techniques that both sides use would be much harder on macOS. Of course, Hackintoshes have always existed and where there’s a will, there’s a way. But it makes me wonder how this would evolve if Apple eventually gets its act together and makes a real push into gaming.
In this era where AI is eating away at how deterministic computers are, I really appreciate reading about an elegant solution to a real problem using deterministic logic.
Yes, but a computer is just a paperweight without its software. Also, increasingly the hardware is being specifically designed and optimized for that non-deterministic software. The experience of using computers is changing and we’re still in the early days of that shift.
Of course there’s still plenty of deterministic software you can run… for now.
I can almost guarantee that all of AI runs on deterministic hardware and software. AI is just (near?) the top of the stack. There is no reason, and probably never will be to have a purely heuristic computer. Deterministic systems are way simpler and cheaper to handle very routine well defined tasks. Even AI authors code behind the scenes to process data files deterministically.
Are you saying that "Artificial Intelligence" is just not properly named for now.we.currently use it? Feels like at least the distinction of qualifying it with the term, "LLM" is popular.
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