After having some persistent issues with my previous pi-hole setup, running as an add-on on my Home Assistant rPi 5, I moved to AdGuard Home on dedicated hardware.
I run it on a rPi Zero 2W (15$), with the Waveshare Ethernet / USB HUB BOX (16$). Together with a power brick (5$) and a meh µSD card, it's very affordable. I did add a small heatsink on the CPU and left the lid off the box to improve the temperature situation (it's in a small room that easily gets warm).
Software wise I've opted for DietPi, which works great for this kind of "dedicated device" pi setup. Current up-time is 135 days, with the last reboot being likely due to a power/breaker issue. It's truly become a set and forget thing now. It also runs Tailscale (not as exit node due to USB 2.0 limited bandwidth for Ethernet) and a dynamic DNS refresh script on a timer. It still has some headroom, but I prefer to keep it rock solid and do more fancy stuff on my Home Assistant pi, which gets rebooted/updated more frequently.
I do have the option to set my DNS settings in my router (ISP provided routers don't have that option here typically), so all of my devices follow.
In combination with µBlock Origin and SponsorBlock in my browser, I almost cry every time I see the "raw" internet on other people's devices.
The only remaining source of ads is if I watch YT via my TV, so if someone has ideas to make that stop, I'm all ears. (I used to pay for the discontinued Premium Basic, but I refuse to pay double for a bunch of crap "features" I don't want/need.)
It takes out so much frustration too. No more nitpicking about style/... in merge requests, the pre-commit hook will fix it and CI will catch it if you don't.
The more of this you can automate, the more you get to spend on "real work".
The same thing existed for micro USB before but Apple could not agree to that or a new standard, so the EU said "USB-C". The law provides for upgrades and mandates compliance with the spec, including PD. If the spec upgrades, the law does so automatically.
USB-C is a horrible standard to consolidate on because of all the confusion about various sorts of USB-C cables (with exactly the same physical connectors) and thunderbolt cables.
Similarly, I’m glad Tesla convinced all the other American manufacturers to go with NACS for the American market because the CCS plugs are monstrosities.
CCS is great in Europe. You can plug in your normal 3 phase 400V EVSE and charge at 22kW at home, and twice a year when you need it, you can uncover the little extra flap for 350kW DC charging for on route to your holiday.
USB-C suffers from unclear naming problems sure, but in my experience most of the problems are actually caused by shady marketing pages. If they just clearly marked cables and ports with their capabilities, using the same physical connector would only be a benefit.
Those aren't really going to have an effect on the charging though. This standardization is only concerned about charging.
So no one is going to pick a theoretical "USB-D" that requires every cable to be able to carry 40 gb/s to be a standard. I don't need a 40 gb/s cable to charge a battery pack.
I have at least two devices that are “USB-C” for charging but will only work with USB-A to USB-C cables. USB-C wall warts seem to need a handshake the device doesn’t do. So I still can’t throw out my old wall warts and cables. It’s terrible.
It can be done with 2 resistors. It's kinda required because of the same port on both ends. If I plug a battery into a phone, should the phone charge the battery or should the battery charge the phone?
USB-C is great for 5V charging. And probably not awful for PD either.
All the weird data transport, seems like a big pile of maybe it will work, maybe it won't. I think most cables will do usb 2.0 data and probably usb 3.0 data, which covers a lot. I've managed not to need any of the other things, so avoidance seems to be pretty good. The one exception being the nintendo switch that does hdmi over usb-c, but sticking with their dock works enough for me.
Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
I watched that video from start to finish and disagree with your conclusion. I watched it all so I could make an informed comment but regret spending those 15 minutes on it.
The author essentially made a video about a popular streamer, then went on their stream and baited them with 50$ and a video about themselves. It was literally click bait. It was so transparent that the streamer realised at the end what had happened but still decided to go along with it since it cost them nothing.
That’s just directed spam (which, by the way, is a word the author used themselves). It was one video about drivel. Granted, it’s not dissimilar from the other garbage that populates YouTube, but it also didn’t get views for being good. It’s the equivalent of video junk food. You know it, the creator knows it, yet it’s still hard to stop consuming.
The idea that success is earned through luck rather than merit is a firmly ideological position, regardless of the domain you’re talking about. If you succeeded via luck then that provides a better moral justification for the related ideological position that you should be deprived of the fruits of your labor as much as possible, for redistribution to others who were simply less lucky than you. It’s really just sour grapes.
The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume. It’s not 0 variance, but if you have some insight into what people want, and you do the work to execute your idea, then you can simply work through the ups and downs and success is almost inevitable.
One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias. [1]
No he didn't immediately received the same level of reception and success as Stephen King does, but neither did Stephen King at first! That's why it's skill + dedication. If you look at some of the old videos of people who have succeeded in e.g. social media, they tend to have terrible production quality yet still significantly stand out from the crowd, even their early days. For instance this [2] is one of the first videos Vertasium ever uploaded, 13 years old now! That video, even now still 'only' has 230k views, and certainly had a tiny fraction of that when it was initially released - but he kept at it, clearly putting way more into his videos than he was getting out of them - until that trend reversed.
> One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias.
I don't think it actually demonstrates this. As your wording hints, the hard part of writing is getting yourself out of the slush pile and into an editor and publisher's hands, and Stephen King's actions relied on his existing relationship with said editor and publisher to publish under a different name. He never demonstrated pulling the feat of escaping the slush pile again.
In modern content creation, the similar metric is getting to, say, 1k views, or even as prosaically simple as being part of the 50% of streamers to get 1 view. It's not sufficient to have talent to get to even that level of success; there is a lot of luck necessary to get you there.
The mistake you (and a lot of others are making) is that the people who didn’t make it just weren’t skilled enough.
That isn’t true - I think the people who don’t make it are massively skilled. It’s not random in the sense it’s just selecting randomly from the population. It’s random in the sense that there are 100 elite content producers but at any given moment there is only space for 10 of them.
Stephen King has a massive leg up for already having built the inroads for having a successful book. I think if you give any elite, yet unknown writer, the same tools, editor, and publisher they would succeed. But to truly succeed from nothing may just depend on going to school with someone who became an editor, or the editor’s daughter showing them a TikTok. That’s what is meant by it’s largely random.
> The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume
Well, the formula for success in selling products is this. Most people don't define success in terms of business acumen.
Except, of course, businessmen. If you perceive our society as centered around successful people, of course you'll see it as merit-based. If you perceive our society as poorly run and catering to the rich, of course you'll see success as primarily a product of circumstance outside of your control. Is it so hard to see that "merit" is necessarily defined in subjective terms?
This is just arguing over phrasing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, if you’re making YouTube videos, or music, or paintings, or cakes, or web apps, or cleaning diveways, your ability to succeed boils down to your ability to provide something other people want. That is the objective source of your merit.
Perhaps your own idea of success in life is something that revolves exclusively around your own satisfaction, like going off and living in the woods. But this is exactly the same situation, you’re just only trying to provide the things that one person wants in that scenario, yourself. Your ability to do this will again come down to your own merit.
Of course if you’re chronically frustrated by being less successful than you would like to be, then looking for alternative explanations such as luck will be an attractive scapegoat that could excuse you from scrutinising your own capabilities. But the human inclination towards doing that is certainly not morally righteous.
I don't think its black and white. I think sometimes success is a matter of luck. For example, in large organizations there can be a lot of roles generated where there isn't always that much direct pressure and people can be hired through luck (e.g. getting on with the boss, some types of diversity hires, being loyal to a company even if you are not that good etc.). If teams of people make products/reports etc. sometimes it can be hard to shine, and 'talkers' who don't contribute much can get promoted into a 'lucky' role.
Its not black and white.
You illustrate a perfect example of simply not understanding what people want. Talkers get promoted because talkers have social skills, and companies are social systems, and social skills are required to advance through them. Social skills are probably more desirable than technical skills most of the time. It’s not luck that these people succeed, it’s the fact that they have the qualities that people want.
You can succeed through partially through luck, like if a record executive decides they going to manufacture some massive level of fame for you. But this isn’t a viable long term strategy, only providing what people want is. Over time the variance of luck goes away. The luck outlook relies on the fallacious idea that you only get one opportunity to succeed, but you don’t, you have as long as you’re willing to keep trying. Maybe a failure on one particular day can be explained by luck, but you get to wake up and keep trying every day, and if you have what people want then luck becomes irrelevant and eventually you will succeed. That’s how basically every single successful person you’ve ever heard of has done it.
3 Phase is (normally, in Europe) 3x400V+N. Single phase is 230V.
AC chargers here (Belgium) are usually 11kW or 22kW capable (at least nominally). This is 16 or 32A. A normal household socket ciruict is 20A here, so this is not very abnormal wiring wise. Most homes are actually hooked up to three phase power, but just have a single phase meter, so an upgrade is usually affordable.
If you want to offer 11kW or 22kW single phase, you'd need 47A or 95A service, with massive cables etc. Hence why most single phase chargers are 7.4kW limited here (32A). Also: Almost no cars would even take that in on 1 phase as far as I know.
Higher amperage is what costs more in terms of losses and cables, so less amps is good.
3x230V also exists, but at least here, is being phased out.
Is there still a N needed for 3phase? The big selling point of triphased power is that you don't need a neutral line, which is obviously a big benefit for transport. Is there a benefit to add a neutral line for battery loading?
No on the distribution network (aka up to the transformer in the street usually, but for sure not on the xxx kV lines) because there the lines are balanced.
In your house, you do, because the voltage between 2 phases is 400V, but the voltage between 1 phase and N is 230V. So you have "low" voltage for "normal" appliances, but high-voltage (and thus high-power) available for high power applications. For example: EV charging, induction cooking, home heating / AC etc.
For an EV usually the N wouldn't be needed, if you always charged at a balanced power on all phases. But from my experience, the full 3 phase power is only used when the battery is empty. At some point the charger switches back to single phase to better modulate the current I guess.
Sidenote:
On a 3x230V net, you don't have an N, but that means you also don't have a non-power conducting wire either! Meaning: double pole switches and breakers are required to prevent shocks. This is why these are generally required in Belgium btw.
I think it's more, 3-phase+N can be converted to 1-phase whenever needed with simple wiring. So even in France, you might have 3+N coming to the breaker panel, and then 1-phase from there on.
The neutrals in either of these situations are used when you want to use some partial multiple of the power, instead of a full multiple for some or all of the load. For example, most US electric clothes dryers will use the full split phase 240V for the heating element, but 120V for the light and sometimes the motor. Same with US electric stoves. So they need a neutral to be able to do so.
If they don’t need that 120V (half the voltage), they can just use straight 240V, and no neutral.
Same with 3 phase - if connected in a delta configuration, you have three distinct loads, each connected phase to phase.
Same as in split phase, if you have two 120V phases, each connected to one half of the split.
When designing AC->DC rectifiers a key concern is ripple (aka how consistent the DC output voltage is per unit time). 120V half phase AC is particularly terrible for this, but a single phase of a 3 phase system will also be not great. You spend a lot of the cycle with no meaningful power available, and need to smooth out that very spikey output with capacitors or the like.
The ripple on three phase (if using all three phases) is going to be a lot lower, and power flow will be much more consistent, as you’ll have 3 waveform ‘peaks’ per cycle, unlike split phase which has 1, or tapping a single phase of 3 phase which has one. (Depending on your definition of peak - some would double the count as the negative voltage side of the waveform technically counts too!). That means with only minimal additional component count, you have a nearly perfect continuous flow of power.
At the type of power levels we’re talking about, the capacitors for smoothing out the ripple (assuming it’s needed when charging the batteries - I would assume so, but I’m no EE), will be enormous and expensive if using single phase.
I know for industrial motors, the smoother/more continuous waveforms are a huge help in making smoother and more powerful (for their size/weight) motors. Almost all industrial motors run on 3 phase AC, and it’s common for even small hobby machine shops to either get 3 phase pulled in, or use phase converters.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWKv7KIIr9rlCwZ9K43...