I used to visit McDonald’s regularly back in high school, but then the local McDonald’s had “euro deals” which was either the regular hamburger or the cheeseburger (switched every week) for €1. And they were open until like 5 in the morning so it was cheap and available if I was on the way home and a bit hungry after a night out.

But now they already close in the evening, their prices have risen a ton, and the portion sizes seem to have gotten ridiculously small. A “large” menu with one of their biggest burgers costs like €20, and for that I get a mushy, bland industrial burger that I can eat in about 3 bites, and like 10 or so fries. It’s more like a snack than a meal. I rarely eat fast food, because every time I try it I end up still hungry afterwards and disappointed with the quality and cost.

And just down the street from the McDonald’s here, there’s a “frituur” (a typical Belgian takeaway place that sells fries, burgers and fried snacks), and their “small” portion is at least 5x more than McDonald’s “large” portion, more than I can eat, and much better in flavour too. And their burgers are also bigger and better than McDonald’s offering. Best of all, a full meal there is like €12, and after that I’m completely stuffed and still have leftovers to feed to my dogs or chickens.

McDonald’s, and the other big fast food chains like Burger king and KFC are all just overpriced, undersized garbage. I really don’t understand why people go to them often enough to keep them in business while there are so many alternatives available which are both better and cheaper. At least in this area.

Do you think an installation with a CoP of >1 gives you free energy or something? It does not. An installation with a CoP of 2 still uses energy, and twice as much for the same heat demand as an installation with a CoP of 4. A CoP of 1 would be equivalent to a resistive electric heater, which is generally considered to be the worst way to heat a house. Cost wise with the energy prices in my area you need a CoP of between 2.5 and 3 to break even in energy costs, and with the grid here still being largely dependent on coal and gas in the winter you’d need a CoP of around 2 to be positive in CO2 footprint. Most heat pumps can easily reach that CoP, when used sensibly.

Tanks with thermal gradients also do not matter for CoP. What matters is the difference between the hot side and the cold side. If you have to heat something up to a higher temperature, that efficiency is lost, regardless of what happens with the heat afterwards.

The video also shows the exact opposite of what you claim. You can clearly see that the power required to run the heater goes up as the temperature increases. And yes, topping up requires relatively low amount of power compared to a cold start, but that’s because it doesn’t have to add much heat energy to the tank, not because of a difference in efficiency during top-up.

I’m also not saying you need a heat pump for every single tap, I’m just saying that relying on one single heat pump for all your heating and cooling needs in your house is a stupid idea. It of course makes sense to have one heater for all hot water taps in your house. But it does not make sense to run your heating and dryer on the same heat pump, unless you like wasting a lot of electricity.

You also mentioned per-device inefficiencies, but it’s actually the opposite. Heat pumps are at their most efficient when properly sized for the installation. If you have only a single unit then it has to be sized for the peak demands you might need, and it will not run at peak efficiency in the summer when it just has to power your dryer. Having a dedicated heat pump inside the dryer that is properly sized for exactly the heat output the dryer needs is much more efficient. And that is even ignoring inefficiencies behind heat distribution you’d have with a centralised setup.

A lot of startups are using at least partially consumer grade hardware, which will likely get offloaded to the used market when the bubble bursts as they try to recoup some of their losses. This will put some pressure on pricing especially for used parts.

I don’t think it’ll put pricing back at pre-AI levels immediately, but it will likely cause prices to start to drop pretty soon after the bubble bursts, even before manufacturing is able to change focus.

You clearly did not read the full comment chain, nor my full comment.

The different temperatures are not a problem because they’re difficult to achieve or anything. Most devices that need heat would have a pretty wide tolerance. The main problem is efficiency, when that heat is provided by a heat pump.

If you have underfloor heating, that can typically work with water temperatures as low as just 30°C. If you have a heat pump that needs to heat up water to 30°C, with outside temperature being at about 0°C (realistic winter temperature here, and it makes the calculation easy), then a good heat pump typically reaches a CoP of 4 (sometimes even slightly more).
If you instead would use an internal heat grid of 65°C (a pretty typical practical maximum of conventional heat pumps, and a pretty typical temperature for a heat pump powered clothes dryer to run at), then that CoP typically drops to only just about 2.
So, if you let your heat pump run at 65°C and use a heat exchanger to run your heating off of it at 30°C, you use nearly twice as much electricity for every watt of heat you add to your house compared to just running the heat pump at 30°C and using the output directly.

Typically the heating in a home is the application that demands the most amount of heat by far. But it’s also the application that is usually the most tolerant to low temperatures (especially if you have underfloor heating or forced airflow radiators). So you save a huge amount of electricity by having the circulating water temperature as low as possible, but that also makes that heat not very useful for most other devices (a clothes dryer operating at only 30°C would be highly ineffective).

Heat grids work great if they are supplied by industrial waste heat. But if the heat has to come from a heat pump they’re a terrible idea because of how much heat pump efficiency decreases with increasing temperature delta.

I think Toyota’s cruise control handles that situation nicely. It detects that situation (shows it on the display) and smoothly adjusts your distance and speed so you’re at a safe distance for the merger. I have it turned on probably about 90% of the time when driving.

But that the best cruise control I have experienced so far. I’ve used other cars that would be very slow to react and adjust the distance after the merging, and also one that would just automatically slam the brakes whenever someone merged in front of you. Both situations are not something you’d want to happen in heavy traffic, when there might be someone driving close behind you.

Central heating systems use recirculating hot water to spread meat from a central heater (which can be a heat pump) to multiple radiators. In theory there’s nothing preventing you from connecting other devices to that loop of recirculating hot water to use the heat from your central heating system for those too.

It would however add quite a bit of complexity to the devices and plumbing, which would also make both more expensive.

And it also wouldn’t really be worth it. Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature difference between the hot and cold side gets larger. So while your air conditioning does indeed produce heat, dumping that heat into the outside air at ambient temperature is much more efficient (in terms of watts of heat moved per watt of electricity used) than trying to use it to heat up water to 50° or so to be used as heat source for a dryer. Then there’s also the issue of balancing demand and supply of heat. Your dryer could only use excess heat from your air conditioning if both are running at the same time, so the devices need to be synchronised or you’d need heat storage, which adds additional complexity, expense and inefficiencies.

Devices that need heat also do not all need the same temperature. Your radiators, clothes dryer, dishwasher and so on all have different ideal temperatures, and because heating pump efficiency decreases as the temperature difference between the hot and cold sides increases it’s more efficient to run it with the lowest temperature delta that’s feasible. So it’s more efficient to just give each device that needs either heating or cooling its own heat pump (unless you have sets of identical devices which all need the same temperature and that can all be integrated in a single system, such as central heating radiators or floor heating zones). And the complexity involved in distributing heat between unrelated devices in your house makes giving them all their own heat pump likely the cheaper option too.

People are also way worse at distinguishing them than they think they are. And it’s the same story with images.

If you can use the page code instead then you have the information of which blocks of text belong together, and you know with 100% accuracy what character the text contains. And you also have additional information such as which elements are interactive, and, if semantic tags are used correctly, which part is the header, main content, or such.

Besides, scraping can be done with OCR too. Both softwares can use the same tricks, so if screen readers can work using a workaround, then scraping can work with that same workaround too.