Every single hardware subsystem adds lag. Double buffering adds a frame of lag; some do triple-buffering. USB adds ~8ms worse-case. LCD TVs add their own multi-frame lag-inducing processing, but even the ones that don't have to load the entire frame before any of it shows, which can be a substantial fraction of the time between frames.
Those old systems were "racing the beam", generating every pixel as it was being displayed. Minimum lag was microseconds. With LCDs you can't get under milliseconds. Luckily human visual perception isn't /that/ great so single-digit milliseconds could be as instantaneous, if you run at 100 Hz without double-buffering (is that even possible anymore!?) and use a low-latency keyboard (IIRC you can schedule more frequent USB frames at higher speeds) and only debounce on key release.
8khz polling rate mouse and keyboard, 240hz 4K monitor (with Oled to reduce smearing preferably, or it becomes very noticeable), 360hz 1440p, or 480hz 1080p, is current state of the art. You need a decent processor and GPU (especially the high refresh rate monitors as you’re pushing a huge amount data to your display, as only the newest GPUs support the newest display port standard) to run all this, but my Windows desktop is a joy to use because of all of this. Everything is super snappy. Alternatively, buying an iPad Pro is another excellent way to get very low latencies out of the box.
That's a good one. I probably should have brought up variance though. These cache-less systems had none. Windows might just decide to index a bunch of stuff and trash your cache, and it runs slow for a bit while loading gigabytes of crap back into memory. When I flip my lightswitch, it's always (perceptibly) the same amount of time until the light comes on. Click a button on the screen? Uh...
Hah, that’s a good point! Unfortunately I have Hue smart bulbs and while they’re extremely convenient and better than most, there is sometimes a slight pause when using my WiFi controlled color schemes to switch between my configured red and daylight modes. What you gain in convenience and accessibility (being able to say “turn off the master bedroom” when I’m tired is amazing) I’ve lost in pure speed and consistency.
Yes, sensitivity at over 10x normal, so I just took 10x less. I’m taking a more normal dose now after 4 years and I believe I have become desensitized as my body normalized. Other seemingly unrelated aspects also normalized such as thyroid, testosterone, and neutrophils also improved. I was taking medication for these and have been able to stop taking them. I am assuming a lack of GLP1-As to begin with caused the receptors become more sensitive to it. When I started there was no anecdotal information available just theory, in the 4 years since many people have now had very similar experiences including hypersensitivity. (https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2025/11/03/glp-1-agonist-m...)
Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.
SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10°C (and some a little lower still), even before you get into appropriate maximum capacity.
That's not even close to correct. At the design lowest temperature (if <15°C), the very best get 2 COP, but most are 1.5 or lower. The problem is you have to accommodate the worst case.
The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average, unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency. A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your guess.
I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your solution. Land development requiring ”2-car homes" is the driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75% right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer to 75%.
There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
And that gets into another coordination problem we're unable to solve. It's a solved problem to build apartments where you can't hear your neighbors, but the builders don't have incentive to spend the money upfront to do so and we add regulations to make it more expensive for them to do so. So people go on thinking "apartments suck" and not the correct "we shouldn't let people build apartments which suck".
Also, living in SFH isn't avoiding all problems. I'd rather live in a properly-built apartment than my old house when my neighbor left her dogs outside to bark for the entire work day, every single day, and all the city would do is fine her a hundred bucks every few months. (or if you want to say "rural", that's 1 a small fraction of the population and 2 I like hospitals).
And the usual engineer mindset to consider the options to be 1 or 0, no?
I just live far enough from the center of it all that I have a vacant quarter acre and thicker windows that happened when the last owner's mistakes caught up with me the current owner. For medical, I have UCSF, and for major medical, I have medical tourism, something I fully endorse from experience. And yes, not everyone can do that. And well, I can't touch my toes and they probably can. Life's funny that way.
No reason to be rude or hyperbolic - I agree with you that cars destroy communities and we should strive to reduce the need for cars and parking.
For solar powered homes specifically though, multi-story buildings are much harder to run solar powered from the simple ratios - even if you reduce energy use 75%, at 4 stories you are break-even in roof-ratio-to-energy-need. I’ve worked in this space a while, and it’s now pretty straight forward to run single-family homes 24/7/367 on solar in most of the world, but multi story buildings are much harder.
Utility solar is cheaper in studies that do not factor in the cost of distribution, but the picture is much less clear when total system cost is considered - not having to pay for expanded distribution grids or new interconnects is a major benefit of residential production.
As for the last part not being true, can you clarify? The majority of the earths population lives between the 20th and 40th latitude, the band around the earth approximately between Madrid and the Sahara desert. Sure you can’t run a poorly insulated home in northern Michigan on solar year around without considerable expense, but that’s nowhere near where the majority of humanity lives.
I misread you as saying all homes. You're right that anywhere that's sunny year round, a SFH can be self-sufficient for electricity with photovoltaic and batteries.
There's a solution that costs less than fossil fuels, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is structurally unable to solve those anymore. I guess the Soviet Union wins the last laugh?
GP's argument is the marginal cost when building new is roughly that amount, not that any house can be retrofitted for that amount.
However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5" XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a basement you bring insulation several feet down and out below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can do in an old house).
"Special concrete transport trucks (in-transit mixers) are made to mix concrete and transport it to the construction site. They can be charged with dry materials and water, with the mixing occurring during transport. They can also be loaded from a "central mix" plant; with this process the material has already been mixed prior to loading. The concrete mixing transport truck maintains the material's liquid state through agitation, or turning of the drum, until delivery. "
Those old systems were "racing the beam", generating every pixel as it was being displayed. Minimum lag was microseconds. With LCDs you can't get under milliseconds. Luckily human visual perception isn't /that/ great so single-digit milliseconds could be as instantaneous, if you run at 100 Hz without double-buffering (is that even possible anymore!?) and use a low-latency keyboard (IIRC you can schedule more frequent USB frames at higher speeds) and only debounce on key release.
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