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As we all know, AC won the "War of the Currents". The reasoning behind this is that AC voltage is easy to convert up/down with just a ring of iron and two coils. And high voltage allows us to transport current over longer distances, with less loss.

Now, the War of the Currents happened in 1900 (approximately), and our technology has improved a lot since then. We have useful diodes and transistors now, we have microcontrollers and Buck/Boost converters. We can transform DC voltage well today.

Additionally, photovoltaics produces DC naturally. Whereas the traditional generator has an easier time producing AC, photovoltaic plants would have to transform the power into AC, which, if I understand correctly, has a massive loss.

And then there's the issue of stabilizing the frequency. When you have one big producer (one big hydro-electric dam or coal power plant), then stabilizing the frequency is trivial, because you only have to talk to yourself. When you have 100000 small producers (assume everyone in a bigger area has photovoltaics on their roof), then suddenly stabilizing the frequency becomes more challenging, because everybody has to work in exactly the same rhythm.

I wonder, would it make sense to change our power grid from AC to DC today? I know it would obviously be a lot of work, since every consuming device would have to change what power it accepts from the grid. But in the long run, could it be worth it? Also, what about insular networks. Would it make sense there? Thanks for taking the time for reading this, and also, I'm willing to go into the maths, if that's relevant to the discussion.

What tech if any have you found interesting lately?

What tech concerns if any do you have as of late?

Mine:

• concerned about the google web DRM. I've been digging into android and trying to give stock android a chance again but the DRM stuff makes me want to jump over to iOS for tap to pay + carplay and Graphene/Calyx for my daily internet usage. Android added a builtin ad ID to their phones which makes me pretty uncomfortable.
• Decentralized Tech, like Radicle, Gitopia, Mango for Git and Ethereum DApps (again). Feels like there is a lot of good that can be done but anything I'd build with ethereum I'd really want to disambiguate from the culture of scam/scam coins. The notion that most successful platforms today are ones people can make a career off of like being an influencer isn't lost on me and I think ethereum offering ways to maybe appeal to that is good.
• IPFS (interplanetary file system). Love the idea but can't seem to find a good entry point or an easy way to discover content and really understand how a consumer would user this outside of an app providing that contex/gateway for it to connect to
• Nim Programming language: I love that it looks and reads like lisp/python but compiles like C. I feel like I adopted docker because python and nodejs weren't portable binaries.

Maybe this could be a positive thing for newbies since now mastodon instances can federate with Tumblr and Threads to become more viable

Or could it bring destruction? Just like what happened with XMPP and OpenID