A little bit of sweat equity is the ONLY way to do solar installs. Even if you hire other people to do the installation, sourcing the panels, the hardware, and your own electrician will save tens of thousands of dollars.
If you let a general contractor like SunRun, Tesla, or Solar City do the sourcing, you will either get:
a) The older generation equipment for top of the line prices.
Last time I played with RDP on Linux it really just seemed to be a wrapper around {the equivalent of} a VNC connection - so even when it worked, it was nothing like the streaming experience when RDP'ing into a Windows machine. Not sure if things have improved since, or FreeRDP does things differently.
I had a quick glance through the FreeRDP site but didn't spot any immediate clues as to whether this is a true Windows-style optimised/streamed RDP implementation or a "we'll send you a constanst stream of compressed bitmap screenshots" VNC-style...
RDP on Windows is one of the few things I really miss from the Windows ecosystem. There is nothing on Mac or Linux that I've seen to date which comes even close to the near-instantanous experience of using a Windows machine over RDP.
There was a good npr special on how the well meant deception that masks didn't work, and later that it wasn't a pandemic yet and we could still stop it, decreased trust in a way that ultimately backfired. I'd also add that they have been exaggerating the severity of most flu years (there have been some truly bad flu years) to get vaccinations up, which lead people to compare covid to those exaggerated numbers. Treating citizens like children that must be managed and given limited access to truth will lead to more and more truth management being necessary due to both mistrust and no practice at handling truth responsibly.
But it wasn't just the mask statement. The whole narrative of minimizing the severity of the virus vs stop breathing and stay inside, swapped parties early on in the US. Almost like they said "nah I'm shirts this time and you are skins look at the polls". And much later fox news silently swapped again to support vaccines. It was said the latter was to have Murdoch's properties in the US and UK have a common story, but it could have been lobbying, or just management shifts. In the US antivax has either been right wing faith healing stuff or more commonly left leaning woo medicine stuff. In several countries it was the left against vaccines and masks the whole time. I think it may come down to which party is more individualistic and which is more cooperative in which countries. In the US the right has recently been more individual, but that wasn't always the case, and it isn't the case elsewhere.
I'm pretty happy with _Podcast Republic_ on Android. Its a bit of a "power user" app, but I have yet to find something that I want to tweak that it doesn't let me tweak via its vast settings menus.
This reminds me of the “Architect from Pluto” scene in Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. The architect reveals his new efficient apartment design: a matrix of coffins. He received a thunderous applause from his investors. [1]
“A man doesn’t need a home. All he needs is a shelter. If we can sell him on the idea of a shelter, we’ll make millions.”
A long time ago I had a junior developer store the internal storage used by Docker on iCloud Drive. He then suffered multiple weird file version issues inside the containerized app inside Docker before he stopped doing that.
I think scientism runs deeper than just a set of philosophical beliefs. It is more like a modern religion, or even an aesthetic.
A key feature of scientism is that science itself is never well defined or understood by its adherents, so science is a floating signifier that can mean whatever its proponents want it to mean. Typically, these are not people with firsthand experience doing science, but consumers of second and thirdhand science media and science culture (TED Talks, "I fucking love science", NASA t-shirt, "I believe in science" bumper sticker, etc.). Lack of scientific literacy results in science taking on a ritual status, where following the ritual (scientific method, peer review, etc.) produces truth, and failure to find truth is always the fault of the mislead individual scientist. Because science is the ultimate source of truth, it is also the organizing principle for society, and those "anti-science" people who would question science are dangerous and stand in the way of progress--basically a religion.
> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I think it's relevant to point out that even Amsterdam eventually chose to ban magic mushrooms, though less potent magic truffles remain legal. This happened after a rapidly increasing number of incidents of people having psychotic episodes while tripping and injuring or killing themselves, usually while trying to fly.
I don't really see how legalization could work, let alone in an area with extremely high numbers of people with mental illness. Shrooms + mental illness go together like ammonia and bleach. And how many 'flying deaths', particularly of otherwise healthy young people, will society accept before backtracking? One can already easily envision the commercials for the inevitable proposition over it.
This is a common argument - anything done by immigrants is assumed to be only achievable with immigrants, despite numerous countries offering counterexamples, usually even the same country a few decades ago. The same population that built the country is assumed to be incompetent at any task they hand over to immigrants.
In Mary Roach's book "Grunt" she talks about some of the poor decisions that went in to uniforms and how the style influences come full circle. Military camo influences fashion designers which influence commanders picking uniforms for troops. This article [0] talks about some portions of the book and the camo:
'In the early 2000s the Army attempted to come up with a Unified Field Theory, not for physics but for camouflage uniforms: they wanted one pattern that would hide troops in the woods, city streets and the desert. The uniform designers and engineers came up with 13 patterns for testing. But before the results were in, a general went ahead and picked a pattern—one that was not even among the 13 agreed-on contenders. “The new camouflage performed so poorly in Afghanistan that in 2009,” Roach notes, “the Army spent $3.4 million developing a new and safer pattern for troops deployed there.”
Meanwhile the Navy currently wears blue camouflage as its working uniform. “I asked a Navy commander about the rationale,” Roach recounts. “He looked down at his trousers and sighed. ‘That's so no one can see you if you fall overboard.'”'
I had a colleague who’s degree was in comparative literature - we’d walk out of meetings and the rest of us would be talking about the engineering side of what we’d just heard while he’d go through and enumerate the different things each person had been talking about while using the same words as everyone else. The amount of latent conflicts that dude caught before the rest of us got torched made me really appreciate the value of an art degree.
In late 2021 / early 2022 I got scared about the incoming consequences of LLMs and downloaded all the "Kiwix" archives I could find, including Wikipedia, a bunch of other Wikimedia sites, Stack Overflow, etc.
I'm pretty glad that I did. I'm going to hold onto them indefinitely. They have become the "low background steel" of text.
Just to clarify, they are using the cassettes and old computers to create punch cards required to run older machines they are using. They are also using modern equipment and computers. This is fairly common in industrial manufacturing because the cost of replacing or retrofitting expensive equipment is high not because older = better (although I'm sure sometimes that is the case).
I have GERD and the only reason I found out was my dentist told me. It was because my teeth became so sensitive a room temperature banana was too cold. Lots of pain and still. It's from coughing due to acid reflux and acid splash up onto my teeth. It can also get into my lungs and over time damage them too by causing scarring.
My dislike of ORMs mainly stems from the tendency to treat modern SQL engines as glorified dumb bit buckets.
Where a CTE or LATERAL join or RETURNING clause would simplify processing immensely or (better yet) remove the possibility of inconsistent data making its way into the data set, ORMs are largely limited to simplistic mappings between basic tables and views to predefined object definitions. Even worse when the ORM is creating the tables.
SQL is at its heart a transformation language as well as a data extraction tool. ORMs largely ignore these facets to the point where most developers don't even realize anything exists in SQL beyond the basic INSERT/SELECT/UPDATE/DELETE.
It's like owning a full working tool shed but hiring someone to hand you just the one hammer, screwdriver, and hacksaw and convincing you it's enough. Folks go their whole careers without knowing they had a full size table saw, router, sander, and array of wedges just a few meters away.
This is why I moved to jOOQ years ago. Nice lean abstraction over SQL, to the point where it's just a typesafe SQL builder and also does the mapping to domain objects if you want. Abstracts and polyfills SQL capabilities just enough for you to be able to port your queries between DBs if desired.
kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.
One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it...
All those start-ups and unicorns, though. Just do it, when to be a hacker became an honorific, a title... Code your stuff, design your mechanics at Starbucks, who needs mathematics and physics when we can have s*t done instead. Who needs signing-off when we can have a carate-belt meeting standing on bouncing balls instead...
I don't want to be the dean of the faculty of prophecy but this is only the beginning. Wait until those autopilots starts using ChatGPT/Stack Overflow/copy/pasted code...
Putting aside obvious questions such as "what is hate?", "who defines hate?", "what if something is falsely labelled as hate?", and "is preventing free speech ever ethical?", this study looks like a textbook example of the McNamara Fallacy in action.
It's easy to ban a bunch of people and come up with an estimate of a large amount of hate reduced. "These hate-mongers posted X times per day to an audience of Y people, therefore we stopped Z hatred-incidents per month. Big progress in stopping hate.". That's the stupid man's interpretation of the available data.
It's a lot harder to measure things like the feeling that people who already feel disenfranchised about life feel when they can't even vent about stuff on the Internet and what that leads to. The people with the ban-hammers are doing nothing but creating further and further resentment and confirming whatever biases and conspiracy theories that many people already feel.
I have this theory that religion is part of the human psyche, and that in 2023 we have more people that belong to a specific but as of yet unnamed religion than any point in history.
It just doesn’t have a bible, it’s a screen. Requires conformity, but doesn’t have a dress code. There is ceremony seen in emojis. And the priests are people you know are lying but it’s the other guys that are always “the problem”. You are a good person only if you do what you are told.
One of the difficulties here is that simply verifying for accuracy isn't sufficient. If you're relying on ChatGPT to do research it can still mislead you. It's quite easy to find examples where it will withhold information it does actually know, because it thinks you shouldn't be told about that for the greater good i.e. it can go beyond mere hallucination and explicitly lie to the user in order to advance its own agenda, whilst simultaneously claiming it doesn't have one.
If you're a lawyer doing research for a case, that seems like a fundamental problem that simply reading over a draft and verifying claims can't fix. Without doing your own research by hand, you may miss critical information, especially if the court case is about a topic that ChatGPT has pre-conceived moral notions about.
OpenAI could probably fix this and in fairness to them, they seem to have made a genuine effort to improve the model's RLHF training since the launch in November. I've seen clear improvements in the neutrality of its answers. However, this capacity for explicit deception hasn't gone away and is deeply troubling. In extremis over-reliance on LLMs for legal work could lead to a loss of trust in the legal system as a whole, as people will suspect they aren't getting an honest defense if their position happens to be unpopular with the sort of people who train models.
I feel like there's some liability on Netgear's part here: People can't be expected to know they can't leave it connected and a charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery.
It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this. Hotspots with batteries tend to be a lot cheaper than battery-less routers and USB dongles. The latter of which isn't even available for 5G.
I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate group symbolsim".
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards.
Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
Working with a team in India just plain sucks. Here are the top reasons why;
- Timezone diff is brutal. I either have to take meetings late at night, or else I’m waiting up 24-hours for a response to any requests.
The documentation requirements suck. The team would only do what is in the docs and nothing else. I’d end up with wonky solutions and shot code.
The inability to deliver bad news. The team would never say no or would not deliver bad news. Issued deadlines were a common occurrence.
What I learned is that you get what you pay for. So, I could get smart developers in India if I’m willing to pay more. However, a good dev in India costs the same as a good dev in LATAM. at that point why would I deal with the TZ BS?
If you let a general contractor like SunRun, Tesla, or Solar City do the sourcing, you will either get:
a) The older generation equipment for top of the line prices.
b) Top of the line equipment for obscene prices.