The magic product the writer is looking for does exist — somewhat. It's those Euro style mini-split heat pumps, that pump coolant through an external unit.
Up front cost is higher, but the efficiency gains are huge, and they can cool/heat much faster.
More than standard, they're basically universal. I'm surprised and shocked it's apparently a rarity in the US.
Is it because HVAC is so common it usually makes sense to plug the AC in the HVAC, and the rest of the market is basically leftovers which get to have window units or crappy portable air conditioners?
Pretty much. Central AC is the default in regions of the US where you really need AC (which is most of the south and west, places that people didn’t really settle in large numbers until post WWII - among other reasons, because AC hadn’t been invented and the climate there is oppressive without it).
In the northeast where buildings are generally the oldest in the country, window units are common - especially in rental units, because the tenant typically provides the AC themselves. One less thing for the landlord to maintain.
The northwest, for the most part, doesn’t use AC much with their climate. Many homes don’t have AC at all.
Mini-splits are becoming more and more common in big cities here now, but only if you’re lucky enough to own a place and you don’t have landmarked facade problems. I’d love to use one instead of my window units, but I rent a street-facing apartment in a landmarked building. Even if I could get my landlord to approve me paying for a mini-split to be installed, I couldn’t put anything outside. The commercial tenants in my building have mini-splits, but they have access to a side of the building which doesn’t front onto the public street, so no landmark concerns.
(The fact that many landmarked facades have a random collection of window ACs hanging off the front seems much uglier to me than a bunch of professionally-installed identical mini-splits compressors would be, but, c'est la vie...)
It's the the large horizontal vents protruding from the wall you see in pretty much every low-rise (2-3 floors) residential buildings ("apaato"), or if you go to the back of the building you can see each flat's external unit, generally wall-mounted next to or below a window.
They're almost all reversible heat pumps, though their heating capacity tends to be lower than their cooling capacity.
Note that mini splits can also use a more discrete slim duct (as the link notes), but in my experience the wall mount is by far the most common, as that's way simpler and more convenient for multi-unit buildings.
The most important difference between pelmeni, varenyky, and pierogi is the thickness of the dough shell—in pelmeni and vareniki this is as thin as possible, and the proportion of filling to dough is usually higher. Pelmeni are never served with a sweet filling, which distinguishes them from vareniki and Polish pierogi, which sometimes are. Also, the fillings in pelmeni are usually raw, while the fillings of vareniki and pierogi are typically precooked.
Those distinctions seem about right in my experience, and I eat all three fairly often, since I go to a lot of cultural festivals.
This seems like an accurate description. Unfortunately, these three are the ones I'm more familiar with, and I was hoping to understand how Kalduny compare to these. The Wikipedia article for them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalduny) basically says they are similar, but doesn't really get into the differences.
Myco-nerd here: absolutely never rely on the image recognition apps for fungi ID.
There are fungi in entire different genera that are VERY morphologically similar, and the apps are just not there yet — likely won't be for a few dozen years.
An app can make a lethal mistake much easier than a human.
I’ve used Google Lens as “if it says unsafe, definitely unsafe”. I would not rely on it for “oh yeah, I can eat this” :).
I doubt your “few dozen years” though. Humans are only so good at it themselves. Computing has improved a lot since 1984 (3 dozen years ago), and so I’d wager that by 2050 we can be better than human at “Eat or not?” for fungi. Up for a longbets.org wager? :)
I mean the thing about fungi is that the tops can look the same and you just need to do a spore print to positivity distinguish one from another. There may be some mushrooms which are simply impossible to tell apart by outward appearance. In one of the fast.ai lectures Jeremy shows how to distinguish different breeds of cats. Then he shows how to look at the confusion matrix, and he found one pair of breeds the network really struggled with. It turns out they look really similar to him too, and when he researched further he found they’re simply hard to tell apart. Perhaps with an enormous data set there might be small differences a network could detect, but the confidence might still be low.
And given that mushrooms can kill you, it may simply never be advisable to rely on any photo based identification.
I don’t consider it against the rules of the bet to allow multiple pictures, including the underside and perhaps even “here, smush the mushroom on a piece of paper and take a picture of that”. My question is can a vision-based AI thing outperform humans within another thirty years, not if it can do it via a mechanism that isn’t discriminating.
For all the myco folks here: Do you have a sense of whether or not the multiple hours mentioned is “required” or “just” makes it easier to get a strong signal? (That is, how much is the signal boost due to our inability to see well as humans)
We foragers and amateur mycologists use smell, touch (slimy, dry, etc,) sometimes taste (bitter, acrid,...), habitat (on wood, ground, type of wood, is there a bulb below ground or a root-like structure, time of year, spore prints, sometimes color change due to drops of chemicals (especially on boletes), sometimes even microscopes to view spores, and more.
all of these variables could of course be coded for a good classification algorithm.
It's mostly visual. I would add location and latest weather to any software trying to recognize the mushroom. The mushrooms that people commonly forage for are not that numerous, so the algorithm needs to know about a dozen or two varieties. Chanterelles are easy to tell from images. You can probably have an AI chanterelle identifier coded right now and for most edible mushrooms very soon if not now.
A bond also loses you the personal/medical liability protection of auto insurance. Very few people who do have enough money would drive with only a bond, as the risks are pretty extreme.
Same here. I had them running for a small informational website, and they took the site down for several days via surprise cert problems. I may switch to a paid provider.
If you give an email address to your LE client you should get an few emails from LE advising you when a cert is due to expire giving you some time to get it sorted before your old cert expires.
Edit: personally I also have a script that runs every day and checks the validity of all the certs in my live directory and pings me when they are due to expire as a second measure.
I most of the LE/ACME breakages I've seen, the issue was that something broke in certbot (or other client) when rotating in the new cert, not that it was unable to get a new cert issued. LE won't email you about that.
It all depends on the companies and institutions. If there are no special holidays or orders, people will go to work no matter what and the epidemic will spread. On the other hand, if the government or companies imposes a quarantine, it will be respected.
Not really. Probably closer to a Veblen good (which does exist) but, in any case, those are about increased price driving up demand, not increased supply driving up price.
(I suppose increased supply could drive up price if providing that additional supply increased the overall costs but you'd presumably still be constrained by the overall supply/demand curves of the market.)
Neonicotinoid pesticides are the likely culprit. Companies that produce them have been sinking large sums of money into studies that search for alternative explanations, and responses that don't simply consist of eliminating neonics.
The replacement is probably just as bad. I've seen industrial scale pesticide application in the U.S. Doesn't matter what you're spraying, it's going to cause Problems in the quantities that they use.
Up front cost is higher, but the efficiency gains are huge, and they can cool/heat much faster.