MakersF

You might have watched too much Chernobyl. It's not true that an irradiated person becomes itself radioactive. Once a potential radiation contamination (radioactive dust and material) is cleaned from a person, independently of how much radiation they were exposed to, they don't become radioactive themselves. You can easily look it up online to verify

The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.

When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.

When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.

Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.

So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.

I checked and it looks like ETS are increasing prices of gas produced electricity 20-30€/MWh. So not little (although peaks are around 140€/MWh). But these are taxes that can be used to reduce the reliance on gas (actually, it's mandatory to use them for transition projects).

What are you talking about? Spain is one of the biggest importer of Russia LNG, at 25% https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-remains-spains-to...

It's unfair you're being down voted, you're right. I used to think that we could get by with just solar wind and batteries, but then after collaborating with people on an ideal energy mix the numbers were obvious: there is a (small) fraction that cannot be covered. Not with storage (the discharge cycles are so few that the cost is prohibitive. How can a battery pay for itself with 10-20 discharges a year? And this applies to any kind of battery that needs to be built, including hydro). Likely there will need to be some baseload nuclear (which then increases average prices, since to make it economical you need to buy all the electricity it produces, and so it partially displaces renewables). The alternative is overbuilding solar+wind+battery something like 5/8 times the average need. Maybe if the prices drop enough that could be feasible.. The big win would be if there is some way to get predictable power at a lower cost than nuclear (e.g. tidal), which could be used to smooth the troughts, or alternatively a low capex but potentially high opex solution which is turned on only when needed (gas is an option, but not co2 free. And sizing the power needed is not super cheap, although now it's not a problem since we have enough gas capacity which is going to be displaced, so it won't be needed to be built)

Capital costs starting to dominate doesn't mean that they increase.

If capital costs are 10 and operating costs are 90, but later operating costs become 1, the capital costs remain 10 and the price to recover the capital costs is the same.

Of course the capital costs need to be spread over less kwh, so the kwh will become more expensive, but what matters is the avg (and thus total) cost paid, and that would be lower.

E.g.

5B in capital cost for 25MW (amortized in 25 years), and 30 per MWh in gas cost.

If you produce 180TWh (20h daily of production) the average price cost will be (5'000'000'000/25 + 180'000'000*30)/180'000'000 = 31 per mwh.

If you produce 36TWh (5h a day) the average cost is 35, but the total cost is significantly lower.

At the limit, if the power plant produces 1MWh in the whole year, it will cost 200'000, but paying that MWh that high enabled the system to pay for all the rest of the year the electricity at less than 31. You need to look at the total cost paid in the end by users, not at the marginal costs in some situations.

It's an auction, it's called marginal pricing. Every producer bids for x KWh at a certain price (for each time slot), and the cheapest y KWh to cover all demand are taken, and all are paid at the price of the most expensive KWh bought. There is plenty of economic research on auctions and why this system is optimal: this system incentives to bid at the actual marginal cost of producing electricity, and thus allows to discover the optimal price. EU has been discussing about changing it, but there hasn't been a better system proposed yet. If you change to pay at the bid price, you'll have companies build teams of analysts to predict the market price and bit at that, they're not just going to accept being paid much less of what they could.

Instead of focusing on this, here a few more impactful things that would help: 1. Zonal pricing, so that there is an aligned incentive to build production where demand is (connection to the grid is a big limiting factor) 2. Stop providing contracts to renewable where curtailed production gets paid (curtailed energy is paid by consumers as taxes on bills normally) 3. Start allowing to build more renewable so that renewable are setting the marginal price 4. Push utilities to do PPA (power purchase agreements) with producers of RE so they can agree to a fixed price, and a smaller slice of electricity is bought at the auction

There are a few more, but these are the most important.

Regarding your edit: the gas plant is not subsidizing, the customers are paying. But of course at the moment building renewable is so lucrative thanks to this setup, that there is a big incentive to build them. Of course they need to plan for 20-30 years, and the risk of getting to big periods at 0 marginal pricing is real, so builders need to evaluate well the risk (and PPAs can help)

In a non-competitive world what you say would be true (you'd avoid filling in the remaining 1%), but there are a large number of power producers that a cartel is unlikely

Not only that, after X months of not paying the landlord can request an eviction, and from the moment the eviction is requested to the moment its executed the government pays the rent to the landlord (I believe 3 is reasonable for X, but it can be higher or lower).

I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord. If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).

Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.

The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.

We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it

Catholicism has been in general against contraception. Of course it's still used, but probably at lower rates. Non protected sex leads to pregnancy at a much higher rate than protected one. I expect it to be similar for other similar religions. Bodycount is also irrelevant, the total numer of intercourses is what matters. I'm not sure if having a stable partner since a young age leads to more total intercourses than occasional partners, but I'd be lead to thing so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_birth_control#:....

This comment consider employees (people) as if they were algorithms to maximize personal revenue.

That is not necessarily true. If FB where a place where people could feel proud of the good it does, a lot would be ok taking a pay cut.

Sure, maybe the ones that care the most about compensation wouldn't join, but that might be ok.

I worked previously for a for-profit company which was devolving a massive amount of their profits to charity. It was something I was proud of, and a part of my evaluation of how much I liked working there.

Message a recruiter working with the company (internal recruiters for example), they are litteraly searching for people, they'll be excited that a candidate reached out.

Of course some don't answer, but it's not a big number

The article talks briefly about mocking your database: definitely never do this.

I definitely recommend doing this for same tests: it's the only way to check how your application behaves in case of failures.

The best thing would be to have a DB where you can inject failures, but I'm not aware of any. So test - the happy path on the real db - the sad path on the mock/fake (which might be a light wrapper around a real db, but with the ability of injecting failures)

This is what I saw. But I think it would be good to share the experience of a big, mature company with it to show that it's a system that can work, and can be easily added to companies which currently have a multi repo approach.

Also, there are quite a few tools to manage the distributions, and it would be great if they were open sourced. Basically Bloomberg championing their approach, to gain the usual advantages of open source (developer familiarity, cooperating across companies for improvements, and so on)

Those projects typically have additional CI/CD enrollments outside of the integration build system too.

Another thing to call out is that you can simulate the "promotion", so you can check in your PRs whether your change is going to break any dependency or dependant.

They do, the repositories define dependencies, so when you change something everything that depends on you is rebuilt and tested. This prevents breaking changes, both for your dependencies and your reverse dependencies, identically to a monorepo.

It's a bit complicated to explain, but it works. That's why I hope they'll make a blog post :)

Like some people, I was expecting to find a way to have the advantages of a monorepo while having projects in separate repos. This is something Bloomberg is doing, and it's very cool. Each project is a separate repo, but they have a central integrated "repo" with all the repos, which is the "source of truth", and were code is built and deployed from. You can commit changes in your repo, and then you "release" the code into the integrated repo, which will rebuild all the transitive dependencies and run their tests to make sure everything still works. If anything fails, your release of the code is not merged in the repo. I'm now working with a monorepo, and I much prefer the Bloomberg approach. Cross repo changes can be made atomically (you update the reference in the integration repo for multiple individual repositories at once), and that is usually the big sell point of monorepo. And it doesn't have the downsides of the monorepo. The only issue is that it's not very ergonomic, and there isn't a tool to make that easy. But building such a tool is definitely easier than implementing a virtual FS as it has been done in multiple companies.

I'd love if someone still working there were to write a nice post about that system, it was the first of such a kind I saw.

Bloomberg let you do philanthropy work during working hours, and they assign you some amount of money depending on the hours you do that you can donate to charity.

I met a few people during such events, which is more or less what you say: you are with people from the company (not necessarily teammates, we did it as a team only once) and you might be helping public parks clean, or take trash from canal on a canoe, or sort food in a food shelter. It's a nice way to take a break, meet people from other areas, feel good about something you do, and managers have been very supportive of that, and they do it too.

I think that is a good balance of what you are talking about

They aren't criminal until the court system declares them criminal. The lawyer is defending them before they are declared criminals. That is what "presumption of innocence" means. Everyone has the right to be represented in court, even people that later on will be convicted. Otherwise we can just go back to use pitchforks and similar (and actually it's happening on social media, and it's not looking good)

In practical terms, none. They are the same, and the same as using the curly braces.

From the POV of the standard, those are different kinds of initializations. C++ has like 12 different ways of initializing variables, and the differences are quite confusing, but in practical terms in my experience I never had to care too much beside making sure native types are initialized to some specified value.

You can probably find some talks on YouTube talking about the initializations of c++, and 1h30m is probably not enought to cover all the details :')

The law forced the companies to be explicit about what they do, and ask for consent.

The user experience is made shit by the companies doing shady things. If they didn't do shady shit, they wouldn't have to display any banner.

I'd rather be informed, at least I can make a decision that way.

Why shoot the messenger?

The part that is missing is making rejecting as easy as accepting. So far there are a lot of dark patterns, but there are sites that make it very clear and easy, and I appreciate it.

Possibly, we'll never know unless that happens.

But something that I noticed during the GME craze is how (some) people were making pledges to donate part of the profits to charities if things went well for them, and later showing proof of doing it.

IIRC someone pledged 20% of the profits thinking they'd donate a few 100s, and ended up donating several 10'000s, but staying true to the pledge.

If you dig the subreddit you'll see people donated to foundations for autism and homeless shelters, in addition to local food banks.

It might be another one of the usual internet "mobs", but it's the first one were I see unorganized individuals part of the community pushing others towards doing good, lead by example and show proof for it (although typically with some meme reference in it).

True, but that was because no one had social media. Now that a big majority of people have it and interact over it, if you don't have it the chances of being marginalized are higher.

When everyone was using SMSes to chat, how did the kid that did not have a phone felt? And people were social before phones existes too.

I think that being outside of the main mean of communication is going to have an impact on your social life, independently of what the medium is

This, absolutely this! I did a lot of interviews (as interviewer) at a non-fang-but-close-enough, the guideline was to tell interviewees to pick the language they most prefer. Even if we didn't know it, the valuable part was the problem solving, and the candidate could display good communication skills by explaining the language features you were not familiar with. This is much better than picking a language that you don't know (happened several times that someone picked python, and when asked to write a class said "I know how to write classes in java". We switched to java, no problem.)

Of course it was reviewed, it's when they provided misleading information on the usage of data, and later got fined for it.

"Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...

Over the years I had many friends ask me for tips on negotiating their salary. I always though this was a very dense guide which brings up to speed starting from 0. Recently a friend was negotiating an offer (he ended up increasing it by more than 50%), and I thought there might be many people which are not familiar with this topic. Spending 1h on salary negotiation is going to be the best ROI you'll ever get in your career! Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the site, just a happy user)

I think it's important to notice that the point is not to keep how to make the cheese secret. The recipe for the cheese is actually encoded in the law, and you can download it freely ( https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/it/consorzio-disciplinare..., in italian). During lockdown I was trying to make a regional cheese, and the law was the best recipe I could find, with extremely detailed steps.

I think they are trying to discourage the usage of "something style" naming, as consumers associate the "something" with the knock off. I saw it a lot in recent years in the UK, even knowledgeable people end up buying "parmesan style" cheese and refer to it as parmesan, when the taste is not the same.

To protect the name in general, they might be going after every instance of the "style" usage, even if in this case it's clear there is no intention to trick, and probably no commercial incentive.