blaze33

You can go to the source website https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4

There's is an interactive chart that's easier to understand

If it works it could reduce the electricity price in the evenings and mornings.

Now if I take the french grid example that I know best, for the past 7 days the usual spot price is around 100 to 150€/MWh but between 9am to 6 pm it is greatly reduced due to solar production, frequently down to 0 like today (current heatwave, lots of sun). And today between 1 and 3pm we had up to 5GW of solar production being curtailed. That is on top of the nuclear plants already reducing their output by up to 8GW around noon to accommodate solar power. Hydraulic storage was also running but tops at ~3GW.

That is to say there's already unused energy during the day, in theory, if you had a MWh battery you could have charged it for free today (sometimes even been paid to do so) and earned 100€ a few hours later.

One thing I see coming (albeit slowly) is EV cars phasing out IC engines, that once plugged on the grid with their big batteries could be a good distributed storage solution: they recharge during the day whenever the price is low and smooth out the expensive peaks when possible.

I guess you can have both positive and negative externalities.

I went back to re-read reflectorbital.com, indeed if you're only lighting a solar farm in the middle of nowhere maybe the light pollution is not so bad outside of the targeted zone.

Still fells like a complicated solution to me. Imo we need more storage innovation and investment, a lot more. We know we'll have more and more intermittent renewables electricity production, we just have to store it.

One question I have is about apparent magnitude: given the satellite's small size (relative to the apparent size of the moon) it would have to be very bright to match the luminosity of the full moon on the surface.

In this article: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/new-kind-of-satel...

calculated that the Reflect Orbital spacecraft would appear as points of light with a magnitude of -15 [...] might damage the eye.

-15 seems ~10 times brighter than the moon (-12,6) if I got the formula right so it would indeed be very bright.

Reminds me of all the led lighting we have now: one evening on a random street I watched the cars, bicycles, shops, street lamps: all leds, yes a bit brighter and colder than the old bulbs I know, buuut the light sources being very small dots (with no diffuser), it feels very harsh to the eye, at least to me.

Anyway, even if it proves useful for something, it would join the long list of innovations doing one thing at the expense of everyone else (externality == light pollution in this case).

I once worked with smart meters for electricity consumption that do run 24/7. Leap seconds were not an issue but we had a very similar one now that I think about it: DST shenanigans!

Like how much time is there between 2 and 3 am? Usually one hour, but sometimes 2 and also sometimes 0. It looks simple at first but it creates a lot of edge cases that your business logic now needs to handle and we had a fairly complex system for this.

age verification doesn't have to be a nightmare dystopia

But I feel there's not a lot of trust that whatever implementation we could end up with wouldn't be such a dystopia. The real world equivalent would be checkpoints at every intersection verifying the driver's age, the cashier who carded the 20 yo with a beer now does it for everyone, makes a copy of your ID and stores it in a big folder shared with their 427 "business partners".

Imo we should scrap the whole idea of age verification. Kids get a kidPhone with kidOS, whitelist of age-appropriate resources & capabilities. You wouldn't let an 8 yo drive on the highway, yet they can have a supercar to drive unsupervised on the information highway, no biggie. Internet is full of adults doing all sort of stuff while kids need supervision and education: design safe spaces for children, not checkpoints at every corner.

The Man vs Horse marathon is interesting but in a real race we have no actual chance of winning.

There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back).

[1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-...

It doesn't seem like owls have infrared vision, in that case an IR camera looks like the easiest way to go.

I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.

I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.

Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.

I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.

Previous discussion (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772065

Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.

My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport

Do we know how they get that? Because my fingerprints are also in there, so...

I love the logo, go ahead and click it!

As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.

As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.

Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.

Ah nice to know! In my defense I only searched for the English version.

That being said, Robespierre was a key participant of 'La Terreur' where tens of thousands of people where hastily judged and executed and he himself ended up executed 4 months after that speech. [1]

[1] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_lors_de_la_s%C3%A9an... (French version)

Ok so this "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is so recurrent I once went looking where it came from.

The oldest account I found is in a religious book from 1832 [1]: "We must have nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but, and this is the important bit, this is in the context of your relationship with Christ.

Later accounts are mostly from judicial documents like "well tell us what happened, if you have nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear".

And later on we start to see the current form of the argument related to privacy, except now this argument is never directly used to erode it. It will always be in some form of "ok now we have to do this collective thing because of criminals, because of terrorism, because of protect the children, etc.". If you search "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" 100% of the results are about how it is a logical fallacy, nobody at all seems to defend the argument and yet, here we are!

Food for thought:

- this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)

- many governments, organizations and in any case the people in position of power and authority can develop a god complex (power corrupts etc.)

So unless I end up dealing with an all-loving and all-forgiving entity I could fully trust, I'd like to keep my right to privacy, thank you very much!

[1] https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Sermons_on_the_Spiritual...

Pretty sure virus creators could just pick a real ID leaked by the "adult only logins" shenanigans, whereas legit app developers probably wouldn't want to commit identity fraud.

Nice project! Reminds me of a startup whom I met the founders several years ago: they had a system of hexagonal wooden tiles you could put on a device to play a specific songs (also maybe videos). I'm not sure the project is still alive but I found an article with pictures of what I saw: https://competition.adesignaward.com/ada-winner-design.php?I...

While digital files are obviously very practical and efficient for our pictures/audio/video I can't help but see how different our relationship to them is when a physical object embodies the data.

I understand but frankly "doesn't do anything if there is no illegal material" reminds me too much of the old anti-privacy argument "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".

It is about control and purpose, "my OS watches my communications" is true but weird to say because there's an expectation, unless compromised, that the OS is under my control so no problem. A third-party controlling the local scan of all my data specifically to report whatever it wants is a huge problem.

Too often are some specific issues left insufficiently addressed for too long and it seems like the answer ends up like, ok we give up, here's some collective punishment, that should do the trick.

I regularly see similar articles with similar comments here, but there's one thing I still don't understand:

From the European Convention on Human Rights[1]:

  ARTICLE 8
  Right to respect for private and family life
  
  1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family
  life, his home and his correspondence.
  
  2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the
  exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the
  law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of
  national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the
  country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection
  of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms
  of others.
  

My layman understanding of the usual process is like, we want surveillance over those people and if it seems reasonable a judge might say ok but for a limited time. Watching everyone's communications also seems at odds with the principle of proportionality[2].

[1]https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG

[2]https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...

It is the most technological color, and I’m willing to claim that this is why it is usually, in science fiction and elsewhere, used to represent the future.

For me it is because of red- and blueshifting[1]. Far away galaxies appear both older and redder the further away they are, so red is the past. And if you go really fast, the forward view will be bluer, so in the sense that it is where you go, blue is the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Blueshift

Ok, now if we took a picture of all the food in the world, a more accurate caption would be:

"The staff threw away 30 to 40% of it and ate the rest later."

it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun

I do that too, like the moon is lit from the right, slightly from above so yes obviously the sun is over there, up, aaaand... nope, it's sunset. Something's not right, is the light curved?

Anyway, that's the day I learned about the lunar terminator illusion[1]. Honestly, even knowing about the phenomenon, it still feels quite mind-bending to think about it.

[1] https://chrisjones.id.au/MoonIllusion/

there's a website dedcated to listing the best models for all of this but I cannot find it anymore

Could be the DarkSky approved products: https://darksky.org/what-we-do/darksky-approved/

This article is a bad rewrite of this one from a month ago:

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/japan-super-solar-panel/12474/

Scientists in Japan have been discussing the possibility of using a material called perovskite for solar panels

The perovskite tandem cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 43 per cent, while the silicon-based cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent. It is speculated that these solar panels will be able to produce 20 gigawatts of electricity by 2040

Under Section 0 of Japan’s revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry prioritises the use of perovskite solar cells over the less efficient silicon-based solar cells of yore.

Japanese company, Sekisui Chemical Co., with the help of the Japanese government, is now working towards developing advanced perovskite solar cells for circulation in the global market in the 2030s.

Seems to me the Dalai Lama used the 7 years cell replacement thing as a metaphor to explain some classic Buddhist teachings.

still dwelling on something that happened thirty years ago.

Exactly that: clinging causes suffering.

Buddhism also goes a step farther, they have a whole doctrine about emptiness and no-self: there's no permanent or unchanging self to be found.

The “ideology of technological salvation”

On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".

I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.

Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.

Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!

I once read that whale's songs could be used to transmit a 3d image from one whale to another which doesn't sound so crazy considering that echolocation can activate the visual cortex.

I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may instead have a visual language that just so happen to be transmitted by sound.

Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.

Most of all, I don’t want my priorities re-ordered. And that is why I don’t use psychedelics.

Ok, good for you :) I suppose if you're lucky enough to already have a good life, psychedelics may not appear so relevant or appealing to you...

I've also known people claiming they don't want to use psychedelics, sometimes the reason is that part of them is actually afraid of what they may reveal or do to them, which is also a perfectly valid reason not to use them.

In my case, too many wrenches were thrown into my life, psychedelics made sense to me and indeed were a tremendous help for both my physical and mental health.

Another reason not mentioned here is that they're usually illegal, which is a whole other debate. My point of view is that it should be a personal choice but that you should be somewhat educated about what you're getting yourself into.

The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.

Indeed, I'm sure it's marketing speech but it tells me nothing about what xAI actually does. Yeah, something AI-related I guess, way to go...

I'm currently reading C. G. Jung ("L'homme a la découverte de son âme", French title, doesn't seem to be an English edition to this one though, roughly translates to "man discovering his soul") where among other things he talks about the nature of reality: "the psyche is the real entity in the supreme degree, since the only immediate one". And also that your typical Western man usually suffers from "the disease of knowing-a-priori-everything-better-than-anyone"...

Maybe Elon should read it and get a grasp of himself because I probably won't take lessons about the true nature of the universe from the guy who literally wants to do dick measuring contests on twitter.