eamonnsullivan

This is actually a good link. Thank you. It's usage that is the big driver, and LLMs are a big driver in emissions and other damage to the environment.

I won't belabour the point, but I think someone needs to correct their misconceptions. You're comparing a single, average person's usage of AI in a day -- not the billions who actually use it. Then you are comparing it to an American's two-hour commute in an oversized SUV. (A commute on the Tube costs about 0.02991 kg per passenger, per kilometre.)

What about training those models? Or the usage of all of the data centres? The projections are that by 2028 a fifth of all energy consumption in the U.S. alone will be for AI.[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

Well, I doubt that. I mostly work from home. But also I live in a big city (London) with a working public transport system.

The one thing that had me reading to the end was the mention near the top of the environmental impact of LLMs, but he never got back to it.

I'm currently writing an onboarding doc for my team, encouraging LLM use for some tasks. (OK, well, I'm actually procrastinating by reading HN).

At the same time, I'm in a darkened office with tinfoil on the windows and a fan pointed at me because it's hell outside and it has been for weeks, and every year it seems to get hotter and hotter and we have longer and longer heatwaves.

This seems ... discordant, at a minimum.

Really, _should_ we be using these things to speed up, say, dependency updates if the cost is the planet? I wanted to know what the author thought about that.

Clojure 1.6, Emacs 24.5... These are pretty old versions, at least of those.

https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk Not updated much, though. Couple times a year, generally.

I got briefly excited about this one, but I've run into the same issue of needing the IT department to explicitly permit me:

https://github.com/jgunthorpe/cloud_mdir_sync/issues/25

I too am a bit surprised this made it on the front page. Mu4e is definitely niche, and I wouldn't crow about it like I do org or magit. I've only been using it for less than a month and it will be a while before I know whether it is a net win.

Also, the real test would have been my much more voluminous work email!

The HTML rendering isn't great, as you said, but you are two keystrokes from opening that email in a browser, if you have to.

And I have tweaked the config several times now, but I think that's mostly because I'm changing my (and the charity's) email, which involves a lot of shuffling about. Again, in six months, I'll have another look and decide whether it _really_ helped.

This was my second attempt to get email working on Emacs and I gave up the first time, too. I persisted this time and I _think_ it will pay off. There is the obvious danger of this becoming another "project", but I'll make a note to check-in again in six months. It's an experiment!

I've not seen the other things you mentioned. I only check for email every 10 minutes, but opening and (especially) searching for emails seem much faster than doing it in Gmail. Plus, I can do searches across email accounts, like all unreads across all three accounts. That was definitely slower in the online clients.

Finally, there's a quick ('a' then 'v') way to just open a message in a browser if the HTML is too thick.

I tried both. The error from davmail suggests it was specifically blocked/prohibit and I failed using actual Thunderbird.

This is an important point that I missed and didn't mention: My work and school life were really hard and chaotic. This is so intrinsically part of me that I didn't even notice, but has generated a lot of stress on me and my family. I guess getting treatment would have saved me a lot of that. I wonder if it is worth it, as a 62-year-old and probably within 5/6-ish years of retirement?

I worry about all of this labelling that we apply to various ends of the "normal" spectrum. Where does it lead us? Is it actually helping?

I easily score as ADHD, but I'm in my 60s now and have never been diagnosed or treated. I have muddled through all my life. Yes, I often self-medicated unhealthily (cigarettes, various over-the-counter uppers), but also relatively healthily (I've been practicing meditation for decades). I managed to have two, long, fruitful careers (20 years of journalism, coming up to 20 years of software engineering) that (I'm betting) was at least partly attributable to me being on the outer edges of normal.

I think that's OK. I'm not looking to be "treated" because I'm a bit different.

I love these packages (like this, Spacemacs, Doom, etc.), even though I've used Emacs for over 30 years. I don't use them directly, but they give me ideas and alert me to packages I haven't heard of (eat?). And that gives me an excuse to go on another round of config-tweaking, which any Emacs user loves.

I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.

Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.

I absolutely understand that, but it seems concerned with the same things (preserving a minority language) and there are lots of initiatives in this area all over the U.K. Literally, right next door.

I find it odd that the article makes almost zero mention of how Ireland is doing with its very closely related form of Gaelic. Ireland has arguably been at least slightly more successful.

Or Wales? Or other minority languages, such as Basque? Just nothing -- not a mention.

It's missing quite a lot of context.

So, I saw this link and immediately thought, "I bet the discussion will be about how we should use N100s, instead." I wasn't disappointed. Even on dedicated Pi forums, you see that happening.

I guess I understand this point of view if you were trying to use Pis to experiment with Kubernetes or something. You'd have built your own (desktop) PC or a personal server rack for that kind of thing, years ago. But for the vast majority of typical uses (Home Assistant, VPNs, etc.) a Pi is going to be way more than you need. It will sit there and silently and reliably run, for years at a time, powered by a USB cable. I know mine have.

Why would I consider replacing those with a bigger box, fan noise and a power brick? Maybe I'm missing something?

I think I've been operating this way for a long time: My notes, software and wiki are almost all in plain text -- source, markdown or org mode in Emacs, usually -- and open image/video formats (jpeg, mp4) and synced with a replaceable combination of services (git, Dropbox, Syncthing, etc.). It lets me switch the conduits/pipes regularly, to whatever works best for my needs at the time.

When the zombie apocalypse finally hits (or the Internet implodes), I still have everything important, in plain text.

I did pretty much the same thing. The issue wasn't cats (I have two, but they'll gladly let anyone pet and feed them), it was that I can't hear the doorbell from my WFH office. I wanted to flash the light. I already use Home Assistant for loads of stuff.

I tried ESP32 and a 433MHz antenna thingy, so that I could continue to use my cheapo bell. That proved unreliable (a press got picked up, at best, about 90% of the time).

Then I went through two zigbee buttons. The issue is that Amazon and other delivery drivers appear to use a hammer to press doorbells. That's the only explanation I can think of for the state of the buttons after a few weeks.

I finally just caved and bought the cheapest (still expensive) Ring doorbell and disabled the camera. It's been solid, but I feel dirty and regret it each time I pay the annual bill. It's my last cloud-enabled device, but I can't afford to just keep throwing Zigbee buttons at the gorillas who deliver my packages.

That's an excellent point. I don't think HA is anywhere close to being something that could carry a separate professional services industry, like many more mature projects (e.g., Redis, MQTT or whatever). It's just moving too fast. But I could imagine in the future it developing a "long-term support" version model.

A section I cut out of the blog before posting was my experiences with Z-Wave. Most of my smart plugs are Z-Wave, which was part of my issue with Zigbee coverage/instability (smart plugs are good routers/repeaters).

I like Z-Wave, but the stuff is expensive and options (for different types of devices) are fewer, so I've generally followed the economic incentives and ended up with many more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave ones (7).

Also, Z-Wave is more power-hungry. I have one Z-Wave motion sensor and I need to change the battery every few months. My double-As in my Zigbee motion sensors last two years.

I keep it up-to-date religiously and rarely run into breaking issues, but I have occasionally. I keep an eye on the release notes (https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), so I usually have at least a week's notice when a breaking change is coming and can adjust. I used the Met Office integration in some of my automations (setting a fan's speed based on the outside temp) and spotted that it was going to be disabled, and switched to Accuweather before this month's version came out.

Author here: Yeah, I cut that out at the last minute, but my feeling is that if you need to use the dashboard, the automation has failed. I put the app on my wife's phone, but she almost never uses it. She does use a touch screen on the wall, though, to bump up the heat, but that's about it.

Here's the company's statement, which they've updated to accuse HA of, basically, DDOS: https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decis...

Bloomberg? Comdb? If not, sounds very similar, anyway. Been there, done that!

Am I the only one who hears this in my head spoken by a character in Firefly, or maybe from the later chapters of Cloud Atlas?

Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU (https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still the OS I choose when the option is available.

I have a very similar set up -- also using Home Assistant (and Node Red -- I don't like programming in YAML). I have Hue bulbs and motion detectors everywhere. (I much prefer the quality of the light and the ability to control that light based on time of day or whatever, rather than smart switches and dumb bulbs.) I have a small number buttons around the house that I can click, double-click, press-and-hold, for overriding default behaviour. My "good night" routine does something similar to yours, but waits for movement to stop outside of the bedroom for longer than 10 minutes before shutting off all of the lights. I even have some routines for things like meditation -- the lights in the room dim, three gongs ring to start, a gong once in a while, until three gongs at the end of the duration you've asked for.

It's all great. My wife and I almost never have to pick up my phone (app) or whatever and things just happen the way we want, just by walking around the house and going through our normal activities.

Until... We're about to get a guest for a few months. Now, suddenly, everyone in the house won't be going to bed at the same time, or coming and going at the same time... I've had to make sure at least one room is "dumb" and I'll need to add a button or two. I'd heard of big "guest mode" switches, and now I'm going to need to develop one.

I've had two (main) careers -- I was a journalist for 20 years, starting as a sport reporter for a local weekly, and ending as the legal affairs editor for Europe for a international news service. But I had also been a computer geek for at least as long. My Dad worked for IBM and I had one of the first IBM PCs, which was utterly useless when the family got one unless you could program in BASIC. I took a few CompSci classes in college (but got a degree in history) and used those skills often in my journalism career, even creating one of the earliest web sites (and announcing it on TBL's email list at CERN).

My second career is as a software engineer. I did it by leveraging my domain knowledge and going into R&D -- looking at how to design software for journalists to help them be more accurate and faster. For example, how to draw the eye toward areas where mistakes are commonly made and how to handle mundane things automatically. (These kinds of things are important on a news wire, where competition is measured in seconds.) Eventually, it was evident that I knew as much about programming as the programmers and things took off from there. I'm now a Principal at the BBC.

(Edit: I've been paid to program now since 2007, so I'm probably well on my way to having a second 20-year career before I retire.)

So, basically, start where you are, using what you already know. That's more valuable than you think. Most programmers know relatively little about their users, and one who knows can be very valuable.

Not sure why this is being promoted today (new release?), but I absolutely love this project. I use esp32 boards to power two strips in the house and another is currently powering my Christmas lights outside. The integration with Home Assistant is awesome. I just this week made the outside lights do a little dance (turn different colours and wave) when the doorbell rings.