foxrob92

I'm in Perth. Our feed in tariff changed in July to 10c/kWh between 3pm and 9pm, and 2.5c/kWh at other times. Use tariff is 26.2c/kWh. I'm pretty sure our solar will pay itself back in under 5 years, but we have a 25 year warranty on the panels.

My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.

Dunno if your geographic size argument holds much water. Australia is about the same size as the continental US, but we always get lumped in as one entity. Canada appears to get the same treatment.

Except instead of being something cool like "diet coke and mentos" this is something basic that webdevs should be familiar with.

The transaction price does not reflect the true cost of the energy, nor does it reflect the negative externalities. When ~1/3 of BTC mining is powered by coal in Xinjiang, it's horrific for climate change (source: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env...). The power is cheap, in part because it does not include the externalities of the extreme CO2 emissions used to generate it.

i don't place a utility judgement on the use of energy.

Attitudes like this are why staying under 2C of global warming is going to be a long shot at best.

If somebody is willing to pay for their use of electricity, they deserve to use it.

A nice idea, but energy use affects us all. More fossil fuel burnt = more extreme climate change. For where I live, it means cyclones will hit land further away from the equator (and closer to larger population centres), overall rainfall will drop and bushfires will be more severe and frequent.

I feel justified in denigrating BTC because its colossal waste of power is a significant contribution to climate change. This has tangible harms to everyone on this planet.

It's absurd. repeating what I said elsewhere - my desktop at home has a 650W PSU. It would take ~76 days of full power for that to consume as much energy as a single BTC transaction.

The problem with people claiming mining btc is a waste

It takes ~1.2 MWh to confirm a single transaction right now. My fridge at home consumes approx 300 kWh/year. Are you saying that a single BTC transaction verification provides anywhere near the utility as refrigerating food for four years?

Even comparing it to gaming, my desktop at home has a 650W PSU. It would take ~76 days of full power for that to consume as much energy as a single BTC transaction. There's orders of magnitude more energy being used by BTC, but I don't think there's orders of magnitude more benefits.

but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment?

Got any evidence for that?

Bitcoin mining is a colossal waste of energy (given it's at about 1.2MWh currently to confirm a single transaction, and that number is basically nondecreasing). People playing video games are at least deriving some enjoyment from it. There are less wasteful methods of exchange than BTC.

So people aren't allowed to criticise the system they live under?

Every time I see this take, I am reminded of this comic: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?

Got a source for the "fires are down 90%" statistic?

I think it's pretty clear that GP was referring to climate change, which wastes of energy like NFTs and BTC exacerbate. A side note - climate change means that bushfires are more common and their severity is worse than in the past. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the world burns for it.

Google wasn't an ad machine prior to the dotcom crash. Before the crash they had a very small advertising group, and it was pretty maligned.

It's also somewhat important to differentiate between "doing advertising" and surveillance capitalism. The scope/scale is completely different.

Seems like stock standard American Exceptionalism to me. "When we do it, it's a communications network. When China does it, it's espionage".

Why would you need to use "modulo and division into round/ceil/floor" on array offsets? How often you do it?

Circular buffers?

There's multiple theories of value.

Labour theory of value contends that the value of an object depends on the "congealed human labour" in that object (e.g. a chair is worth more than its constituent timber because the chair requires you exert additional labour on that timber).

Intrinsic theory of value says that some objects have some objective value, inherent in the object (or as a property of that object, like mass).

Subjective theory of value basically says "value is in the eye of the beholder".

There is also exchange theory of value, which is similar to subjective value. An object has a value decided by what it can be exchanged with (e.g. 2 square metres of linen might be worth the same as 1 coat, even though the coat only has 1 square metre of linen in it)

If that were true, wouldn't the proportion of crimes involving a firearm be consistent the world over?

While Rowling provided the creative input to her stories, they were:

- Edited by other people - Printed by other people - (Films were) directed by other people - Characters in the films were played by other people - Distributed by other people

If there was no J.K. Rowling, we (admittedly) wouldn't have the stories. But the same is true of all of the other moving parts in the media business.

No-one is self-made.

Why would they? Supporting privacy-preserving options is not within their business interests.

I guess the hardware / IoT use case is pretty small

OSIsoft was bought earlier this year by AVEVA for $5 billion[1]. OSIsoft's offering is centered around storing industrial control system data (the buzzword-version is IIoT, though that is a bit more broad). They're also not the only player in this space. Many of the industrial automation vendors also have their own offerings.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-25/aveva-to-...

The other surprising factor is that a lot of heavy industry will have data going back decades. If they can't get all of that data in to timestream, that's a massive mark against it.

I'd heard that it was initially developed for a major industrial operator (sounded like it was in the resources industry though I never found out who it was for), so the lack of support for late arriving data is a big surprise. That being said, there aren't any of those companies on the customers page - maybe it was just an incorrect rumour.

If you expect a 12 hour outage, you should probably spec for 12 hours.

Industrial facilities don't always expect their outages.

Additionally, you can scale the memory retention policy up and down as you see fit. So if you notice a network outage, you can scale up the retention policy for the duration and then reduce it back down again after.

Better, though still a hassle to manage.

Sure, but if you configure your database for, lets say, 4 hours of in-memory, and you have a network outage of 12 hours (this is not uncommon on mine sites), you lose 8h of data and cannot put it in to your "master store".

Yeah, I currently work for a company that does a time series DB for industrial applications (think power generation, mining, etc).

Backfilling/inserting old data is common. Control network connectivity is not always great. Sometimes you need to do fill in old data.

Forecasts are also a common use case (e.g. forecasting grid demand/capacity), so not being able to handle future data is another limitation.

Can't speak for Chinese systems, but I'm aware of "jump hosts" (used for remote access to industrial control systems) that are running windows server 2003 and are internet-exposed.

It’s an old idea that keeps resurfacing and frankly I think it misses the real problem of modern websites: they’re too bloated with code that the user is expected to run and yet isn’t there to serve the user.

I can't find it now, but I thought there was an article recently that looked at page rendering times and how they have changed over the years (as bandwidth has also increased). In general, page rendering time hasn't decreased as much over the last few decades as you would expect, and a part of that is the amount of js (often for tracking - not to serve the user) that is pervasive nowadays.

The table linked lists the following lifecycle emissions (min/median/max)

* Hydropower: 1.0/24/2200

* Concentrated solar: 8.8/27/63

* Rooftop Solar PV: 26/41/60

* Utility Solar PV: 18/48/180

* Wind Onshore: 7.0/11/56

* Wind Offshore: 8.0/12/35

* Nuclear: 3.7/12/110

I've gotta say, Nuclear/Utility Solar/Hydro all have massive ranges in their lifecycle emissions. If you're basing "which tech has the lowest lifecycle emissions" from the median alone, you're not getting the full story. Rooftop solar is a lot more consistent than Nuclear, for example.

This is exactly why I changed all of my personal machines to Linux. Unfortunately I'm bound to Windows at work (work is a MS shop).

Some family friends had the "trilingual" version of this - the wife is from the French/Spanish border, so she had both French and Spanish speaking parents. The husband is from Australia, so they were looking for names that don't change much under translation between English, French and Spanish.

They went with Robert (en/fr)/Roberto (es), and Ines (fr)/Inez (es)/Agnes (en). Ines doesn't really use her "English" name.

My university used turnitin (I assume it still does), largely to check journal paper submissions and theses.

This was pretty frustrating, as my undergraduate thesis had some publishable work in it. When I reformatted the thesis up so that it would fit the standards of a journal, I still ended up getting a pretty high match...to my own work (the thesis). I ended up rewording as much of the paper as I could, but I couldn't get the %match below whatever the threshold was. Eventually my adviser said "ok, that's good enough" because he could see that I was being accused of plagiarism against myself.

I wish more smart devices offered a “run it locally on a Pi if you’re paranoid or a control freak.”

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the "smart device" (from the manufacturer's point of view)? The business model often seems to be locking you in to a subscription (rent seeking) or selling your personal information (surveillance capitalism).

I don't "just accept" that I'm going to die

But you are going to die. This[1] is a very thorough walkthrough. Wanting to live longer than your parents is one thing, but "forever" is a long time. I'd go as far as to say that if you think you can live forever, you don't understand forever.

no justice in the universe.

Justice is an idea created by humans.

Wanting to improve yourself and the world around you is a central human trait imo, but there are some things we will never completely fix. One of them is death.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1dn43v/i_rema...

I feel like the author has a weird conception of what capitalism (and socialism) is. They seem to conflate market economies with capitalism, when capitalism is just a mode of economic production where the means of production are owned by people other than those who operate them. It's an economic system where you have a Capital - Wages - Profit cycle.

is some sort of socialism, where the government introduces new laws and systems to redirect money to attempt to balance the system manually

"The government doing things" is not socialism. Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned (usually by the people who operate the means of production). What the author is talking about here is "welfare statism" [1], and IMO UBI is just welfare statism taken to an extreme.

That being said, I'd definitely agree that UBI (under a capitalist state) is a way to keep capitalism ticking along.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state