nnf

I noticed users in the United States can't sign up. ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18. Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow uptake.

I've got a similarly sized ground-mount array, and I push the snow off with a triple-telescoping aluminum pole with a large squeegee on the end. An actual snow rake might be better, like the one you describe, but my setup gets it done. It takes some effort, but it's worth it to be able to collect the solar energy that would otherwise just reflect off the snow for days.

Privacy Badger has three modes for each host (other than the origin) from which content is loaded on a page: Allow, Block Cookies, and Block Entirely. This lets you load things like Google fonts without allowing tracking cookies to be set. Yes, Google still sees your IP and user agent and can do some tracking that way, but they can't add a tracking cookie (at least once Privacy Badger sees them trying to), and you have the option to block Google Fonts (and whatever else) entirely if you want.

For the same reason dealing in counterfeit money matters — just because I can't tell it's fake doesn't mean the person I try to pay won't know or care. If your reputation is your currency, you don't want to damage it by promoting artwork that other people know is AI generated, so it's likely better to play it safe.

I have this problem with my Logitech mice too. They work great for two or three years, and then they start registering about one in every 50 clicks or so as double clicks, with the frequency slowly increasing to maybe 1 in 10.

We also ensured that these links remain invisible to human visitors through carefully implemented attributes and styling.

Additionally, I wonder how this works on sites with a Content Security Policy that disallows inline styles and style tags and stylesheets without a nonce.

I suppose if Cloudflare is proxying your site, they could get the nonce from the content-security-policy header and use that, but hopefully that would be an opt-in-only behavior.

because the parents were too stupid

This sums up all of the school pickup problems I see and/or deal with daily.

I also see many parents making dangerous decisions, most of which fit into the “I’ll go now” category, including accelerating quickly to get to the crosswalk before the kids crossing the street do. Just this school year, I’ve seen multiple near misses, with kids jumping back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a parent who just picked up their own kid.

I can't pass by this comment about Network Solutions without an enthusiastic second. Several times per month I help various customers with their domains, and when I see that one is with Network Solutions, I know I'm going to have to waste a bunch of time with their terrible DNS editor and will have to wait around for at least 20 minutes before their own editor reflects the changes I've made.

The worst part is that when replacing an A record with a CNAME, it lets you delete the A record but then blocks you from adding the CNAME, because "a record with that name already exists" (referring to the one that was just deleted). This is where the 20+ minute wait changes from "inconvenient" to "downtime". It's been like this for at least 15 years.

The flip side can also be true, where the replacement cost of a home is higher than its market value. Always be sure to insure your home for at least the replacement cost.

I’ll second the Bobiverse series, one of my favorites. Its descriptions of new technologies is at just the right level and depth, I think, and it’s subtly hilarious.

Useful link to the JetBrains blog from the Reddit discussion: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...

From that blog post (2022):

In addition to terminating all sales, all of our offices in Russia, including Moscow, Novosibirsk, and St. Petersburg were shut down. Work on the new campus in St. Petersburg was also terminated. All R&D activities were gradually stopped and liquidation papers for our Russian legal entity were filed in August 2022.

I got an Ember mug and use it every day and love it. It keeps my coffee at a set temperature (controllable via my phone over Bluetooth) so it doesn't get cold right away, and I can take my time drinking it. I've bought a couple more as gifts since, and the people I gave them to say they like them a lot. The impact on my life isn't anything to get excited about, but it's been positive nonetheless. I don't feel rushed when I drink my coffee anymore, and I'm able to concentrate on my work without that nagging "my coffee is getting cold" feeling.

I have solar panels and battery storage and have been very happy with them, but there are two aspects (in the area of the U.S. where I live) that made obtaining panels a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Around here, it's extremely common for homeowner associations to ban solar panels outright ("they're ugly", "nobody wants to look at that", etc.). Additionally, the local power utility has been granted the ability to limit how much solar capacity an individual homeowner can have. I would be more understanding of this second point but for the fact that very nearby, across a state line, solar capacity is not limited even though it's the same utility and the same power grid.

When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs.

By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions.

Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.

One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.

If we're talking about handwritten letters or even typewritten, one would have to have a plan for what they wanted to say and then execute their writing linearly from beginning to end, whereas now we can edit and poke and prod and reword with almost no effort.

This is a neat style, and I was pleased to see that the author included accessible text since the visible text on the page is all in images.

“fail to find” is one of my favorite aspects of Kagi. When I get that message, I know I need to adjust my search terms. In contrast, Google wants to show me something even if there are no good results, but when it’s just junk, that wastes my time.

The electric utility in my area is this bad and worse. I once reported a power outage when the power wasn’t actually out (explanation follows) and they had no way for me to cancel the report when I realized everything was fine. I tried calling but couldn’t get past an automated “we received your report and are working on it” message.

(Why would I report an outage when the power wasn’t out? Our lights blipped and my whole-home battery backup system kicked into action and showed a “grid outage” message. I checked it a few minutes later and it still showed the same status, so wanting to be a helpful neighbor, I reported it. I found out later that the battery backup system stays off-grid for five minutes following an outage of any length, even just a blip, I think as a debounce protection. When the utility trucks showed up, I told them what had happened and that their system wouldn’t let me cancel the report, but they were just glad to have a break from running around dealing with outages nearby, so they stayed and talked for a few minutes, curious about the battery system. Nice guys.)

The Atlantic seems to have no problem linking to multiple outside sources in seemingly every article I read.

I've long wished for built-in browser functionality that converts times to the user's preferred time zone, with perhaps a dotted outline indicating that a change was made by the browser to the page.

I remember reading once that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, it's almost certainly the first time any deck of cards has ever been in that configuration. Seeing how outrageously large 52! is puts this into perspective.

I've wanted to implement this on a distributed web server environment I manage. Right now there's a centralized MySQL database that the web servers read from when rendering a web page, but there can be lots of queries for a single render (page, sections, snippets, attributes, assets, etc.), and sending that all over the wire, while fast, is slower than reading from a database running on the same host. It'd be great to be able to copy the "master" database onto each web server instance, maybe once per minute, or just on-demand when a change to the data is made. I imagine this would make reads much faster.

GP's comment is talking about checking multiple feature flags, not checking a single feature flag multiple times.

For me, it's Sandlot. Relatively small part, but it was impactful for me as a kid.

There’s a lot of stuff in the photon’s path “out”. from NASA[0]:

Once a photon of light is born, it travels at a speed of 300,000 km/sec until it collides with a charged particle and is diverted in another direction. Because the density of the sun decreases by tens of thousands of times from its lead-dense core to its tenuous photosphere, the typical distance a photon can travel between charged particles changes from 0.01 cm at the core to 0.3 cm near the surface.

[0] https://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2007/locations/ttt_sunlight.php

Thinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates me. I read (or listened to, rather) The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is" the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many faces over the ages.

tax the land of lot developers so they don’t hold land off the market.

This is something I dealt with a few years ago. There were a few acreage lots (5-15 acres) my partner and I were considering buying and building a house on, and all of them had been in the $200k range a year or two before but had been bought by land speculators (in some cases by the same person). Prices went from ~$200k to ~$750k, which we weren't interested in.

Most of them sold. One of the larger lots was around $350k and is still for sale, now for almost $2 million.

I don't think developers should be forced to sell land just because I want to buy it, but the taxes they pay on their empty lots is extremely low. I checked on a couple of the ~$750k lots, and the taxes were something like $115 per year. At that rate, it costs the developer/speculator basically nothing to hold onto it while prices rise.

If lots like this were taxed at, say, 20x the current rate for lots that are near areas that are being built up and are ready to be bought, then there would be a stronger incentive for the owners to sell to people who are ready to build and start paying property taxes. It seems like such an increase would benefit everyone except the speculators.

I’m not sure what you mean about the UI, but I pay for YouTube Premium exclusively so I don’t have to see ads, and for that purpose alone, to me it’s worth it.

I read a lot on https://www.regular-expressions.info and experimented on https://rubular.com since I was also learning Ruby at the time. https://regexr.com is another good tool that breaks down your regex and matches.

One of the things I remember being difficult at the beginning was the subtle differences between implementations, like `^` meaning "beginning of line" in Ruby (and others) but meaning "beginning of string" in JavaScript (and others).

If you're just starting out, it'd be helpful to read about how a regex engine evaluates an expression against a string so that you can understand the "order of operations" and how repeating elements are matched.

I would much rather wait a few hundred milliseconds for a video to start during the few times I decide to watch an embedded video than to wait for the full video player to load every single time I visit a page with an embedded video that I'm never going to watch. Similarly, I would much rather have every stoplight I approach be green for me rather than having every light be red but for not very long.