olau

You start with the queen. Everyone knows who she is.

Probably only few. Nuclear attracts dreamers. But would they pay the price, literally? Cost is the real reason nuclear is dying.

Can I recommend playing Bach?

The specialization goes both ways, though, I'm much better playing Alberti bass with my left hand compared to the right.

Diamonds? You can use them in a drill bit.

No, you need to match the demand curve at all times.

Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.

You just write "spent two years raising my youngest kid [building tree houses and whatnot]". If you keep a bit up with tech, why would anyone think twice about that? They wouldn't where I live.

Yes.

Some years ago we ported some code from querying out the data and tallying in Python (how many are in each bucket) to using SQL to do that. It didn't speed up the execution. I was surprised by that, but I guess the Postgres interpreter is roughly the same speed as Python, which when you think about it perhaps isn't that surprising.

But Python is truly general purpose while the core query stuff in SQL is really specialized (we were not using stored procedures). So if Pypy can get 5x speedup, it seems to me that it should be possible to get the same kind of speed up in Postgres. I guess it needs funding and someone as smart as the Pypy people.

The suggestion was not to use an LLM to compile the expression, but to use an LLM to build the compiler.

Not sure, but I solved a similar problem many years ago, and ended up concluding it was silly to send all the data to the client when the client didn't have the visual resolution to show it anyway. So I sampled it adaptively client-side by precomputing and storing multiple zoom-levels. That way the client-side chart app would get the points and you could zoom in, but you'd only ever retrieve about 1000-2000 points at the time.

Original Flot maintainer here.

I once had to deal with many million data points for an application. I ended up mip-mapping them client-side.

But regarding sampling, if it's a line chart, you can sample adaptively by checking whether the next point makes a meaningfully visible difference measured in pixels compared to its neighbours. When you tune it correctly, you can drop most points without the difference being noticeable.

I didn't find any else doing that at the time, and some people seemed to have trouble accepting it as a viable solution, but if you think about it, it doesn't actually make sense to plot say 1 million points in a line chart 1000 pixels wide. On average that would make 1000 points per pixel.

The ones about Calvin having an awful day due to what's demanded of him are honestly heartbreaking.

Yes. DJGPP and Allegro was a great help, and a big step up from the old Borland Turbo Pascal I started out with. I remember trying to rotate an image pixel by pixel in Pascal. Allegro simply had a function to do it. And yes, the mailing list was great - Shawn Hargreaves and the couple of people in the inner circle (I seem to remember someone called George) were simply awesome, helpful people.

I eventually installed Red Hat, started at university and lost most of my free time to study projects.

Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.

One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.

I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.

Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.

I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.

Prepper store is potentially misleading, it's shops that are prepared to respond to a crisis for those that didn't prep.

Greenland can become independent if they wish. There would be some things to work out, but the legal framework has been in place since the 1970es. And they seem to be working towards the goal.

The reason it hasn't happened yet is that they'd either have to increase tax income greatly, or reduce public spending greatly with financial support from Denmark. As I gather, infrastructure up there is really expensive.

Yeah, the only dumb thing about the digital mail is that they're not just using email with an official registry.

They could have started some kind of certification thing for email providers and even funded a couple of certified email providers much more effectively than the digital post monstrosity.

That would have been awesome and forward looking, and perhaps even helped ordinary people get better security for their personal emails.

Perhaps we'll get there some day.

I enjoyed reading most of that.

One thing to watch out for with immutability is that if you're dealing with personal information about people, immutability is probably illegal. You must be able to forget information, and not just simulate you've forgotten it.

I don't how universal this is at the moment, but I think it's likely to be more universal in the future.

The UK used to have very high subsidies for offshore wind for some reason. The last I've heard, subsidies for new plants are much lower today.

As for being cost effective, onshore wind is probably the cheapest option, and I think it's hoped that offshore will come close to that once more of the learning curve has been traversed. Perhaps fossil gas from the North sea is still cheaper for now, if you ignore the external cost.

I think solar power is even cheaper, but doesn't deliver much in the winter so far up north.

Backup: Batteries are cost effective for short term shortages. For long term shortages, you'd fire up thermal plants, either biomass or biogas (fossil gas for now).

It doesn't make sense to back up wind with nuclear. Nuclear has a high capital cost and relatively low running costs, so you don't save much from being standby but you still need to pay back the loans.

This is false. Take a look at Denmark. This argument was repeated there in the past for "above X", with X being 15%, 20%, 30%, 50%.

I think the problem is that then you need two energy harvesting systems, and there's not just that much to eat nearby.

I guess to effectively live a long life by eating other stuff, you need to be able to move, or what you eat need to be able to move to you.

I was taught something of the same.

But I think it was misguided. I'll note that 1/3 is not a number, it's a calculation. So more complicated.

And fractions are generally much more complicated than the decimal system. Beyond some simple fractions that you're bound to experience in your everyday life, I don't think it makes sense to drill fractions. In the end, when you actually need to know the answer to a computation as a number, you're more likely to make a mistake because you spend your time juggling fractions instead of handling numerical instability.

Decimal notation used to be impractical because calculating with multiple digits was slow and error-prone. But that's no longer the case.

Seeing like a state does not argue against the meter system.

It just explains that many of these things got traction despite the resistance against them only because the state needed them.

In the case of measurement units, one was that the natural units varied in size and could be gamed, which is a big problem for fair tax collection.

I recently bought a second-hand Microsoft Surface tablet, installed Debian and now run GNOME on it. The first time it came up and I logged into a familiar GNOME environment was a profound experience. I was pretty sure what was going to happen, but it still took me by surprise.

So I don't think the convergence idea is necessarily bad. It's perhaps somewhat niche, and it's not easy to pull off.

I almost never use a phone, so for me the major selling point of my tablet is no Android oddities or second-rate citizen vibes. I don't need to wade through an app store to do simple things. I'm not depending on a hardware vendor where support stops a few years down the road. Plugin a keyboard and mouse, and it's just like any other computer with a really small screen. I already have a desktop computer, so it doesn't replace anything, but the familiarity is still nice.

The touch experience is not as polished as Android. It's fine for my purposes, though. I'm mostly using the tablet as a night-time reader for epubs - dark background, light level at minimum, and then it works surprisingly well for when I wake up and need something to do before I can fall asleep again.

When you buy one, they come with the warning to drive around first without cargo. But yeah, you need to take it easy. Safe speed is perhaps 10-12 km/h on a bike path with other bicycles, and you need to slow down to almost a complete stop for 90 degrees turns.

Perhaps I should add to this that they're actually super stable at slow speeds, compared to two-wheelers, especially when loaded. My wife prefers a cargo bike to her usual non-cargo bike, I think for this very reason.

Biology is so complex that extremely little is known about details. Grab a college textbook on introduction to zoology, and prepare to be blown away.

One thing that helped me was reading a book on good political discourse. It basically said what the GP said, that good discourse is about exploring the world. It also pointed out that vilification in its many forms is counterproductive. It undermines trust.

One of the examples used was of a party that I did not agree with - that most people didn't agree with. You'd see mainstream politicians declaring them to be bad people.

But the book pointed out that before this party existed, nobody was representing the people who were now voting for it. If you believe in democracy, how can you be disrespectful of representation?

Suppressing my value judgement also later helped me see that when the party got into a coalition and managed to get some of their politics put into law, some of those laws actually did help the rest of us, because they addressed issues that the other parties were not willing to address.

I have also dealt with EU compliance, and I have never seen the EU act quickly on anything concerning business. It's a slow, bureaucratic institution.

With all due respect, when you are given years to comply, the problem is not that the timeline is impossible, but that your organization chooses to ignore the regulation.

If the same laws had been passed in the US, the company would have complied already.

If you charge the buses over night, then you don't need 100 kW. I think the battery sizes are something like 100-300 kWh. So with 9 hours of charging, you need only perhaps 30 kW at the most.

Anecdotally, the town I live in invested in probably around 100 buses. They did build a new depot with charging stations.

Batteries are coming down in price, so if getting a good grid connection is a problem, you can put in a buffering battery.

The comfort of the BEV buses is much better than the old diesel buses, by the way, and they are much less noisy in the city.

I find it slightly odd that you get hung up on the file format thing. The law as you quoted it says "including but not limited to" and the first example given is then "software".