1dom

Thanks, I really appreciated this comment, a lot to think about!

> Some company is going to create a gray-market "high voltage -> top N home battery systems" dongle that you can just wire into the battery pack on your car.

I agree. I've been thinking of trying to build a similar but more generically, a "240v in dongle" which would just be a bench PSU with phase synching and islanding config (e.g. allow power if islanding is handled at home level, or operate grid tied and cut off if not). This would allow any device with a standard 240v AC output to safely power a home, so this would include basically any EV (as most have V2L) as well as a lot of other generators, UPS batteries etc. I thought the phase synching/grid tying stuff was really hard or complex or expensive to do, but the recent boom in balcony solar shows it's totally feasible to make and distribute hardware that apparently safely does this for less than a couple hundered.

This issue is regs. Tbf, I think in the UK, it just needs someone with money and confidence to do it fast and safe enough that the obvious immediate benefits force a law change. The balcony solar regs changes this year really showed how needlessly behind our grid regs are. Now is the time to do it too, with big scares around energy costs and WW3, this would gel well with the push for EVs.

> Leave the car ignition on, and it runs the gas engine for a few minutes an hour indefinitely because it sees the drain and thinks you are driving it.

Oh wow, I hadn't even thought of that! I'd only ever considered pure EVs. Feels like hybrids have a lot to go wrong, but this is a really interesting use case that I could justify a hybrid to entertain.

> Most modern EV's support this sort of thing officially, but they're hardwired to one brand of house battery.

I haven't seen this much though - most cars I've seen that mention v2g or v2h mention the generic standards around it, rather than any specific manufacturers. The "hardwired to one brand" tend to be hardwired to the brands that have said they support the standards (OCPP, ISO 15118 etc.), at least in the UK.

> I have an islanding system for my (house) battery and solar, so in theory, I could have a bidirectional charger whilst being off grid. However both my car and charger don't support that (my charger is also deeply shit, and has no local API access

...

> The amount of sysadminig to make that work reliably means that no normal person is able to achieve it. The problem for consumers is that there isn't any motivation for manufactures to work together on this. because they want to vertically integrate.

We are in a very similar position. The issue is every company in this area is like you say: deeply shit with limited local API access. Setting up bidirectional charging in the UK is technically, really not that hard, especially with islanding handled at the household level.

Good luck trying to get someone willing to put their career and certifications on the line to actually do it though.

Part of the challenge is finding an electrician willing to work like a sysadmin and do things because they know how they work, rather than only doing things they've explicitly been taught as in line with (dated) regulations.

This entire area is a mess, I spent a year or so trying to get bidirectional charging set up at home in the UK. I even went to several of the vendors mentioned in that post and said "I've got basically a blank cheque and permission to do whatever you want however you want, even use it all as a case study to make this work" and nowhere could/would do it.

The most frustrating thing is it looks like V2G is easier and more accessible than V2H[1]: it's easier to give control of your battery to your energy provider and bypass your house to help the energy companies than it is just to power your own home with your own car battery.

Technically, this is ridiculous. You don't bypass your house when you do V2G.

My tinfoil hat is clearly making me too cynical when I say this, but I think it's this way because of the relationship between energy providers and law makers. These are the same energy providers that use "changes in wholesale pricing" to justify increasing how much they sell me electricity for, whilst reducing the amount they pay me for the solar electricity I sell them.

[1] https://octopus.energy/power-pack/

Local LLMs are pretty powerful and useful for me personally, and the best compute I have locally is a an RTX2060. I certainly have no paid AI subscriptions.

Obviously depends what you're doing, and not suitable for everyone, but it's an unhelpful generalisation to say AI in its current form is purely a paid product subscription.

That's not was I was asking for at all. I just said that a non-paywalled link should be posted.

I think the leap you've made here makes you look like a lunatic.

This is public news. There should be free resources available. They should be the resources published here.

Nobody's saying journalists shouldn't be paid. But that doesn't mean all public access to public news should be paywalled.

Exceptionally succinct and thought provoking. Well done.

Sorry, I can't think of a single plaintext editors, even going back to things like vi and ed, which don't support find and replace.

Markdown was designed for plaintext editors. Plaintext editors are - by the definition of markdown - a right tool for the job of markdown.

I don't have anything else to add here.

I agree. I feel if github was owned/run by people passionate about code and open source software, no code repos be banned, if not just because it's consuming resources contrary to the mission.

It is owned/run by Microsoft. The mission is the big tech mission: usage of any kind regardless of the impact on anything else, and profit.

Markdown was explicitly designed to be a lightweight markup language for formatting text in a plaintext editor.

You will not get any joy reading/editing non-primitive things in a markdown language not designed for reading/editing non-primitive things.

You will get joy from using the right tool for the right task.

Exactly, you just confirmed how complicated, complex and varied markdown rendering is, which is exactly why it should be left to markdown applications.

The OS should be able to natively open plaintext. The joy of markdown is it still largely works in plaintext.

Markdown is a plaintext format, that's what makes it great and got it adoption, it works without formatting! Rendering markdown is a nice to have, a luxury that gets very complex very quickly when done properly. If you want it, install a an application that does markdown rendering, I use Obsidian.

The fact that a file can't be opened as plaintext in a plaintext editor is not a problem with Markdown, it's an OS problem that effects any file you'd want to open as plaintext.

The algorithm is cheap and simple. A human brain requires decades of experience and information to train it to be generally useful. An AI model requires a similar equivalent scale of information and time to train it to be generally useful, and that isn't cheap to gather or implement.

Sure, once trained, every usage technically lowers the cost per usage. Once trained...

They weren't out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs, they were out-competed by massive piles of cash and compute that were only available to unscrupulous businesses.

> I don't think a system maximizing enjoyment would be any better.

That's why I mentioned autonomy too. People like working and being valuable and choosing to add value. The issue is the current economic system doesn't consider things valuable if they don't directly generate a lot of money or profit for a business. An individual developer gets a lot of value from having a job they enjoy where they produce useful code that solves problems. AI removes some of that value for the individual developer whilst promising more profit and value for the business.

> Why would anyone choose to work with sewage? Or why would most developers choose to align with rest of the team or with user needs, when programming is most enjoyable?

Why do people choose to work with sewage now? They're not paid a lot. Programming is most enjoyable when it's useful. Writing code which is going to get thrown out because it doesn't align with your team is not valuable or fun, so why you or any other individual developer choose to do that given the choice?

I disagree that what you're describing isn't just another angle of "broken economic system".

The broken economic system is the lack of perceived individual choice, and the priority of business decisions and business profit over individual satisfaction or autonomy.

If we lived in an economic system where maximising individual enjoyment and autonomy was priority, we could give AI to individuals to do with what they want. No sensible human/border collie would choose to give away the fun sheep herding part of their job if there weren't other forces and incentives at work.

But instead, AI is sold to businesses to profit, rather than given to individuals to do the right thing for everyone.

Sorry, I meant general-lone-focus-on-a-screen-during-school-time, in contrast to engaging with what's going on in real life in the classroom (e.g. listening to teacher teach, or interacting with other students etc.)

> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.

In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.

Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.

> The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable... Most of these kids will not be athletes.

The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.

Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.

I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.

Lost fingers don't heal. A lot of the mouth still heals.

Saliva doesn't produce acid directly, but it combines with other things to contribute to the environment that produces the acid. I couldn't find the exact study, but a fair few studies founds links between genes, saliva, bacteria and cavity rates.

Look, I didn't suggest dental care is unnecessary. Quite the opposite: brush your teeth folks, and if you're lucky like many other people, you won't have to go to the dentist and won't suffer debilitating consequences. Treat it like a finger: look after it, clean it, don't hurt it, but you don't need to waste time and money on a yearly checkup of it (unless you've got a good reason to).

The way I see it, your teeth are just a particularly heavily used part of the body, like fingers. A good portion of people go their entire life without having any issues at all with their fingers.

Think about how you feel about dentists, and how everyone else talks and acts about teeth and dentists. Now swap teeth with fingers, and dentist with finger doctor.

"Shame on you, you haven't had your annual finger checkup? Doesn't matter if they feel fine, finger doctors can see issues before they arise and give you painful expensive treatments to prevent issues you didn't have and didn't know you were going to have."

FWIW, I read a study a long long time ago that talked about some people have a rare genetic mutation which means their saliva doesn't produce the acid that leads to cavities. I'm in my mid 30s, haven't been to the dentist in nearly a decade, never had a cavity or toothache or any mouth discomfort (apart from after I'd been to the dentist).

I'm not sure I understand the use-case or target audience for this. Selfhosted on cloudflare is a great oxymoron though.

In the context of software, I think "how old is old" depends on how web based the software has been over its lifetime.

I think 8 years is old for software that has heavily Web based like Deno. But Windows and Emacs have had portions of their lifetime without the Web in a meaningful way, so 8 years would be young.

You really can't see anything positive in celebrating achieving stuff with someone you love, just because AI is partially involved?

I dunno, that feels like an unproductively strong disdain towards AI. But like you said, people really are different, I guess!

edit: I realise I'm assuming AI is the issue here, maybe it's not?

We should just throw in the towel now then, I guess.

I don't disagree with you, but now what? Seriously - if we accept humans are just generally losing to AI now, what's the right thing for us to do now?

I dunno. Lobotomy? Heroic amounts of debauchery?

Any suggestions?

I agree. There's definitely value in it.

But I think you put it well that the problem is making it all accompanying. e.g.

> Something that people learn quickly when they work with me is that my approach to pretty much every problem is:

The overall sentiment is good, positive and actionable (think, do informed things intentionally, understand things well) but I feel like the tone tries to make it all accompanying and somewhat unquestionable, which is confusing for an article titled "I am often wrong" that ends with "I am open to changing it".

> They beat a lack of them, for me.

I generally agree, but I feel like there's a midground where we acknowledge positive, productive motivation, whilst also acknowledging that it is not how normal humans go around talking about their normal day to day activities. I feel I only see this stuff in environments where people are expected to be pushed to the point of being uncomfortable, and to be okay with it. There's a time and a place for that. I think it's not always sustainable, but that's not always understood/believed by younger engineers/younger me (and younger you?)

I think without that nuance, things like this will always be criticised/torn apart by people not currently in that kinda zone.

This post has the same vibe as the best/worst of modern tech leadership principals. I feel these things are like a rorschach test for an individuals current position corporate psychopathy scale.

There are times in my life where I'd have read these, been really deeply impacted by them, and picked up a new mantra or 2 for a few weeks. It's like "Get a plan, execute it violently, do it today".

If you're in a time and place where you're motivated to "move fast and break things", I think you'll nod along with Boris' post.

But it's so general and high level, the only meaning you get from it depends entirely on your own personal attitude and examples that you throw at it.

The obvious pro angle is: "yeah, understand stuff well, biased for action, act urgently, yeah!" and competent, motivated, currently-in-the-zone people will spring into action. (But they would have done anyway, because they're already motivated and in the zone).

The obvious against angle is "uuuh, last week you said we needed to be goal oriented, and now you're telling us to go and learn a bunch before we even know why/what we're learning? And I've learnt a bunch of stuff, but you're telling me it's not right because it doesn't fit within this framework you just invented that you're now telling me I absolutely have to follow and you're my manager so I have no choice?"

I'm not totally hating on this, there's a time and a place for it and I've found it very motivating at times where I was already thoroughly motivated, but I think it's also useful to recognise that it comes across as self-serving platitudes for a lot of people who aren't already in that kinda zone.

If you can't state your point clearly, I'm not going to spend time trying to figure it out for you, sorry.

I think the negative impact lots of humans regularly experience from Google's approach to business is far more than the benefit of the very, very specific learning that "this idea doesn't make enough money for Google the way Google did it".

Sorry, I don't understand your point.

Can you state what actual point you're trying to make, rather than just picking each of my sentences and saying you're not so sure or you disagree? I could do the same to you, but it's just a waste of time if we're not trying to actually come to a conclusion together.

My hypothesis is that I suspect there's a MAD type situation where technically - by the letter of the law - all the big tech companies bragging about x% of their code being LLM generated are basically admitting to breaching copyright laws. But if one well funded tech company successfully prosecutes that and sets a precedence, then all big tech is going to have to wind back all the LLM code its put in production in the past few years to prevent litigation, which is probably unworkable, hence MAD.

I was looking to disprove my own hypothesis by asking for court cases prosecuting this. I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you.

(FWIW, I was repeatedly taught by various legal scholars at various levels of education that a criminal is someone who has been found by a court to be guilty of committing an act that violates criminal law. Up until that point, they're usually just a suspect or similar. Not debating, just highlighting that your definition of criminal doesn't negate or disprove any point I'm making. Same for your definition of illegal.)