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I wish would stop using "journalist" and "reporter" interchangeably.

Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.

Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.

I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.

PaulDavisThe1ston Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

yay for rural new mexico ...

PaulDavisThe1ston Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

For between 5000 and 25000 years (at least), humans have used storytelling to preserve, develop and disseminate their culture(s).

If you want to critique the stories and the storytelling of TNG or whatever else, please do so - there's plenty to get into. But "still a work of fiction" is not a critique worthy of anyone's time.

PaulDavisThe1ston Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

> I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power".

No Shakespeare for you then!

PaulDavisThe1ston Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

Ah yes, the famous Shakers of Sabbathday Lake who were eventually seen in jackboots marching across New England.

PaulDavisThe1ston Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

Because Data isn't obviously the result of corporations seeking to get very, very, very rich along with VCs seeking to do the same, and both not really caring much about the collateral damage to everybody else along the way.

Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.

PaulDavisThe1ston Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

Where do you prefer to look instead?

PaulDavisThe1ston Turning a solar power system into its own backup

There's actually no mention of the technology used by the turbines. This article is about how you heat up a heat storage facility that is then used (somehow) to drive turbines. Might be water, might not be.

PaulDavisThe1ston Turning a solar power system into its own backup

Not quite right.

The 1000 degree air is not used directly to drive turbines, but instead to deliver heat to a heat storage unit via a heat exchanger. The solar-heated air, after flowing through the heat exchanger, is still around 250 degrees and the article mentions some possible uses of that heated air (again, not generation).

Generation occurs using heat coming from the heat storage unit, not using the solar-heated hot air. Since the heat storage unit can also be fed by hot air heated via other means, this makes the heat storage unit "source neutral" - it can be heated by solar or fossil fuel combustion (or whatever).

The turbines are "downstream" of the heat storage unit.

PaulDavisThe1ston Turning a solar power system into its own backup

Not quite. It's a solar thermal (heat generator) that feeds a heat storage facility via an air-flow heat exchanger. That exchanger can alternatively be fed hot air generated using any other technology, including burning fossil fuels.

So, the heat storage facility is "source neutral". In addition, precisely how the stored heat is used "downstream" is also not a central part of the design, but turbines etc. are a likely option.

PaulDavisThe1ston Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

October 30th/31st ... how are you doing?

PaulDavisThe1ston Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health

Alternate take: people are so afraid to be themselves that it has become easy to ideologically divide us.

PaulDavisThe1ston Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health

You've read it wrong .. "they're NOT more unhappy without them"

PaulDavisThe1ston Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health

Isn't it the inverse? i.e we think it is bad for students to have phones in schools, but it might be a problem for the students if we ban them, so let's do the test ... yep, no problem for the students, so let's definitely ban them for educational reasons?

PaulDavisThe1ston Proton goes all in on using AI

That might have been an excuse in 1992. It's not an excuse in 2026. The geeks won. We are the cool guys (or were, until the fucking geek CEOs went insane).

PaulDavisThe1ston The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

Isn't that more or less precisely what I said?

PaulDavisThe1ston How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)

S2 was reasonably OK, IMO. But that was it. And all their talk of having a fantastic entire story laid out right from the start? I don't believe a word of it. There's no way they had thought up Rehobaum or whatever it was called back when they started work on S1.

PaulDavisThe1ston The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

I've read that globally almost all the places that can do pumped hydro "storage" already exist. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then while this is a really cool technology, we won't be getting much further with it.

PaulDavisThe1ston What we know so far about Spain train crash

I'm a volunteer firefighter in rural NM. We have a commercial property close to us that repeatedly has false alarms on its fire alarm/smoke detection system, to the point where even the best of us are suffering from "the boy who cried wolf" feelings.

Because of this, I discovered that (apparently) NY Fire Department charges $5000 per false call on an alarm system directly connected to the dispatch system.

Somethng to think about.

PaulDavisThe1ston CNC Stone Carving

When it comes to subjectivity, I am not a majoritarian. I would go even further: I do not care what the majority thinks. Furthermore, I think this is a vital element of a free and vibrant society.

PaulDavisThe1ston Emacs Turns 50

What a deeply strange article. It starts out deep in the details of Emacs' origins, then suddenly gives up, fast forwards and ends with a whimper.

ps. My first sight of the author was in a basement lab at the Weizmann Institute in 1986, sitting cross-legged on a chair working in front of the then-wondrous brand new Sun workstations - the so-called "3M standard" (1MB of RAM, 1MHz CPU, 1M pixels). Good times but old times!

PaulDavisThe1ston CNC Stone Carving

> the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations

do you know that (a) the designers of those cathedrals actually thought that? (b) the the people who built those cathedreals actually thought that?

PaulDavisThe1ston CNC Stone Carving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_National_Cathedral

Started in 1907, finished in 1990. I don't love it as much as Sagrada Familia, but it is a pretty bona fide classic cathedral.

PaulDavisThe1ston CNC Stone Carving

I like this general hypothesis, but dislike this formulation:

> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.

I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.

I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...

PaulDavisThe1ston Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

I did not interpret "power sources" as singular in your original remark:

> The demands to remove power sources come from the left.

PaulDavisThe1ston Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

You were using the example of "left" opposition to nuclear power as a complete or partial refutation to my point that there really is no or very little "left" opposition to power technology.

PaulDavisThe1ston Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

The very decidely non-communist SunZia wind project in SE New Mexico (not too from where I live, and the largest wind generation system in the world at this point) came with a 1600km new grid line connecting it to California (though it is a part of the overall western grid too, and electricity is fungible).

PaulDavisThe1ston Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

Opposition to specific power technologies is not opposition to power technologies. How difficult is this to grasp?

PaulDavisThe1ston Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers

I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:

> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

PaulDavisThe1ston Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

The current US administration has forcibly shutdown solar, onshore and offshore wind projects. Explicitly, intentionally.

A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.