andor

It has the ring of “load-bearing” and “belts and suspenders”, but in this case, it really is a one-dimensional bin packing problem.

It's true that this is happening a lot. And I think this is one of the reasons why ethicists still want to get involved in these companies: it should be easier to make a company do the right thing from the inside, why else would they hire for these positions? They join with idealism and probably don't get very far in terms of real impact.

Companies are not bound to sociopathically pursue profit. It would be in their long-term interest to care about stakeholders outside the boardroom, and until a certain person with tiny hands started a war on anything remotely "woke", the market rewarded ESG metrics.

Nobody suggests moving to 100% solar. Some off-grid homes do it, but generally there are multiple complementary power sources available. There is no assumption that any single power source always provides consistent output and it wouldn't make sense, because production needs to match consumption, which is variable.

There is also no default price on energy markets, it fluctuates with supply and demand. Dynamic pricing by itself is enough of a reason for industrial users to build up their own power storage, which allows them to time-shift consumption from the grid.

Time-shifting is definitely going to increase, but it's not a bad thing. Look at how battery storage has made electricity cheaper and more reliable in California.

The "subsidy" (Einspeisevergütung) is a fixed price paid for power sold to electricity providers, for those who don't want the complexity of taking part in the energy market. It was supposed to accelerate the transition to renewable electricity production by making financing more predictable.

And it worked very well, as it started the global solar boom. Because it's not necessary anymore as an incentive, it's slowly getting phased out.

The Einspeisevergütung is not the reason why consumer electricity is expensive in Germany, though. That's more related to our grid.

The market rate is the expected compensation in a certain market, usually based on location, and it's a range rather than a single value. If it was the highest compensation, everyone except a single employer would pay below market rate. What you're referring to is "top of market".

Governments print money, high frequency traders extract money. They would say that they provide liquidity to the market as a service.

Very few things are purely technical decisions. In this case, it’s about centralized vs. distributed electricity generation (or freedom vs. dependence if you want to state it that way). One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.

Edit: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals, from your dinner table and your company Slack to democratic institutions.

Pasta is actually a relatively low GI food, due to long starch chains. Like fiber, some of the (resistant) starch acts as food for the microbiome of the gut. There’s a theory that eating lots of resistant starch has similar benefits to high-fiber diets.

The LLM does not prove anything (it cannot reason). It generates Lean code, and conveniently, in Lean, the code is also the proof. It’s not merely a model of the stated system, it is the system.

You still need to verify that the generated code is what you asked for, though.

Even if you reduce it to that, you still endorse (or at least accept) the side effects of the production of what you eat.

If you eat meat, you are okay with the effects it has on climate change, and that’s political. If you do the opposite and don’t eat meat, that’s also political.

If you consume food from non-organic agriculture, you are okay with species extinction, especially insects.

If you buy the cheapest foods, you are okay with the working conditions and low pay necessary to reach the price. If you buy a more expensive option, who in the value chain benefits from the increased price and who doesn’t?

Almost everything that you do is political in some way.

VPNs are generic networking/security tools that can also be used for things like circumventing geoblocking.

Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.

> No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.

What do you eat and what do you refuse to eat? Which restaurants would you go to or not? Which companies do you buy from and why/why not?

Who do you meet with and who do you avoid? What do you talk about and which topics do you avoid?

Where is your cocoa grown, which brand do you buy and who ends up making money on your purchase?

It’s probably pointless to argue, but there was never a lot of nuclear power in Germany to begin with. This is just turning energy policy into culture war.

In practice, repairs affect the water resistance, and Apple Store employees will confirm that to you. They just don't want to say so in the product description as it would raise doubts.

Comparable or not, the Fairphone 6 costs less than half of my iPhone. I don't think the price is an issue.

Low friction is cool but it leads to tons of abuse

In a way, that's true. Drinking a lot of juice, or soft drinks, is not ideal, and when I see an overweight person drinking straight from a large juice bottle, that reaffirms my belief. It would be socially unacceptable to judge this behavior as being caused by cognitive deficits, but you could argue that such people are acting against their own interests (which is a very human thing to do, we're not machines).

The case of watching a lot of TV is a bit different though because it's about attention. Time is limited and it makes a difference whether I do something intellectually stimulating or not. If I spend 8 hours per day creating things, writing software, learning languages, etc., that is going to develop my brain in a different way than 8 hours of watching TV does.

Now to the point about the bad look: even if the study could not prove a causal relationship, why would you even risk it? There is little to gain from watching lots of TV and you'll end up healthier and happier by prioritizing other things.

Laypeople are changing how “AI” is used in common language, like they previously did for “algorithm” and “crypto”.

The textbook definition of AI is a system that solves problems that are difficult for humans. Whether the approach uses formal logic, machine learning, neural networks as a special case of machine learning, optimization, search problems, etc. does not matter.

So you’re saying that it’s naive to expect a company to care whether they are facilitating a genocide in one of their growth markets?

You must be fun to work with

Her book is exceptional. You won’t get these insights anywhere else and it’s surprisingly entertaining.

They live in a bubble and don’t understand that getting rid of jobs is not universally seen as a good thing.

If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.

Since he spent Euros, he must be somewhere on the EU. This is a GDPR violation and I bet he can reach actual people that are able to help by mailing their GDPR legal contact.

What are you using instead of Homebrew?

The "doing things correctly" mentality is the root of so many problems. Bureaucracy, "German engineering" (overengineering), cargo-culting, CYA, error culture, ...

By the logic of the article, a circuit breaker for the DB query would act as a fallback for the fallback. A path that would be executed in production even less frequently, and which would be more difficult to test for its effectiveness. Surely, you can test whether the circuit breaker is triggered, but would it reduce DB load enough to keep the fulfillment system running?

Look at his other tweets, he seems to be a sociopathic extremist

Eye roll. The UN are pointing out that the AI hype is literally burning the planet. Just because they have Google Analytics on their site doesn't mean they are participating in the destruction.

This is like calling out environmentalists that took a flight.

But you’re not carrying around your own water treatment mechanism either (unless you’re out hiking). It is relatively easy to install air purifiers or UVC lights in offices, schools, grocery stores, etc. The problem is that people don’t care enough about air quality and the ROI isn’t clear. Increasing the ventilation rate in an overstuffed co-working space has cost implications for the operator, but it doesn’t increase revenue.

Europe is not a country or a single place. In central Spain, where 40 ºC is more likely, you'll find more air conditioning than in the UK, where people think that 25 ºC is hot.