blackjack_

you have to put at least a little bit of context on asks like if you want a reply. Nobody knows how much water you use, how big of a house / apt, how many bathrooms, etc.

heat pumps just run something similar to a reverse Carnot cycle on their refrigerants and use a condenser coil to release the extra heat to the water. So for all practical purposes it heats the water inside the tank in a pretty similar fashion to how a normal electric water heater works, it just delivers it from a slightly different source and it isn't electric resistive.

So no, not possible. Theoretically you might be able to do it with a stupid enough system of coils and a very ridiculous amount of power, but it wouldn't be efficient or practical.

To some extent ADHD drugs are abused but to us neurodivergent people those stimulants (or in other cases just alpha 2 agonists) just help us do normal things that normal people can do without drugs, like laundry. Or reading a book, or be able to focus on literally anything that isn’t giving us a high level dopamine response.

The meds (both stimulant and non stimulant) help people with ADHD choose where to hyperfocus, but hyperfocus is an internal trait of the ADHD neurotype, so it isn’t just attributable to the drugs or something.

I.e. normal people use stimulants to go fast, while ND people with ADHD use them to go slow or have their brain actually be able to slow down.

Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly

You sweet sweet summer child.

Spoken like a guy who has never had to maintain bare metal infrastructure ops at scale. These things break, need re-imaged, have parts that break, have to be configured (now you need provisioning pipelines, monitoring, alarms, etc), have to be maintained when something goes wrong (swapping hardware and software, debugging the alarms into actually figuring out which bits are broken and/or misconfigured), have to be catalogued, have to be planned for, deprecated, and the finances accounted for through complicated accounting to show investors the Capex at quarterly meetings.

Then you have to make fleet decisions on how much of each type of server you will want to buy, expanded storage, how long you will support each generation of server, when you will order new hardware, how to order new hardware, lag for real world installs, hiring actual humans to fly around to all of your datacenters and do the actual installations / maintainance / etc. Then you will have to do contracts with individual datacenter operators for margins, electricity rates, hosting contracts, white glove ops hourly rates, etc.

Businesses that own their own hardware tend to have a lot of employees whose jobs are maintaining it and running the business side of that.

Fraud that destroys market trust in a market that mostly deals in surveillance and selling intrusive data that was collected mostly unknowingly from the subject seems great to everyone who has any amount of integrity.

Anyone with half a brain can see that destroying the public internet is a very very bad thing. I now have to half assume you are a bad faith argument by a bot.

The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.

Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.

No the Home Screen ads were added in an update 2.5ish years ago. I know this because that is when I decided to disconnect my Roku tv from the internet rather than see ads when I turn my tv on.

I had been a pretty big Roku fan before that point as I had worked with them back in ~2017 and knew how locked down and sewn up they kept customer data, and only shared it in a very anonymized way. Obviously the situation has degraded in the recent years, and caused me to brick the functionality of a very expensive device.

Seems like it’s impossible to have a smart tv now that actually respects privacy, so back to dumb tvs and connections to pcs?

If you are being serious; read the tower for much more context.

I’m interested as to who this is testing.

I see double click coverage, Amazon coverage, and a tiny amount of Facebook, but missing a lot of large players in the adtech space. I don’t see Microsoft being explicitly called here.

Then from the large scale independent companies I see none of them on here? Shouldn’t you try Trade desk, Magnite, Applovin, Criteo, Xandr as well?

Then you would want to check vs data brokers as well; Experian, Equifax, Axciom, Epsilon, LexisNexus, Liveramp, and CoreLogic at minimum.

Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.

This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.

Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.

So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.

Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.

Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.

Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.

It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!

Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.

Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.

However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).

This is a silly take. There is a line of "good enough" for most coding (most CRUD apps and APIs are nothing special), and once we are past that, nobody will care about having the "newest, best" model except extreme outliers. And this base "good enough" model will become an ultra cheap commodity as we already see with GLM, deepseek, etc.

I have 2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill, so it's more like a full acre equivalent of flat ground (except drastically more of a pain). Pulling weeds up several hundred feet of steep hillside that grow back constantly is a punishment worthy of Sisyphus.

It hadn't been done for about 5 years when we moved in, so one of the neighbors spent 200 hours cleaning it up for us. Not joking, 200 hours of labor. Scotch Broom is a literal nightmare.

Yes. And that wealthy individuals are avoiding taxes via things like buy -> borrow -> die, in which high stock valuations that increase but are not sold are not ever taxed, and roll over the taxation potential upon death to their current value. Thus by borrowing against them until death, the inheritor will inherit with a tax basis at the current value upon receipt and thus all taxes are avoided. In which case the tax would go from 0% to 20% (functionally a small amount may be sold to pay interest, so really assume 1% or 2% taxes default). The horror!

Hmm, why would a guy who is best known for spectacularly lying to boost his stock price do a spectacular lie? I do wonder… it’s almost like he wants to value the companies like they already achieved these impossible feats, so he can boost his net worth.

But it isn’t like he lied about full self driving for over a decade and then recently admitted none of his cars that people bought for that promise will be able to do that or anything…

I guess to reply to the OG, I’m very conservatively putting a bound on a cozy upper middle class lifestyle locally. Linus lives in Portland, Oregon. There you can comfortably live an upper middle class lifestyle on 200k or 300k. Again, conservatively take the upper bound. 1.5M >> 300k, so it’s more than anyone needs to live a cozy life. Technical needs are much lower, but this is a lazy mathematical proof where I prove the Linus number is bigger than a thing much higher than practical physical and emotional money needs and so don’t need to strictly define them.

In your argument case, those are all “nice to haves” (like much of the stuff in an upper middle class lifestyle), but it would be very difficult to argue they are necessary to live life, even at a relatively wealthy capacity.

Actually crazy that Linus just takes home 1.5M per year for one of the largest contributions to tech of anyone in the world. Obviously nobody needs more than that per year, but this pay is 1/100 or 1/1000th of many tech executives that have contributed very little comparatively.

Facebook literally heavily contributed or at minimum enabled and amplified at least one genocide (2017 Myanmar). That is the total opposite of "really not causing harm".

Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.

This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.

Yep. Unfortunately in 2026 if you look in the news at the US government spending and see a very big number, it is probably self-dealing / corruption to the Trump family.

It is one of the eternal lessons; All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads. At least until we ban pixels / 3rd party tracking.

Yeah, given the number of vegans / vegetarians I know who have gone through this I find it completely self obvious. If I went and ate meat today, I would almost certainly barf… But I wouldn’t spend ages trying to find a way to cook meat to make me not barf, I would just slowly introduce it back into my system little bits at a time until the adverse effects go away.

Yeah, you don’t run a marathon on your first run. You ramp up the intake slowly as your body adapts, like anything. If you are unlucky, this takes a long time or never happens because you rolled a bad microbiome. But for most people, this works fine.

Yeah, people are diverse. I have this issue with lentils. I love em, but however many I eat they don’t love me back.

Yes. You just eat beans a lot. After a few months it stops making you gassy until you eat a type of bean you have never eaten before and then you are back to square one.

Source: vegan who eats beans with 75+% of meals

Yeah. Heather Cox Richardson was arguing about this today, saying that historically the job of the government was to decide that cheaper but gutting a local economy, or cheaper but taking enough market share to be able to heavily raise prices in the future was bad. But due to Bork that capacity of the government to actually help drive good outcomes for the bulk of the population has been gutted.

Luckily, Lina Khan has just announced The Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which is going to be training the next generation of antitrust lawyers for the US. If we are lucky, she will also be working on much bigger things than that at the same time. If we are doubly lucky, she will be training hundreds of new lawyers as good as she is.