France, obviously. YouTube has turned into a cookie cutter slopfest a long time ago anyways.
329 karma · joined May 8, 2026
AWS, Azure, GCE, Alibaba Cloud - all the same crap, different names and slightly different jenga towers.
It applies to surprisingly a lot of crap and it’s a good substitute for where we can’t put automation in yet.
That’s the “how” we’re wondering about.
Was missing the “make it more difficult for a thief to find the AirTag and remove it” part.
Cheers!
Here’s a simple solution: the ad industry is welcome to not profile its users.
Don’t get distracted though:
> Furthermore, the reporting procedure is to be extended to include all content suspected of being unlawful.
Operating keyword here: “suspected”
What happened to due process?
Just purely from common sense perspective why the fuck should .lan be something that’s an internet/public TLD? Hello? LOCAL Area Network?
While we’re at it let’s update a few RFCs. Plus I don’t want to find out what organisations use .lan for their networks and what will end up leaking to the internet as a consequence of this.
The law permits the behaviour, don’t like it? Change it.
8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.
> I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four.
That description itself is part of the point. “Chinese-American” is a very American way of framing identity: ancestry remains explicitly attached to nationality even when someone has spent essentially their entire conscious life in the United States.
If someone moved to the United States at four and then spent all of their formative years there, I would not automatically treat their perspective on China as meaningfully more “inside” than that of an ordinary American. They may have Chinese family, speak the language, retain cultural habits, and have much stronger personal ties to China than the average American, but their actual socialization - the schools they attended, institutions they dealt with, media they consumed, peer culture they grew up in, and political and social assumptions they absorbed was overwhelmingly American.
I’ve encountered the same pattern among people from my own native country who were raised abroad. Their connection to the country can be entirely genuine, while their understanding of contemporary life there is still largely mediated through parents, relatives, diaspora communities, occasional visits, and inherited cultural memory.
So if the subject is what present day China is actually like from the inside, I would give that perspective roughly the same evidentiary weight as that of a well informed American unless the person later spent substantial time actually living in China.
That says nothing negative about their identity. It simply means that ancestry and family background are not substitutes for having grown up inside a society.
I expand the sections and it’s all full of prompt slop
That’s very generous of you to call it that way.
It’s a parody at best.
All it took was destruction of global energy markets and supplies.
Let’s celebrate!
There are several different concepts being collapsed together here.
“Baseload is a myth” is mostly a semantic dodge. Base load is simply the minimum demand on the system. You do not need a special category of plant called a “baseload generator,” but you absolutely need enough firm capacity and energy to meet demand continuously, including when wind and solar are producing very little.
“The grid can handle peak load, therefore it can handle base load” confuses transmission capacity with generation availability. A grid capable of carrying 50 GW does not produce 50 GW. The engineering problem is having enough generation available at the exact hours when it is required.
And batteries do not make that problem disappear. They are excellent for frequency response, peak shaving and moving solar production from noon into the evening. But a battery is an energy buffer, not an energy source. During a prolonged shortage it can discharge only what was previously stored, and then it must recharge. Once the problem lasts several days rather than several hours, the amount of stored energy required becomes enormous.
Germany provides a very useful real-world example.
Germany began its nuclear phase-out under the 2000/2002 agreement, briefly extended reactor lifetimes in 2010, then accelerated the shutdown after Fukushima in 2011. The final three reactors closed in April 2023.
In 2008 German nuclear plants produced roughly 149 TWh of electricity. Germany subsequently built huge amounts of wind and solar, and those renewables have unquestionably displaced a great deal of fossil generation. But Germany eliminated its existing firm, low-carbon nuclear fleet while it was still burning very large quantities of coal and gas.
And then there is the problem Germans have an excellent word for: Dunkelflaute.
This is not some hypothetical edge case invented by nuclear advocates. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur defines a Dunkelflaute as a period of at least 48 hours during which combined wind and PV generation remains below 15% of installed capacity. Low-wind periods are recurrent; analysis of four decades of German weather data found roughly a five-day period with average wind output below a 10% capacity factor in a typical year, with substantially longer events occurring less frequently.
Germany got a particularly good demonstration in November and December 2024. During two Dunkelflaute episodes, renewable production collapsed while demand remained high. Germany’s own Bundesnetzagentur says that almost the entire controllable power-plant fleet was brought into operation and that substantial electricity imports from neighbouring countries were required. The regulator concluded that Germany urgently needs additional controllable generation capacity for future Dunkelflauten.
That is basically the entire argument in one empirical example. When there is plenty of wind and sun, Germany can have extremely cheap electricity and sometimes negative wholesale prices. When the weather changes, the system suddenly needs the plants that supposedly became obsolete.
And the price swings are spectacular. Germany’s average day-ahead wholesale price in 2024 was about €79/MWh. During the November and December Dunkelflauten it exceeded €300/MWh for dozens of hours and reached approximately €936/MWh at the peak. The Bundesnetzagentur investigated whether those prices resulted from market manipulation and found no such explanation; the underlying condition was very low renewable production, high demand, extensive use of controllable thermal generation and limited remaining dispatchable capacity.
At the retail level Germany also remains one of Europe’s most expensive electricity markets. In the second half of 2025 a typical German household consuming 2,500–5,000 kWh paid €0.3869/kWh, compared with an EU average of €0.2896/kWh—about 34% more. Germany had the second-highest household electricity price in the EU after Ireland.
Those retail prices cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the nuclear phase-out or to renewables: taxes, levies, network costs, fuel prices and the consequences of the European gas crisis all matter. But neither can anyone point to Germany as evidence that a wind-and-solar-heavy system has somehow made firm generation economically irrelevant. Its own regulator is saying the opposite: when Dunkelflaute hits, Germany needs controllable generation and imports, and it says additional controllable capacity is urgently required.
What supplies that capacity today? Coal and gas remain substantial. Germany has zero domestic nuclear generation, yet it still burns coal and natural gas and participates in a European interconnected system containing large quantities of French and other nuclear generation.
So the actual German experiment is considerably less impressive than the slogan. Germany spent decades building an enormous renewable fleet while simultaneously destroying an existing fleet of firm low-carbon reactors. It succeeded in greatly increasing renewable generation and reducing coal use over the long run, but it did not abolish the requirement for firm generation. When wind and solar disappear together, Germany burns dispatchable fuels, imports electricity, draws on reserves and watches wholesale prices rise.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Once you accept that an electrical system requires firm energy during prolonged periods of inadequate intermittent generation, the menu becomes fairly obvious. Hydro and geothermal are excellent where geography permits them. Storage, transmission, demand response and renewable overbuilding all help. Countries fortunate enough to possess enormous reservoirs, geothermal resources or exceptionally strong interconnections can lean heavily on those advantages.
Those countries are not a universally reproducible model. A solution intended to work in most industrial countries has to survive winter demand, multi-day wind lulls, minimal solar production, droughts, transmission constraints and simultaneous weather patterns across neighbouring regions.
Under those conditions, you need some combination of renewables and firm generation. At present, for most countries without exceptional hydro or geothermal resources, large-scale firm generation means principally nuclear or combustion, with storage and interconnection reducing how much of it must run.
So yes: build wind and solar. Build batteries where they make economic sense. Build transmission. Use demand response. Exploit hydro and geothermal wherever available.
But after all of that, somebody still has to answer the boring engineering question: what produces electricity on the fifth cold, dark, windless day after the batteries have discharged?
“Baseload is a myth” does not answer it. “Batteries” does not answer it unless you specify the required energy capacity and how it is recharged. And Germany, of all countries, does not answer it: every serious Dunkelflaute demonstrates why it still maintains dispatchable fossil generation and depends on the wider European grid.
And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
The way they price their RPi’s - are we even surprised there’s now a market for cheap modified Pi’s with more RAM?
If they want to reduce the support burden they can use serial numbers to track what board has what ram - if they don’t match no support because it’s modified hardware.
In other news, water is wet.