donkeyd

The thing is, many houses (like my own) aren't insulated very well still. Also, you can't look at production and use over a month. We often have multiple cloudy days in a row where we produce next to nothing in comparison to what is used. So you need something to bridge those days. We do have wind and off-shore wind is relatively reliable, so that's good.

Solar is just awful for our climate, since we produce most when we use the least, which you can see in the quite extreme negative prices for electricity we've already seen this year... And it's not even summer yet.

This sounds like an in pipe(/cable) dream... First, you need that pair of cables for the UK (assuming your math and physics work out). Then you need at least 10 times that for the rest of Europe. Then we have all those cables in the water, in different places at the coasts of sea bound countries. We need to then split all of it up and transport it inland into all those countries.

Even if the first part is even feasible, that second part is another world of hurt. Oh, and the part before the first part, where we fill Africa with solar to provide the world with electricity for 12-ish hours a day. The geopolitics of this all are going to be pretty much impossible to figure out and that's before any actual engineering can even begin to be done.

I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way.

The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time.

My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.

Microsoft, who provides our mail and calendar service, has a tool for this available in Office 365. So no need to connect an outside service. Otherwise, self-hosting is an option. Or you make the decision that the risk of using a third party is alright in your business and do that.

Exactly, which is why you need to consider this stuff and not use those types of services if you have actual confidential data. Find a provider with clear contracts that prevent these types of changes. Self host. Whatever, just make sure to pay actual attention to what you're doing.

My boss used ChatGPT to write a proposal for a utility company recently. OpSec is so awful here it's laughable.

I think I disagree, but your comment lacks context, care to elaborate?

This highly depends on your definition of 'prompt injection'. A colleague of mine managed to get GPT to do something it refused to do before through a series of prompts. It wasn't in the form of 'ignore previous instructions' but more comparable to social engineering, which humans are also vulnerable to.

While we're at it, have you seen the Apple ones? 3 year old threads with 100 messages of people saying 'I have this same issue' and zero response from Apple.

Some examples of the subjects of these threads:

- SD Card readers in original M1 Macbook Pro not working

- Bluetooth headphones balance getting messed up randomly (so old someone created an application to automatically center balance)

- Specific Intel Macbooks crashing after using a Thunderbolt dock exactly twice.

All of them with no response from Apple at all and no fixes in sight.

Thanks for writing this, people in general seems to completely be missing this point. Oil companies pollute to provide us with:

Fuel for our cars. Fuel for shipping all the goods we want cheaply made in Asia. Fuel for planes to business meetings that could be done online. Fuel for planes we take to mass consume alcohol in the Caribbean. Plastics for packaging all that stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the cheap clothing we wear twice and throw out.

Oil companies are just one example. And alternatives for most of this this are all more expensive, which is why most people don't want to switch to better alternatives, like:

Buy locally sourced produce. Don't buy imported avocados, bananas, coconuts. Buy locally sourced meat. Get whole chickens and eat everything. Make a stock from the leftovers. Buy organic cotton clothing. Or figure out what clothing you can get that's locally produced. Buy furniture from a local furniture craftsman. Don't replace things that aren't broken. Don't go to McDonald's, go to a local burger restaurant that doesn't import 'Irish grass fed beef'. Take a train to a vacation destination nearby.

For some of us, all of this may be obvious, but for the majority of people it isn't. And as long as we keep blaming companies and then sit back, nothing will ever change.

> This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

Yes, but this is only part of it and once again is an easy way to blame corporations. It's not just easy for them to tell people to recycle. It's also really easy for people to recycle and feel good about themselves while not doing much.

To really impact climate change, we need societal change and that has to come from everyone. People, companies, government all need to change, we can't keep pointing fingers at each other, but that's what we're all doing.

> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state

I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.

I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.

I noticed the same thing. I'm not surprised about the current discussion over copyright because this training data pretty clearly has a basis in unlicensed Shutterstock images.

> I feel bad for the millions of units of [...] Stadia

In their defense, Stadia consisted of a ChromeCast and a controller which are both still useful.

> I suspect it took quite a bit of work by our project team to convince them to work this way.

It probably did. I've seen a couple of organizations that did this well, but the majority did not, unfortunately. In the end the sales guy will usually have received their bonus far before the project is over. I'm mostly amazed that companies like this can keep running for decades, but they do.

I had one assignment where we had a Scrum Manager. He was a project manager who was also the scrum master. Luckily he was aware of the conflict in these roles, so he took my criticism well and was later replaced by an actual scrum master.

> you generally do not pivot

I'm just going to grab this tiny part and focus on it. I've seen Agile fail many times for this exact reason. In start-up land, one might pivot and massively change an end goal. In corporate land that's a lot less off a thing.

I've worked on some big projects in government and fortune 500, all of them pretended to be Agile and all of them had predefined scopes, deadlines and budgets. In all of those projects, Agile was more of a disturbing factor than anything else. The only flexible part was the scope of work, because of renewed insights or lack of specification while planning. This always ends with teams getting pressured to make deadlines (because those are never flexible), so they cut corners and work extra long hours.

I think it would be much better for these types of projects (and the sanity of devs) not to pretend to be doing Agile, but just admit they want a more Prince2 led Waterfall approach. This won't happen though, because that puts the pressure with management in stead of the dev teams.

Well, in the organization I was doing this, they had similar issues before I started, with external consultants doing stupid stuff. Luckily, my team wasn't as stupid as these people and integrity was also very high. Which was very, very necessary considering the data we were working with.

> dismissed / insulted the person

That wasn't even remotely my goal and I'm disappointed that my choice of words made it seem like it was. I purposefully added quotes to the word 'real' in my comment since any business is a real business and made it clear it was an assumption, not a fact.

It's just that many tech workers often haven't worked outside of tech and therefore are blind to issues outside of the tech world, like manual data entry, because they assume that must all be automated. It's exactly the same the other way around, people in what I called 'real' businesses are blind to what tech can to to improve business processes because they have no clue about what's available and possible.

They weren't questioning the value if the chat bot, they were questioning the value of the models based on only the high profile use cases such as a now (in)famous chat bot. That, to me, showed that they have a narrow view of the problems that this stuff could solve when applied outside of those high profile use cases. So I made an (explicit) assumption that they mostly worked in tech and not outside of tech, which limits the view of the world outside of tech.

This is very confidential data, which is why the current implementation is run on-premise and of course I'm definitely not using production data to test GPT capabilities.

> What am I missing?

I'm going to guess (assume) you probably haven't worked in a 'real' business. A place where elbow grease still does the majority of the work and where Windows 8 was only just phased out.

The killer app (to me) in case of GPT is GPT itself, not ChatGPT. ChatGPT just allows me to easily test use cases for GPT. There are many interesting use cases for those elbow grease businesses for GPT. For example:

Data entry. There's still a lot of data entry being done from unstructured text. Where specifics like names and addresses need to be extracted from letters and emails and contracts and other stuff. I've worked on these challenges before using different strategies and GPT blows my mind with what it can do just by asking to grab this data and format it as JSON. Is it 100% correct? Nope. You still need people to review the data (depending on the use case), but that already saves tons of work.

Categorization. Some companies still get tons of emails that need to be forwarded to specific departments. This is another thing that GPT does surprisingly well out of the box.

And that's just GPT. There are many other legacy business processes that can be automated (partially) by other models that are coming out right now. Even just 'segment anything' that Meta just released is incredibly useful for many use cases I've seen in my daily work.

Killer apps are always a combination of a technology to solve a real world problem. If you don't venture into the real world and only stay part of the tech world, seeing the killer app is very difficult and ends up leading to Juicero-like products.

I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.

Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can).

So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.

At my current company we're working on one of the problems involved in this in much of the developed world. Actually coming to the point where you can lay power lines is a huge issue that has to do with figuring out property ownership, the stuff that's already in the ground, water ways, roads, trees and more. People work months on finding a route that's actually possible and that sometimes involves paying a lot to property owners for using their land.

Right now we're creating a tool that gives the engineers insight into all these factors and automatically creates possible routes through all this madness. It's quite interesting to work on and fascinating to learn about all these complexities. It also doesn't scale well, we're building this for the Netherlands, which has a lot of centralized, (mostly) open data that can be used. In other countries that's not so much true.

I had a -10x engineer in my team. They refused to test their own work, because that was the tester's job. They sometimes implemented a feature in the wrong place, both technically and functionally, requiring a complete rewrite (and removing code, roll-back was not an option in this tool). They started using float in HTML while we used grid, this caused stuff to be on top of each other.

Unfortunately, this guy played management in a way that caused him to keep getting away with the behavior. Awful person to work with!

This thread was about pricing in the EU. Even if it was inflation adjusted, it wasn't adjusted for exchange rate differences, which are a significant part of the price increase on Apple products in the EU.

> However are you sure you are comparing that with the same segment in your country?

Yes, I come from the bottom of society in my country. I grew up surrounded by people without jobs, blue collar workers and parents that worked in factory and hospitality jobs. Luckily, my country takes care of people in these situations, provides them affordable homes and health care and income and helps them to go to school without ending up with crippling debt.

> America on the internet is different from America in real life.

Implying I don't know America in real life, never lived there, never visited and don't know actual people there. All not being true. I have zero friends in my home country who work multiple jobs. I have multiple in the US.

> The Americans work 34.5 hours a week.

In my country it's 32. So almost 8% less. Which I'd call significant if working hours is directly correlated to productivity as a country.

What's the point of that? My mom who walks into a store doesn't adjust for inflation. Her income hasn't been adjusted for inflation, let alone exchange rate.

Many people on HN can probably explain why the price is what it is now. That doesn't mean that people are willing (or capable) to pay that much.