jcattle

Just to add some positivity: I love the demo on the webpage where you can drag the phone around the panoramas. So fun!

RTFA

> In the end, I don’t think that the delay in shipping PostgreSQL 19 is particularly concerning. It is not a long delay in the grand scheme of things, and it emerges directly from the project’s concern for quality.

Nice way to think about it.

I guess it really depends on the severity of the defect. Would it allow some really significant exploit? -> Important to fix.

Does the defect only prohibit one very esoteric use-case which basically never comes up (and was thus never reported by a human user and only now that we have an infinitely patient machine checking every completely unlikely code path is it detected) -> more productive use of your time to develop a new feature which would be used by more people.

And you say that as if this is a... bad thing?

I always thought they were spread apart so much to further reduce the chance of catastrophic spread of fire from one container to another.

That would be a lot harder if you stack them since heat likes to rise.

But no clue if that is the actual reason.

I mean, both is important. Pumped hydro can have quite large amounts of storage, but supply comparatively little W of power.

Not really in developing countries which the OP is talking about.

While most developed countries have aerial imaging campaigns on some recurrent schedule (NAIP in the US is on a rolling 3-year cycle), this is usually not the case in developing countries.

Quite a few never had any large scale aerial imaging campaigns and most do not have them on regular schedules.

Kind of. Free satellite data starts at 10m resolution per pixel. You will not get a clear signal on small rooftop solar. Same for balcony solar or other near perpendicular installations.

At 10m the only thing you can reliably detect is large scale deployments. If you want to do better than that you need paid data which is prohibitively expensive at large scales.

Obsession with triangles so the GPU can show millions of polygons on a webmap.

Ah fun! I had a period in my life where for some reason I attracted 3 different people within 2 months which were all missing their permanent lateral incisors.

It was really interesting to see, for one person nothing was done whatsoever, she just has 4 smallish gaps (and just generally a bit wonky teeth). For one person, the gap was closed by moving the other teeth closer with braces. She also doesn't really have many problems. The only one with consistent problems is the one where they moved the teeth apart to install implants. Just constant problems with infection, pain, broken implants etc etc.

So just from that anecdote it seemed like in this case implants only cause issues.

Got any in a single category which all start with Alpha and named by the same organization? Say something like... I don't know... Deep learning models published by Google?

If there's 10 breakfast cereals from the same company all starting with Alpha, I would give you some credit. But like this I don't even know what your reply is trying to tell me.

I honestly feel like I am taking crazy pills here.

That's because Google Deepmind has consistently used AlphaSomething for their scientific models. Not for their consumer models which are Gemini, but their models which are more cutting edge and specific to niche problems.

Let's list them!

AlphaZero, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, AlphaGenome, AlphaEarth, AlphaGeometry, AlphaProteo, AlphaTensor.

There are some revolutionary models in there. Especially AlphaZero and AlphaFold. AlphaFold even won a nobel price in 2024.

I would strongly argue against that. I would argue that Google Deepmind has consistently used AlphaSomething for their scientific models. Not for their consumer models which are Gemini, but their models which are more cutting edge and specific to niche problems.

Let's list them!

AlphaZero, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, AlphaGenome, AlphaEarth, AlphaGeometry, AlphaProteo, AlphaTensor.

There's a reason why so many people in the comments here thought that this was a model from Google.

Edit: Just looked through Wikipedia. Here's a few more: AlphaProof, AlphaDev, AlphaEvolve, AlphaStar, AlphaChip

As far as I know Apple also does not own "i" or McDonalds owns "Mc".

If you're creating a Burger called McSomething or a device called iWhatever it does not feel like "paying homage" to Apple/McDonalds, it feels more like copying and trying to capture some audience from this bigger player.

You've supported them for all of "checks git history" 2 days!

What a track record!

10 years? That's nothing. Flooding Hambach will take approximately 40 years. And that includes water from the Rhine carried there by pipeline, which in the current state of the Rhine is... optimistic.

Yes

Alphabet is also the biggest holder of PlanetLabs at around 10%.

PlanetLabs is the company providing the satellite bus infrastructure to Google for this project.

Can JPEG be a vision model?

R really is/was the superior traditional data science language. Python ecosystem is slowly catching up though.

ggplot vs matplotlib

dplyr vs pandas

And I loved that everything in RStudio was so easily inspectable. Have a huge dataframe? Just look at it right in your IDE.

Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question

"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":

> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...

You are not stopping people from taking in calories.

In your analogy it would be the same as saying: you are not allowed to heat your home with a coal burner. Same as saying you are not allowed to eat beef. You can still eat lots of other stuff, just not beef.

The goal isn’t to eat beef, it’s calorie intake.

Now I am not saying that we should ban cattle farming or beef and dairy consumption. In the end I see this as a problem of our current system not being able to effectively reflect environmental impact in price.

Cattle farming has an environmental cost which is higher than other alternatives (chicken, soy etc.). This environmental cost is not directly passed on to the consumer.

All of the alternatives you listed will not succeed in our current system because the environmental savings they might have can not be passed on to the customer. On the contrary: usually lower environmental impact has a monetary cost associated, making prices higher for products from these initiatives.

How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.

It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.

Or Buschenschank in Styria (where you traditionally don't get warm food, only "Brettljause")

I thought you'd mention plant poaching. Which is just evil.

Ah, I thought that was the main vegetation present beforehand? What kind of forest was it before it was cut down?

None of what you are writing is applicable to Landes. Outside of scandinavia Landes region is some of the most intensely managed forest in Europe.

From planting to cutting is only around 30-50 years. With multiple thinnings in between. Also none of that forest existed 200 years ago and there never was anything other than pine planted there for those 200 years, in the beginning for resin, now for pulp.

And so none of it burned in the middle ages or was affected by any higher temperatures because it didn't exist back then.

With freely available satellite imagery you're looking at a 10x10m resolution per pixel.

So basically entire tree stands have to die or crowns have to lose their leafs for it to be detectable form space.

Main insect of concern are bark beetles (ips typographus for spruce, ips sexendtatus for pines) which disrupt the cambium causing a gradual vitality decline until you have dead standing trees. In satellite imagery this is visible as irregular brownish-red patches.

On the other hand there's gypsy moths (also known as spongy moth, Lymantria dispar) which affect the leafs directly, causing large scale temporary defoliation in broadleafed trees usually in the middle of summer.

There's hundreds more insects but few have the capability to cause large scale die-off in trees which are grown in monoculture (pine/spruce/beech).

Yes, I'm well aware that Landes naturally should be an extensive sandy marsh.

With how natural forest disturbances are more and more starting to affect the plantation, it proves to be seen what the response will be.

The thing is that it is an incredibly productive forest (only in terms of biomass). So now there's a bunch of capital riding on it which will have a vested interest to keep it productive.

No, at the moment classifying disturbances is only done retrospective. Predicting fire likelihood is its own large area of research.

An open case is more in terms of temperate forests which are increasingly starting to burn, for example in Austria or other central European countries. These tend to be understory fires, which (for now) only rarely catch the crown.

For these fires the tree crown stays green and you can't see any change until later in the year or the next year, where the trees die due to damage the fire did to their cambium and roots. Correctly attributing this later decline to fire damage is a bit challenging.