lambdadmitry

I was pondering this for quite a while, and overall I'm struggling to see why would it be more than "nice to have". Minor performance gains that very few companies would actually need? That's pretty meh. Chats and SSE and reactive stuff? Even with async, django doesn't fit those applications well. Other than getting on with the cool kids, why do you feel that async support in Django is particularly important?

I'm not sure if you drove in the UK much, but generally roundabouts are explicitly not "death traps" regardless of the amount of power you have. I literally use them on a cycle from time to time. Everyone is slow, pays attention, and is ready to brake if needed. If you feel need for extra power, you're probably doing something wrong (e.g. not giving enough space for the oncoming traffic you're supposed to yield to).

Shouldn't the casual anarchist in you rejoice at people hitting back on predatory, monopolistic, customer-hostile business practices of Big Movie though?

I don't think seeding for hours is conductive to long term retention. For context, in private tracker land it's normal to seed an obscure arthouse movie for years, being an only seeder and getting it downloaded maybe five times. Which reminds me that the cost is not really nil, as you have to pay those electricity bills and depreciation to keep it available. Curation is not free either.

If you use private torrents, chances are you want the swarms you participate in to be private, unless you're happy to announce your IP to RIAA. I do agree though that the current model in which cross-seeding between private swarms is an afterthought and a pain is not perfect. Clients should handle that automatically without having to resort to hardlinks and separate folders and heuristics to find matching torrents and partial matches and the rest of accidental complexity no one really wants.

Do you actually use torrents day to day? I have a strong suspicion that nowadays most people in developed economies who might be interested in TUIs use private trackers, as they're much safer and usually much better curated. However, that means that a) ratios are usually enforced, you have to keep seeding b) DHT and PEX are disabled and explicitly forbidden. Which in turn means the features you are describing are anti-features, especially considering the rise to *rrr-family of tools aggregating centralised private trackers, and relative unpopularity of DHT for discovery. Without curation and entry barriers open systems like DHT are only going to get spammed and/or get the swarm members DMCAed by RIAA and friends.

Edit: slight rewording

It's quite ironic that you chose Germany as an example right when they got into hot water over their massive gas dependency on Russia. Compare and contrast with France with their sizeable nuclear fleet.

Did you seriously compare Armenian air defence and jamming capabilities to American?

It wasn't clear that you mean only autonomous and not loitering in general.

If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank.

Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.

What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? American army made IEDs much less effective through jamming, and they need basically one bit of info transmitted, what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible?

> The primary way to engage a small drone (sUAS) is with a missile

That's just not true. Rheinmetal has their Skynex, everyone and their dog does lasers, and jamming is basically free. Phalanx (and its land equivalent) is also a thing, updating their targeting doesn't seem insurmountable.

I'm not aware of any "hot zones" lately where a war was even close to being decided by drones, much less everyone being forced underground. Even in Ukraine with absolutely hapless Russian army drone ops are mostly harassment. For an advanced army drones just aren't that big of a deal really, there are plenty of detection, disablement, and destruction modalities available.

The exaggeration is great in this one. Drones are hardly "unstoppable" for an advanced military like the one US has. Cheap ones require radio links and can be jammed. More expensive ones communicating via satellites aren't cheap. Autonomous are either pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles. That's not even considering advances in radar (utilising microdoppler effects), IR (drones are hot), and various effectors (lasers and cheap auto cannons).

I don't think it meshes well with Spanish wildfire stats [1]. I can't see any serious trend there, definitely nothing like California. The main difference is that they manage their forests and do prescribed burning.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265354/area-burned-by-w...

I can only wish there were more options like that in Python space. Celery is just a horrible tire fire and everything else seems to be either pretty minimalist, somewhat immature, or both.

That's fine and dandy when you're a wealthy Global West citizen. It's not enough when you're a developing world citizen that too wants a big house with a car or two, aircon, potable water, hot water on tap, paved roads, safe urban environments and so on. They can't "just relax for a bit", they are furiously building a better life for themselves, and it's 7 (soon 9) billion people vs 1 billion of Westerners. Unfortunately the only way we have now involves burning fossil fuels and there is no viable alternative (yet).

Effectively this statist position boils down to "screw you, I got mine", which is generally considered unethical. The only alternative is to run forward as quickly as we can, fixing things as we go.

By the way, would you consider "undoing" ozone-destroying refrigerants by banning/reducing AC and fridge use, or would you prefer a technological, "positive" solution of ozone-safe refrigerants?

It's not hard to see some unsettling parallels between the idea of the party and the people being one and the "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" slogan.

It's not like it was their first blunder, either. It's the same editor that needed more than a decade to retract Wakefield's fraudulent "vaccines cause autism" paper. He's very much an activist using the journal to further his political views [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(editor)

> China's people shouldn't be forced to live in worse conditions because they live in more populous nation

According to the logic of degrowth, they should be forced to live in conditions that allow for net zero total emissions of the country they live in. If anything, it should be easier for them because they're a unitary dictatorship, so can degrow by edict. I can't see how not focusing on China in that regard can make sense, they're emitting more currently, they are rapidly increasing their emissions (unlike the US), and they have a great potential to increase it much higher because they have lots more people. Therefore any degrowth strategy should be first and foremost applied to curb their emissions, yet somehow the conversation is always derailed into useless per-capita emissions that do nothing to the planet.

I believe at least some proponents of degrowth see it as a vehicle for exactly what you described. That is, if degrowth is really the only solution and the only way to do that is a global authoritarian regime, oh well what can we do, might as well create one and redistribute wealth in a way they see better while we're at it

Per capita emissions don't matter for the atmosphere, aggregate emissions do. Yes this makes big population a liability, but it is what it is.

Hydroelectricity is very limited in its maximum instantaneous output, you can't feed half a grid with it, there is just nowhere to put all that water to without massive flooding, so it's a bit of a moot point. Rooftop solar doesn't matter for the top down approach in that paper, they don't make any assumptions about PV location and assume perfect grid, so rooftop PV won't make it any better. So seeing a top down, intentionally optimistic approach arriving at a number much higher than that book's author's, I am very sceptical of the book's results.

Hydroelectric can't ramp up to a large fraction of national demand, for multiple unsurmountable reasons (like, you can't dump the water fast enough for one). Location selection doesn't matter that much as they don't try to optimise cost, they just look at aggregate output.

People living off grid still continue to consume the products of grid-enabled industries, from manufacturing to farming to logistics to infrastructure. Heating/cooling and lighting a cabin is much more trivial than paving a road coming to that cabin, feeding its inhabitants, building solar panels for them, or ensuring dense enough population to make research and manufacturing viable. In fact, we don't need to extrapolate minor part of personal consumption to the whole society, we have aggregate energy consumption numbers.

"Market forces" can't generate electricity on their own. Instead of taking the bottom-up view, fraught with wishful thinking and unstated assumptions, why not take the top down, working from the potential generation capacity under ideal assumptions? That's exactly what the paper I linked did, and the results are… not great for 100% renewable

I don't see where that number comes from.

Also, "good grid" means "perfect national transmission", which is a wildly optimistic assumption. The US is currently split into multiple grids, with ties being able to handle less than 1% of their generation capacity.

Moreover, that's just the US. Here is what the link has to say about countries less blessed with landmass and latitude:

> Indeed, in smaller countries, substantial gaps (>30% of demand for >20 h per year; pale orange curves in Fig. 4) remain in systems even with 12 h of energy storage and annual generation that is 3x annual demand.

Or this, directly referring to extensive overbuilding required to meet demand:

> For instance, historical solar and wind resources data in Germany reveal that there were nearly 2 weeks in which dispatchable generation had to cover practically all of the demand because of a period with very low solar and wind power availability (called “dark doldrums”)27. Although with vast enough wind and solar capacity it might still be possible to meet demand in all hours, the required capacity increases exponentially after a point that depends on the renewable resources of that country, and it is this geophysically-dependent point that will largely determine the cost-effectiveness of highly-reliable, renewables-based electricity systems.

To be fair, state pensions and stable financial systems might be just as much a solution for overpopulation as contraceptives. Kids are your bank and healthcare in advance age in developing countries. You don't need as many (or any at all) when you know your needs will be met by a combination of state support and your money that will still be yours.

It's a really, really bad idea to extrapolate price reductions in solar/wind into carbon free grids. Unfortunately there's a ridiculous wall of increasing overprovision required as you go deeper and deeper into renewables. Have a look at [0] if you can make the paper fall from the back of a truck, especially at Fig. 3. Assuming absolutely perfect grid able to transmit arbitrary amount of electricity and disregarding any real constraints, going purely by geophysical constraints on the amount of wind and sun available, continental US would need at least x7 as much wind+solar capacity as it does consume on average to have no more than one day of blackouts per year, assuming 12hrs of full consumption stored and immediately dispatchable. The only scenario in which that number goes to about x1 requires 32 days of full storage, which is just impossible with our current tech. And as you can imagine, in any real scenario that number would need to be several times higher. It's an absolutely ridiculous cost barrier that is not talked about enough and that effectively guarantees that we will be burning fossils for the foreseeable future.

[0]: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee0...

Solar panels that you can fit on a train won't provide a fraction of the energy required for the train. Luckily, we have a solution since 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system

I honestly can't wrap my head around the views of people promoting "degrowth" as a solution. How do they reconcile their ideas with the basic reality that is evident from a single chart like that one [0] and, again, very basic facts about our world like population numbers?

The simple reality is that there are a lot of people and most of them are very poor by Western standards. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet, and only 1 billion of them live in the West. There will most likely be 10 billion people, with almost all of the extra 2 billion being born in the developing world. Those 8 billion people's living conditions are abysmal compared to developed world, so they want to improve them, which means increasing their energy consumption. 8 billion people is 8 times more than 1 billion people, therefore even if it's somehow possible to "degrow" Western economies to the level of consumption of 1970s and force the developing world to stop at that level, that's still a severalfold increase in overall carbon output.

If we unshackle ourselves from the reality of international politics, let's assume that instead of waiting for the developing world to catch up we somehow redistribute all wealth equally and freeze it at that level. Ignoring all beneficial effects of wealth concentration (you can't build five smaller semiconductor plants for the price of a one big one) and previous wealth expenditure (infrastructure already in place is worth a lot of carbon), the resulting average quality of life on this planet will be closer to favelas than to whatever even the most ascetic green activists would be happy to accept. And we actually need to reduce that level, not just abandon overseas holidays.

Of course, we can't ignore international politics, so any measure that fails the MAP test (can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement it?) is at most a minor respite, not a solution. Something tells me that it would be hard for green activists to convince those leaders to deliberately reduce their citizens' living conditions and, for two of them, abandon their biggest export revenue streams.

I don't know what's going on in people's heads when they talk about "degrowth". Most of the time I brought up [0] the discussion switched to per-capita measures and emotional arguments about guilt of past emissions, as if our atmosphere cares about Americans being especially polluting per capita when there are 20 times more people polluting somewhat less but increasing their pollutions every day. The easiest explanation I can think of is a combination of despair ("but nothing else would work"), desire for "simple" solutions ("just reduce consumption" sounds simpler and less tradeoff-y than, say, nuclear), blindness to the world outside of Western bubble ("we just need to do our part, how hard can it be not fly to vacations"), and a quasi-religious notion of carbon piety. It's disheartening and I strongly believe it's hugely disruptive to productive efforts to combat climate change.

[0]: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1711C/production...

Note that that "location" property should be a method instead of property to signal that it does something potentially complex and slow. Making it a property practically guarantees that someone will use it in a loop without much second thought, and that's how you get N+1.

I would like to point out that nowhere in the best current scientific consensus position we have (IPCC reports) words like "uninhabitable" (or anything to that effect) are mentioned. This is an invention of activists trying to sway public opinion with alarmist predictions. See also [0]

[0]: https://extinctionclock.org/

I doubt it will ever settle. See: Abkhazia and South Osetia. Russia has a history of creating frozen conflicts to make life painful for its neighbours