macspoofing

>It is happening, that is my point.

It's not.

If in 5 or 10 years nothing meaningfully moves in this area, would you agree this approach was not feasible?

If you want to treat this as a nice community project, akin to a community garden - great! Just don't think that this makes ANY difference on the macro scale of solving the encroachment of the Sahara, in the same way that a set of community garden initiatives would not solve, in any way, the problem of feeding a huge urban population. For both those things, you need things done at a massive industrial scale. If you want to feed a largely urbanized population of 350 million, you need industrial-scale agriculture, backed by a massive transport and distribution network. If you want to hold back the Sahara by creating a green wall spanning thousands of kilometres, and hundreds of kilometres deep, that is likewise a massive industrial undertaking.

>Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons at a rate of one/day.

Uh huh - because that's what young men want to do, dig ditches for no wage or subsistence-level wage.

What's going to happen is those who can, will simply leave.

>Fascinating video, but still it worries me how sustainable this is.

What was shown in the video looks like a "mickey mouse" operation, akin to a local tree planting effort to combat climate change. For this to make any difference you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. You need to do this kind of project at an industrial scale, with large amounts of heavy machinery and thousands of skilled professional workers - especially since they are discussing creating a "Green Wall" across thousands of kilometers at a width of hundreds of kilometers.

Very cool. Also, I'm 100% sure this would be very expensive to maintain over the long term. You have custom motors that only a few mechanics would even touch, and who knows how this setup would hold up long-term against water, the elements and wear-and-tear.

If you can afford it, this is great.

There is no infrastructure for mass hydrogen extraction, transport and storage. Hydrogen, at grid-scale, is not currently a viable technology. It may never be viable at that scale.

Right .. Nuclear is fine. It is a perfectly viable way to power your economy. Solar/Wind/Batteries are not.

>China is the global leader in battery and solar tech, yet they are building many coal plants. Why?

The answer is clear, solar and wind (+batteries) as a technology stack, cannot serve as baseload - so they cannot actually replace traditional sources of power (nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro).

The people making decisions to build more coal, and invest in Russian natural gas, understand this. The public seems to not understand it.

>Grid-scale lithium batteries are being built in Australia and California.

What we want is battery technology that can serve as baseload for extended period of time when the sun isn't shinning (enough) and wind isn't blowing (enough). The battery farms being built are mainly for "frequency control and ancillary services (FCAS) market" - because they can only store enough energy, generally, for a few minutes, maybe an hour or so. That's not nearly good enough. We need power for days to offset the intermittency of wind and solar (which varies through out the day, as well as throughout the year, and throughout multiple years).

>To do baseload with solar it's easy: deploy enough PV and back that with 20 hours grid scale batteries.

Easy eh. So why isn't it happening?

The reality is that you will not be able to deploy batteries to power even a moderate-sized city for 20 hours with current technology. It isn't going to happen in the next few decades either.

Your argument has been made now for a decade or more. Maybe we need another decade so that, as a society, we can internalize the fact that isn't going to happen.

As a substitute for battery storage?

>We've had things like reservoir lakes for hydro plants for a long time. Energy can be stored in more ways than electrical.

Hydro is great. Gravity batteries (e.g. pumped storage) are great. The problem is that they require particular geography to work - especially at grid-scale, and we pretty much exploited all of it already - so you cannot scale it.

>Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal so it is in China's economic interests

Solar and wind could be free and it wouldn't change the equation by much .. because .. solar and wind cannot serve as baseload.

Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know?

>I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%.

There is no grid-scale battery technology today, nor coming in the next few decades - so don't pin your hopes on that. It also doesn't matter how cheap Li-ion batteries become because Li-ion batteries are simply not the right technology for grid-scale battery storage.

>Eventually they’ll want to add some form of storage

There is no grid-scale battery technology to handle baseload for any meaningful duration. Worse, there is no grid-scale battery technology on the horizon either (you can define 'horizon' as the 'next few decades').

So ... maybe number of coal plants is not a good metric of anything. Maybe instead we should just talk about emissions - and in that case, it sounds like China's are going up, though the article is hopeful that may not be the case (hope springs eternal).

>As low-carbon energy sources continue to grow, they’ll take priority spot in the electricity mix. Coal power will start to take on the role of ‘peaker plants’.

Another 'hopeful' statement from the author. Coal power will be a baseload in China for a long time still.

Current state. Always current state.

Outside of the small caveat that his first line could be better (which is what all future engineers will read while scanning commit messages), like I said, at worst, it doesn't hurt.

I like this level of detail, whether it is at the commit, PR, or ticket level. If one of my guys did this same write-up for this same problem, especially one of my junior guys, I would have patted them on the back and told them they did a great job - because you wouldn't want to discourage them from doing more of this kind of write-up in the future.

But here, we can be a little bit more honest, and the truth is, that the problem he solved was trivial, so this kind of detail is overkill for that problem. Once find that the config file has unprintable non-ascii character, immediately you know most parsers would blow chunks on that - and there is only one fix - remove the problem character. So succinctly tell me the error you saw, tell me the character, and if you know tell me HOW it got in there (which is probably the most important detail that isn't in the write-up so this could be prevented in the future) - and that's enough because if in the future another engineer does a ticket/commit search for this error in our bug tracker, hopefully these details will show up immediately.

>The lifetime of the satellites is about 5 years give or take. According to this page [1], a total of 355 satellites have deorbited over the past roughly 5 years.

Wow ... is it economical to replace the entire constellation every 5 years? How does the business side work? Or is it just a great money-burning party?

It's not a great git commit.

1) For all that text, the first line "Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error" - could be better. Maybe a couple of extra words to state what whitespace character caused the error, and what the error was. That comment plus the diff is all the context you need.

2) Honestly, everything else is kind of pointless. It doesn't hurt, but there's not a lot of value here. The author documented their journey in tracking this bug .. who cares?

OK - let's say that's true. That's not an argument against the RTO Mandate. It's an argument for it because the case that is being made is that in-office management is easier.

>HNers by and large don't understand the economics of PowerShell.

That's not true ...

PowerShell is the "lingua franca" for Windows system administration, I think everyone understands that. Much of the power of Powershell isn't the syntax (which is unnecessarily cumbersome), but rather that most core windows system services have PowerShell bindings.

Powershell isn't a tool you would use for Linux scripting and administration, because it isn't ubiquitous the way bash is.

So what exactly is your point? That Linux administrators adopt PowerShell? Or are you arguing a strawman that HNers advocate for using bash in Windows?

>Indexing content provides a useful service that content owners benefit from

I'm not sure about that. The Google Index put a lot of existing content creators out of business, like local newspapers. They certainly did not see this great benefit of a Google index. Even today, given the insanely low ad rates, because it's impossible to generate income from public content (hence the rise of paywalled subscription services) no content creator is making any money - and yet, Google is still worth a trillion dollars. And yes, there's also the fact that in the last decade or so, Google has started side-stepping the content providers by simply providing 'inline answers' and 'AMP caches'

So no, I don't see much difference between Generative AI and your 'traditional' aggregation services.

>Because Americans are so terrified of government that they can be completely okay with something terrible as long as it's private corporations doing it

That's not it. I think it is perfectly reasonable to set up a government with constraints and a culture of respect for the citizenry. It isn't about trust or no trust in 'government', because government is made up of individuals, and individuals have all kinds of motivations. I generally trust the government, but I am aware that any specific policy or decision can be a corrupt action for the benefit of some individual within the beurocracy.

The government is supposed to play by different (more constrained) rules because it has a monopoly on force.

I don't know what the legality of the NSA buying private data is, but it feels like it violates the spirit of the law that says they shouldn't be spying on their citizens.

>These AI systems have been built on the back of free labor for decades.

In practical terms, is that different from Google becoming a trillion-dollar company from its search offering?

Not yet. There is excitement for vector databases in some specialized areas but it hasn't really filtered out to the wider rank-and-file software engineering circles. You know it will be 'peak vector database' when you'll see blog posts on migrating your relational data to a vector database (with a follow-up 2 years later about moving back to PostgreSQL due to the shitshow that ensued).

>I mean for the 14,000 accounts accessed with compromised login credentials, yes that's logical that it's their fault.

The provider has a responsibility here as well - after all, a breach like this followed by the negative public fallout (and potential lawsuits) represents a risk to the business itself. There are things they could have done to mitigate this risk ... Like enforcing 2FA.

And they did mess up, and they know they messed up. Do you know how I know? Because they just started enforcing 2FA (and not in 2019) [1]

[1]https://blog.23andme.com/articles/enhanced-customer-security...

>The estimate for gold in the universe is 50B tons.

That is a wild underestimate. Our galaxy alone has around 100 million Earths worth of gold [1].

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/astronomers-ta...

>and nostalgia is well-known to be an important form of emotional wellbeing ... Where will we be when the youth of tomorrow can’t experience that nostalgia?

Talk about overstating the case. Any problems that the youth will have in the future, will not be because they cannot re-play a live service game they are playing today.

>in order to create planned obsolescence, a

Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very limited use cases.

>We are, at the very least, heading towards a multipolar world with the US, China, and Russia as the three great powers.

US, EU, China, India.

Russia is a big country by size and resources, so it will be important, but it is a small (and getting smaller) country by population size and economy.

>It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel.

Neither does Apple. Amazon prevents all of their sellers from selling their goods at any sort of discount anywhere else (including through direct-to-consumer channels).

>The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

It's not apples-to-apples comparison. Here's a better one ... Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, rig their search (to prioritize their product) and ultimately drive them out of business.

Apple is bad, but their terribleness is limited to the Mac-iOS ecosystem ... Amazon is way worse.