tallowen

I think solar is becoming popular because it is so much cheaper where it works.

One point of disagreement is that you are saying "you need more energy in the winter". Right now, for example, tomato paste is made in a facility that runs year round. The main cost in converting tomatoes into tomato paste is in the thermal cost of energy. Having abundant cheap energy at one time of year will shift the way such industrial processes work so that we use more energy when supply is the highest rather than using the most energy when demand is the highest.

I think the implication is that we'll see a further split around pricing.

One thing that stood out to me is that in the case of thermal loads (perhaps your dishwasher but more realistically a hotwater heater). It will become more worthwhile for that system to know when high and low electricity prices are and store more heat (i.e. hotwater) at low electricity prices and wait until prices fall again to refill it. In this sense, a heater would be operating like a battery.

In a world where energy prices are stable throughout the day, it doesn't make sense to manufacture, for example, a price aware water heater with extra storage capacity. It seems like that calculus is changing with solar and other renewables creating an incentive for variable rates compared to traditional fixed rate alternatives.

I found this podcast with Jesse Jenkins to be a really helpful start to understand non fixed energy resources.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-alwa...

I thought that the most cost effective way to supply energy would require a certain amount of base load. It seems like this is a misunderstanding because of how much cheaper and more available these non fixed resources are than fixed resources. Energy this cheap gives us a huge incentive to change our energy use patterns to match power abundance rather than to take energy demand as a constant.

I am surprised that part of Mozilla's never introduced an Android launcher for progressive web apps.

Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option.

Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?

Starting a social network today is harder than it was 20 years ago. Content moderation, spam prevention, privacy controls have much higher expectations than they did.

I want to see competition in this space. Facebook investing in infrastructure to sell such that new products can compete with theirs seems like it might lead to that.

If Facebook were to develop these APIs, other platform providers could also implement similar APIs for products meaning that FB wouldn't be solely in control. I'm excited about new infrastructure in this play because I think it could lead to more dynamic peer to peer interactions.

Going to repeated class action lawsuits every time there is a bad software update sounds like an inefficient use of the court system to me.

I think most people will eventually want the manufacturer to be the defendant in court cases that result from crashes due to a manufacturer updating cars. I can only imagine NHTSA (US Auto Regulator) will evolve to make this the case.

What makes you say that Facebook's codebase is an order of magnitude smaller?

I don't think the burden of the changing API surface was place on the callers of that API. With core library developers updating their callsites, it meant that people calling into early versions of React, never had to deal with upgrading the react version in their package. As a caller of these libraries, it was much nicer to have the React team take care of upgrades where possible rather than having to deal with it myself.

Furthermore, there were tons of changes that could happen across the board at facebook that didn't happen at google due to owners files. Lots of people were empowered to make broad changes to the entire codebase which in aggregate made the codebase better. Coming from Facebook, all the systems around owners and readability represented a huge amount of time to be able to make changes that should have been easy. It also left the codebase with many warts that would have been relatively quick to fix locally but a pain to land.

Facebook went in the other direction - there were better and better tools for making broad updates

I’m always surprised to see the totality of support for this workflow. My biggest gripes were:

- Owners

- Readability review (or really the 18month queue to get Java/python readability)

Although seemingly innocuous, this made maintaining internal libraries very challenging. There was no way to update every call site of your library in an efficient way. Tools like Rosie were added on top so that you could shard your PRs and shepherd many PRs through a Byzantine approval process.

Compared to Facebook, I found it much harder to reach the same levels of productivity given Owners and readability review. I don’t think libraries like React could get developed at Google given how hard it would be to evolve the API surface.

Unfortunately, this used to be his situation but the blindness now limits all reading.

I agree that we would need testing and trials before it could be rolled out. Many trucks in the US are already implementing these for various reasons. Other countries are already mandating this.

The European Union is introducing mandatory “Intelligent Speed Assist” in 2024 which requires a lot of the technology that you’re referring to.

I think the real obstacle to this is no longer technological but political

I agree with the idea that I would like to see roads redesigned to make them safer.

I'm not sure why it's an either or though. Redesigning roads can certainly slow people down and make them safer but that often comes at the cost of a large planning process and a lot of money spent. Dyanmic speed limits and speed governors could be much simpler to manage.

I think most proposals for speed governors would make it difficult to go over 10 mph above the speed limit under non emergency operation. I don't think anyone would argue that it's safe to drive 10 mph over the speed limit on a redesigned street so why wouldn't a speed govenor be another tool in the toolkit?

How do we balance safety regulations with these emergency situations?

We're experiencing some of the highest traffic fatality rates in decades and I think the liberty of those dying and being injured on our streets need to be taken into account as well.

I prefer the technological solution of a speed governor to automated traffic cameras because I think automated traffic cameras can easily become surveilance devices while speed governors tend to be implemented locally (i.e. within the car).

Are there other solutions that you prefer that can protect liberty law abiding drivers and pedestrians from the recklessness of speeding and dangerous driving?

> federal government

I had assumed it would be state government since they normally control traffic law?

What other solutions would you propose for enforcing speed/safety regulations on state owned infrastructure? Personally, given my experience interacting with police, hate our current system that relies on being pulled over and interacting with them. I would much prefer an automated solution (e.g. speed governors or automated speeding cameras).

Imagine if we had the tech to apply speed governors in places with high crash rates! What if departments of transportation could lower speeds dynamically to make sure that risky road infrastructure is made safer.

I can't help but feel a little bit salty about these baindaid solutions to our ever increasing rate of road deaths in the US. I'm not sure what the right solutions are to keeping people safe while allowing them to get where they want to go but the solution of adding yet another notification on an electronic device seems disheartening to me.

An article about increased pedestrian deaths: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

I wish there were better approaches to solving the problems around replacing batteries. This solution has downsides in terms of size (extra material required to surround the battery) and waterproofness.

I like the features that will have to trade off against replaceable batteries. I wish there were more opportunities for creative solutions to ewaste rather than the specific outcome being regulated.

I've been using it to learn programming concepts I'm unfamiliar with and I perceive a huge difference in quality of chat-gpt answers between:

- Salesforce API

- AWS

- React Native

The react native docs are good enough that I really empathize with what you're saying - wouldn't I just be faster reading the docs? However, for salesforce I feel exactly the opposite - the docs are all over the place and message boards tend to be of low quality for the subject.

For what it's worth, AWS felt somewhere in the middle depending on the service.

I think another huge difference here is that the Australian continent has ~25 million people living on it whereas United States + Mexico + Canada is ~500 million.

There are far more communities and cultures to explore without the need for overseas travel.

As an American who has spent 6 years living abroad, I think foreigners vastly underestimate the size and diversity of the United States and North American how many meaningful travel experiences can be had despite the fact that there are relatively few national governments

Although electric vehicles are certainly heavier than their ICE counterparts, I would imagine that increasing in average vehicle weight is due in large part of a shift towards selling larger vehicles (pickup trucks, SUVs).

More broadly, beyond parking garages I'm curious what other infrastructure will be ill suited towards the shift to bigger and heavier vehicles especially in urban environments.

I agree with what you're saying - hydrogen propulsion will make the most difference for large fleets over long distances. Right now, in the pacific northwest BC Ferries and Washington State ferries are moving to electrify their fleets. The crossing distances of these boats are much larger (The most popular BC ferries route looking to be more than 20x longer). As I recall, the procurement process for these much larger boats that go much further distances didn't include all battery (because the weight/space would have been prohibitive) or hydrogen electric (because the technology is too immature).

I don't think it's reasonable to be experimenting with new technologies on 200 car ferries so even if hydrogen is not the ideal use case for this crossing, I'm excited to see this technology build a track record so it becomes a more feasible option for the large scale where it does make sense.

> English is not a language that traditionally deals well with gender, in that the language’s pronouns can be a little clumsy.

I think it is really interesting to deconstruct this. Most European languages have gender as a more central concept in the language; as the author points out "In Spanish, if referring to a group of friends containing both genders, you would use amigos, clearly favoring the masculine form". It seems like these languages would be even more clumsy around these non gendered cases!

Perhaps not having gendered nouns causes other gendered grammatical constructs (in this case personal pronouns) to stand out more. Do speakers of other languages with gender as a key construct see changes happening in those languages to make the language more gender neutral or does the high prevalence of gendering make that too intractable?

I think it's interesting how there are two common threads in the comments:

1) People don't like switching twice a year.

2) People have a preference for summer time or winter time based on the perceived benefits of the existing system in the summer or winter.

I wonder if there is a certain wisdom to time shifting that people are ignoring. For those of you who would prefer permanent summer time would you rather get permanent winter time or the existing system?

Montreal?

It is very exciting to see more people write frameworks using "React" ideas. This will make React and similar frameworks better!

It seems like one of the biggest ideas that flutter brings to the table is a different approach to component libraries. It makes sense that there is a need for this given that larger companies that invest in React tend to have their own tailored component library that people outside of those companies generally don't get to take advantage of. The startup costs to developing your own library of React components and their CSS/Native wrappers are high.

That being said, when I think of prebuilt component libraries (eg, bootstrap, swing) I generally think of components that are too familiar for users and a crutch for developers to allow them to quickly develop interface code where they may not be an expert. In a high quality app, I would expect widgets to follow the patterns that other apps on the platform follow. Won't this be difficult for a framework like Flutter which will have to re-create each of these native widgets (as apposed to React native where they are just wrapped in a JS layer)?

Regardless of these qualms, I'm excited to see more well funded frameworks enter this space because I'm sure that all users of frameworks in this space will benefit. I will be on the look out for more complex uses of this framework to see how people overcome these types of issues!

Have you had a different experience with other companies?

My experience living in Germany has been that its been pretty hard to get American keyboards. Apple for instance only lets businesses oder laptops with US keyboards in Germany.

Switzerland has a much more direct democracy than most (all?) other democracies. This means citizens often vote on things similar to ballot initiatives in the US.

In the context of basic income it means such a populist policy would be have different political barriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy#Switzerland

> Researchers at the data analysis firm Data Genetics Also known as cool guy who works as a data analyst at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nick.berry

He also has a ton of other cool blog posts that I find pretty thought provoking: http://datagenetics.com/blog.html

For example: http://datagenetics.com/blog/may32013/index.html

> The house also favors less populous states, even if not by design.

Out of curiosity, how does this happen in practice? My understanding was that seats were divided up by population (giving equal voice to those in more densely populated areas).

What they're saying is that there will be just as many cars on the road as before and therefore not reducing the environmental impact of the road.

I imagined it to be something like this:

Old:

- Road: 1000 users

- Train tunnel: 1000 users

New:

- Road: 1000 users

- Train: 2000 users

Although the train is more environmentally friendly than the road, I think the article is saying the impact of adding it is just that more people make the trip rather than the same number of people doing it in a more environmentally friendly way. This is basically the concept of induced demand i.e. build it and they will come.

These conclusions are surprising to me. I grew up in the states and lived in Canada for 4 years.

Though I agree with the lack of security offered by a signature, that method of payment is basically offered everywhere in the US. Compared to Canada its uncommon to be asked for a 5 dollar minimum purchase or a 50 cent surcharge for a credit card transaction. Furthermore, the credit limits in Canada seemed downright restrictive.

Say whatever about the security of credit cards in the US but as a consumer the product is much more compelling. I can go almost anywhere, rarely pay extra fees and easily spend all of my own money. Furthermore, why would I care about a signature? Yes its antiquated but who cares if its never used, I can charge back fraudulent charges pain free in the US which has not been my experience in Canada.

Basically, I think the user experience of paying money is really important, but chip and pin doesn't solve that problem.