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teamonkey

4,917 karma · joined May 19, 2008

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teamonkey··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
Agreed. As a kid it felt there was so much energy to make things better, to fight the system. So depressing growing up and seeing so many peers and idols becoming the same inward-looking grey old farts they used to mock.

Perhaps this is inevitable.

teamonkey··on In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue
There is grass. Grass is allowed to grow around the panels. It’s great for biodiversity.
teamonkey··on In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue
Are you sure it’s arable land? The majority of solar farms in the UK are built on low-grade land that aren’t suitable for growing food.
teamonkey··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/12mo/monthly
teamonkey··on The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
The framebuffer size for a single 320x200 image with 16 colours is 32k, so nearly the same amount of memory as this entire game.

320x200 being an area of screen not much larger than a postage stamp on my 4k monitor.

The technical leap from 40 years ago never fails to astound me.

teamonkey··on UK intelligence censored report on global warming and homeland security
There’s no real hatred of farmers on the left, other than the fact that farmers generally vote small-c conservative.

There’s certainly a hatred of land owners, and vast amounts of UK farm land is privately owned, renting the land to farmers. It’s the right wing parties and press that takes that to mean that the left hate farmers.

teamonkey··on Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)
Do you mean Luftrausers?
teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
> This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.

Yes exactly. The incentives to renewables producers exist to ensure accelerated growth. This may mean we are paying more for renewables in the short term (though no more than fossil fuels) but the investment should pay dividends in future.

teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.

This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.

teamonkey··on Desk for people who work at home with a cat
They are very patient with us
teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
It’s not currently happening in the UK.

A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.

This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.

teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
Yes, but here’s the thing: you don’t have a monopoly over your potato farming method. Lots of new farms are built, and the more that do, the more the average price of a potato drops. Your expected return starts to drop. Yours - and everyone else’s - profit margins get squeezed.

Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.

But the people need potatoes and more potato farms! The government issues an incentive scheme to guarantee a minimum price for each potato sold. Potential farm owners bid against each other for the lowest price, but it means they can build a farm and expect to break even.

teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.
teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy

teamonkey··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
Because they’re not generation, they’re storage. You need to charge them and that charge can come from any source.
teamonkey··on ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
This is not how curtailment works.

Curtailment is when an energy company has successfully bid on delivering electricity for the next block of time (an hour, for example) but it can’t provide that agreed amount of power because it would overload the grid. There are various reasons why that would happen: faults and unexpected lack of demand, for example. In that case the company is paid for the energy it was contracted to deliver, only for that period of time, even though it did not provide power.

It is wrong to say that overproducers HAVE to be paid. They don’t. They only have to be paid if there was an agreement to buy that power but for whatever reason the grid can’t take it. Normally if there is a generation surplus, the cheapest companies will win the bid to provide power and the others will simply not be paid.

teamonkey··on ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
These policies were in their manifesto, they just take some time to enact, even with a majority government.
teamonkey··on Desk for people who work at home with a cat
They are incredibly communicative animals. Their problem seems to be that I am a very stupid creature that often does the wrong thing, like not feeding them every time they’re hungry, sitting at a desk instead of playing with them, carrying them out of the room when they were clearly trying to get on the kitchen counter, and so on.
teamonkey··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
Roblox accounts for about 50% of total video game play time, it’s insane how big Roblox is.

But not just Roblox. People are spending their time and money elsewhere too. Polymarket and sports betting for one.

teamonkey··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-vid...

You need an email address to access it but it’s good, if bleak, reading.

teamonkey··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
Do we actually know that this is the case? Have they released any figures? How much money are they actually losing on the store?
teamonkey··on Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game
Some other good ones based around deduction:

The Case of the Golden Idol

The Roottrees are Dead

The Seance at Blake Manor

Chants of Sennaar

teamonkey··on MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security
As we say in the uk, “chinny-reckon”
teamonkey··on Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war
That’s because you actually work 6 days a week.
teamonkey··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
There’s no significant recycling of solar panels because they’re still in operation and don’t need to be recycled. Turns out solar panels last decades with only minor degradation so they haven’t needed to be recycled at scale.

They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.

teamonkey··on Rendezvous with Rama
The first Clarke I read as a kid and still one of my favourites. It hasn’t aged well, not least because it was written before we landed on the moon and now know its surface isn’t like that.
teamonkey··on Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
I think the problem with SAT solvers is that they’re complicated, in terms of computation and also how easy it is to understand by someone who didn’t study formal methods.

WFC is brute-force-simple, but because it’s simple it’s quite computationally inexpensive (unless it hits a lot of dead-ends) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it could often find an adequate solution quicker than a SAT solver. At least for games, where a result doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough.

teamonkey··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
That’s because we’ve outsourced so much of our manufacturing to China. Of course ours is going down while theirs is going up.
teamonkey··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?
teamonkey··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.

This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.

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