abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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Speaking as an Australian we’re also not super great at embracing the whole renewables thing

Erm... Australia has the more rooftop solar (32% of households) than any other country in the world and one state (south Australia) already has enough wind turbines to cover 100% of their overnight power consumption when the weather is favourable - with more being deployed (not to mention their grid is connected tot he rest of the nation, which is also investing in wind and hydro, so if it's windy somewhere else that's good enough).

We're also moving pretty fast into hydrogen... in part because we have more power than we can use, so selling it (in the form of green hydrogen) makes sense.

We also have a dying but massive fossil fuel industry, and they spread a lot of FUD... but the reality is those power companies aren't price competitive with renewable and never will be. They have no future and they're just trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible.

Everyone thought that would happen with Huawei. What actually happened was a whole bunch of major countries banned Huawei imports and a lot of the ones that allowed them in are having second thoughts. Germany, for example, is in the early discussion phase to remove Huawei equipment (which is already deployed) from their cell network.

I'd go Nuphy Air (available in a few different sizes) rather than Keychron.

I love my Keychrons (own four of them...) but Nuphy is quite a bit better in several small ways, from nicer keycaps to feet that sit perfectly on top of a MacBook Air keyboard (if you buy a small Nuphy) to lovely cary cases that double as a tablet/phone stand.

It has a weird layout though, with a globe key where control should be.

I'm not sure if anything needs to be "fixed". They just need more staff. They've laid off tens of thousands of staff in recent years and as far as I know it hasn't even cut costs.

The department has spent a fortune paying the remaining staff penalty/overtime rates to fill in staff shortage gaps and a lack of staff has massively increased the workload of the staff because problems are easier to deal with if you get on top of them early.

For example when my kid was born, someone in the department stuffed up his registration. It took over a year to fix that simple mistake and created a huge amount of work for the department. In the old days, when the department had enough staff, they would've fixed it in five minutes.

Robodebt has been just as big a stuff up as my little story. It cost $600 million to run robodebt, which is almost as much money as they "recovered" and it's looking like most of the money recovered will be paid back to whoever they took it off with over a hundred million in interest on top of that. What a mess.

The problem is they don't know which ones are unlawful.

I can get behind "uses a lot of water". But where the headline loses me (to the point where I won't be reading the article) is "potentially cause freshwater shortages".

If someone is using water to mine bitcoins... that's because they can't think of anything more useful to do with that water and likely means they are operating somewhere that has an abundance of water.

And if they're wasting a resource that is needed to grow food, well that's something the local government can easily stop.

Tesla recommends (I think it's the default?) limiting charging to 80% and when they drain as low as 20% they shut down to protect the battery. You'll need to call a tow truck unless there's a major emergency/evacuation, then they take advantage of the car's cellular connection to unlock the last 20% and allow drivers to use the whole battery.

I don't think the Volt did that. Maybe newer (and more expensive...) GM EVs do though.

September sales were actually up 13% from last year

Covid-19 shut down a lot of factories. Not just US car factories but also suppliers of small/cheap components (some of them worth less than one cent each) just couldn't be purchased in large volumes.

As far as I know the industry still hasn't fully recovered. 13% year over year growth isn't a 13% increase in demand, it's a 13% increase in the number of cars they're able to sell.

What they should really do is pass legislation to force those companies to develop apps that actually work well.

It sounds like you could've taken that car back for a warranty claim.... depending on your state it should be able to do about 30 miles after either 8 or 15 years, and your was doing less than 20 at 9 years... I assume you were in an eight year state?

Having said that, draining the battery fully every day will absolutely kill it. It's not good for the battery to be empty that often... an EV with a 300 mile range and the same driving pattern could probably go well over a million miles on the original battery. That's far longer than the typical life of a modern ICE engine (unless its an engine specifically intended for commercial fleets - those last longer).

Of course, a battery that can do 300 miles is very expensive.

No worries. I did learn a lot from your comment by the way as I'm by no means a physics person... I just work with light as part of my job and the different behaviour from one colour/wavelength has practical (and safety) implications that I have to account for.

Not a correction but a minor clarification. Green light doesn't inherently have the most energy. Shorter wavelengths have more energy but tend to scatter in our atmosphere and a lot of it doesn't reach the surface (that's why the sky is blue).

It's also why UV light causes skin cancer and burns on humans, and kills bacteria/viruses/etc. Green is also pretty poor at lighting up flourescents, while blue(which has more energy) does much better. Ultra violet is even better than blue.

That does make me question your theory that green light is the most effective at evaporating water because it's high energy. Blue/violet/ultra violet would be better than green if that was the case. The test didn't use sunlight, it used artificial lighting and the effects of the atmosphere are effectively zero over short distances.

Nah that's bullshit.

Interstate powerlines are like half an inch and they carry several orders of magnitude more power than you'd ever need to quickly charge a car battery.

EV charge cables are thick because a lot of them contain several wires which all need to be electrically shielded from each other (which is generally done by maintaining a physical gap between the actual wires). Part of that is just because we have multiple generations of EV charge technology and the new standards are backwards compatible with the old standards... so a lot of the wires in the cable are not even used when you charge your EV.

As shit as twitter nowadays is, I’d rather have the (as little as it might be) competition that Twitter provides for the corporatised internet, than have Google and Facebook being the only ones to be operating social media platforms.

You're implying X/Google/Facebook are the only companies with a social media presence - when that's clearly not the case. Have you forgotten that Lemmy and Mastodon exist? We already have wonderful alternatives to "corporatised" social networks. We don't need X.

Also - last I checked Google has shut down every social network they've ever tried to create, unless you classify gmail and youtube as social networks (I wouldn't).

Facebook and Instagram are now the only large social networks operated by a public company. And even that company has launched Threads which will soon be on the fediverse taking away a lot of their ability control things. If Threads does anything users don't like, it'll be really easy for users to jump ship to another instance.

DIGI, the network this article is about, is not a "social network" focused group. It's a general internet focused group and, among other things, it includes a commitment to have some kind of public policy document which is actually followed. X has a policy document - but they're not following their own policies which is why they were kicked out.

Inflation adjusted... those canals cost $50 billion to construct and the project took decades. It would cost far more now, since getting access to the land rights would be a nightmare.

They're already not providing enough water, so if building more canals is your proposed solution then you needed to start construction 20 years ago.

Upgrading the canals can potentially double the amount of water they provide. It's far cheaper, and quicker, than building more canals.

Solar panels alone wouldn't get you to 2x efficiency but it'll help a lot, and unlike other upgrades it also provides ongoing revenue. It's an absolute no brainer to start with this and do other canal upgrades later, when every inch of the canals are already covered in panels.

4% is basically just the payment processing fee (averaged out, since it's slightly different for every transaction). Spotify has to pay that regardless of how you pay.

Just so you know - it's nowhere near as good as the "real" gpt-4. Maybe try paying for a month and see how it compares.

This. Replace commonly used code snippets well written code that reduces them to one or two lines of code and take advantage of auto-complete in your IDE.

For the rare case where that doesn't make sense... I'm I'll ususally find (or create) an extension/plugin for my IDE. Something that can be smarter than any snippet.

The problem with open models is you basically have to run it on your own hardware, and the hardware is not only expensive it's also unobtainable.

H100 GPUs are sold by scalpers for $50k with no warranty — and worse that's an obsolete model. The H200 GPU just can't be purchased at all unless you're filling a datacentre with them.