dgmib @ dgmib @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This is the same premier that declared a moratorium on new grid scale solar and wind farms. Alberta has some of the most optimal conditions in Canada for solar power and we can’t build it, because….

The oversimplified explanation is that having a lottery is heavily regulated in Canada as will all forms of gambling, but offering a prize for a contest of skill is not. And frankly it’s never been a priority for anyone to modernize the laws to something more straightforward.

Legally you can have a “contest of skill” and arbitrary decide a winner at random if there’s a tie. This eventually evolved into the typical “math question with a minimum of 4 operands”, which was ruled as essentially the minimum threshold for demonstrating a degree of skill.

What is it about bioreactors that doesn’t scale?

This is great to see.

80% of carbon offsets are creative accounting at best and bold-faced lies at worst.

If you don’t agree I’ve got a _{a bridge} I mean some Carbon Offsets for sale.

People don’t have a problem with subscriptions, they have a problem with companies like Ubisoft charging ridiculous sums to play low quality games.

Subscriptions would take off just fine if they were reasonable and fair, and not trying to exploit their customers.

For the record, yes you need a pilot’s license to fly a hot air balloon.

And yes the “balloon police” (aka the FAA in the United States) or their equivalent governing body in other countries will stop you, and fine you.

That’s surprising accurate for many developers.

And you’re forgetting that about 1% of the population is pregnant at any given time and has another whole human inside of them.

I used to work with health inspectors, when talking about my work I would describe what they do as “ You know the guys who go into restaurants and say ‘I’m shutting you down there’re too many cockroaches in the soup’”

About 1 person in 10 notices I said too many cockroaches.

Restaurants are allowed to have a certain amount of bug parts in soup.

Lived in a house that had a heat pump with resistive electric heat as a backup in Canada. Never noticed a significant difference between that and other houses I’ve lived in that had natural gas furnaces.

Aux heat would kick whenever it was below about -5°C. That house would be about 20 years old now and had decent insulation for the location and age. It never really felt like the furnace struggled to keep the house warm, or was running all the time.

Cost wise it didn’t seem significantly better or worse than natural gas. It was definitely using more juice in the winter when there was a cold snap, but it wasn’t crazy amounts. The electric bill was actually highest in the summer when the heat pump was cooling.

I’m not intending to defend Musk or Tesla here, but this study is literally just insurance incidents by brand and makes no distinction between Teslas on autopilot and under human control.

Teslas tend to attract a certain kind of driver that likes their performance characteristics who are not typically known for being the safest drivers.

There’s no doubt that a lot of Tesla drivers abuse the autopilot capabilities, and the Elon Musk hype machine is at least partially to blame for that, probably more.

But this isn’t evidence one way or the other about the safety of Tesla’s FSD.

Exactly.

Your choice is “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” not “Guilty” or “Innocent”.

(And for the pedantic out there yes, there are more things you can plead than just guilty or not guilty)

“Not guilty” doesn’t mean innocent, it just means you take the stance that prosecutors are unable to prove their version of events beyond reasonable doubt.

You’re dreaming if you think there’s a technological way to enforce access restrictions. You can’t do it with “browser attestation” or “APIs”.

Both China and Russia have built operational SMRs. (Not to mention the fact that the nuclear reactors we’ve had for decades in military submarines and ship are SMRs). They exist.

We don’t have enough data about the economics or SMRs to say for sure, most (but not all) economic models put LCOE for SMRs at half the cost of traditional PWR nuclear reactors.

It’s hard to judge from the current smr projects what the costs will be. The largest cost in building nuclear power is all the regulatory oversight. Every PWR plant is different and needs to go through the entire process from scratch. But once we have some successful and proven SMR designs. They can be mass produced from the same vetted and approved designs without needing to go through the massively expensive design process again.

SMRs are simpler too. Which makes them cheaper. They don’t need as many layers of redundant safety systems like traditional reactors do. Even in the worst case scenario, an SMR can meltdown and a person living next door would be perfectly safe.

All of that adds up to the a lot of potential cost savings if we mass produce them.

If we can build enough solar or other renewable power to replace fossil fuels without nuclear, great.

But most people have no idea just how much it’s going to take. We need to not only replace all the fossil fuels on the grid today. Plus have extra capacity to charge storage for use when its night and cover the added demand of all the electric cars, trucks, furnaces, everything else that needs to become electric.

We need to be building nuclear too. We can’t build enough solar and wind fast enough.

Spez is such a lying sack of 💩

Third party apps weren’t some collateral damage from monetizing LLM usage. Reddit set the prices. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be one price for third party apps like Apollo and RIF that are largely used to add to the community and build Reddit’s value, and a separate price for throws just using it to mine the data.

It wasn’t about opportunity costs of lost ad revenue either. By all estimates, if they gave the third party apps a grace period to rework their business models to be able to pay the api fees. The average third party app user would generate several times more revenue for Reddit than the revenue they get from ads by forcing them to use Reddit’s shitty app

So why Reddit would force people to use their free shitty app if the revenue is less? Either Spez and the leadership at Reddit are idiots or the Reddit it’s giving them something else of value they can sell that they don’t get for the third party apps. Something besides just eyeballs on ads.

I’m pretty sure Reddit killed third party apps so they can harvest more of your data and sell you out.

Before you ask your boss anything, figure out where do you want to go? And I don’t just mean in your career.

Then from that figure out, what does your ideal career trajectory look like in the next few years?

Do you want to be an L2? a sysadmin? DevOps? Do you want to keep working for an MSP, or maybe into a company with a dedicated IT team. Also consider if your tech career progression isn’t the most important thing, maybe it’s family, maybe it more time for a hobby, that’s ok too.

When you have a clear picture of what you want to do, communicate that and ask what you can do for the company that also helps move you toward that goal.

They probably won’t be moving you into your target role immediately, but any decent manager will help you move towards your goals, with training, mentoring, or other opportunities for skill building.

Some bosses are shitty and will try to keep you in roles that are the best for them, These bosses usually respond with a focus on your flaws, they will tell you why you’re not ready for whatever the next step is and offer no support or guidance to help you change whatever they cite. If you have a boss like that, start looking for another job.

Keep in mind the company has their own goals, you need to be prepared to be flexible they’re not going to move you into a role they don’t need. But as long as your manager isn’t a total dick, they’ll move you as close towards your goal as they can within the limits of the company’s goals.

Especially in this field it’s pretty common to need to move to another company to keep moving towards your goals. If you haven’t progressed to a new level within a year or two start applying for L2 role (or whatever else you want) at other companies.

Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.

I literally bailed while writing a comment on another post just to scroll down to this post next.

So yea… all the time.

I concur with everything you've written here.

I concur that a left-to-right interpretation of consecutive explicit multiplication and division is wide spread and how most calculators and computers would interpret:

a / b * c.

But the sources you quote in your blog post and the style guides I've read, state that a fraction bar or parenthesis should be used to clarify if it should be interpreted as:

(a / b) * c

or

a / (b * c)

You make the argument in your post that:

a / bc

is ambiguous (which I agree with)

but

a / b * c

is not ambiguous. Which is the part I disagree with, and I think the sources you quoted disagree with you as well. But I'm open to being wrong about that and am interested if you have sources that prove otherwise.

If I'm understanding your response correctly, you believe that

a / b * c

is unambiguous, and always treated like

(a / b) * c

because of a wide spread convention of left-to-right interpretation (a convention that we both agree exists), not because you found a source that states that.

Anyhow... I'm not out to convince you of anything and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your thinking to me.

I would be particularly interested if you found something in a mathematical style guide that recommended an expression like

( a / b ) * c

Should be re-written as

a / b * c

Generally speaking, style guides advise rewriting equations for maximum clarity. Which usually includes a guideline of removing parentheses when their existence isn’t needed to clarify intent.

I believe, and I’m particularly interested to see if you found evidence that my understanding is incorrect, that the LTR convention used by calculators and computer programming languages today exists because a deterministic interpretation is a requirement or the hardware, not because any such convention existed prior to that or has been officially codified one way or the other by any mathematics bodies.

So like, forget division for a sec…

In a mathematics paper, you usually wouldn’t write:

(a + (b + c)) + d

You’d write:

a + b + c + d

(Except perhaps if in your paper the parentheses made it easier to follow how you got to that equation.)

Because in mathematics, it will never matter which order you do additions in, so you should drop the parentheses to improve clarity.

On a computer or a calculator though you might get a different result for those two equations like if a+b overflows your accumulator and c is a negative number, or when these are floating points values with significantly different magnitudes.

I believe english speaking engineers just adopted LTR as the convention for how to interpret it since they had to do something, and the english language is a LTR language. I don’t believe that convention exists outside of the context of computing.

The Wolfram quote and ISO quote in particular that you have in your post imply that an inline division followed by an explicit multiplication is ambiguous as to if it should be interpreted as a compound fraction.

If that’s correct, then it would be the inline division that makes it ambiguous, not the implicit multiplication that makes it ambiguous.

If there’s some source from before computers, or outside of the context of computers forcing a decision. Then your assertion that it is the implicit multiplication causes the ambiguity is correct.

I’m not trying to prove you’re wrong, I’m just genuinely curious which it is. And if you found evidence one way or the other.