Recent submissions

Comment · 19 days ago
Why? It works in many countries without incident. What makes the US different?
Comment · 19 days ago
That's why in Germany you are limited to at most 800 W for you house with plug-in solar.

Of course your argument still stands, but we're talking about at most 3.5 A extra current, not 10 A. Home installations seem to be adequately sized to be able to handle that load. At least I'm not aware of any reported incidents, and people have been putting them up for quite a few years already. And typically, German regulations err on the side of caution.

But sure, with 110 V, you will have more problems with the extra current for the same power, so in the American grid there could be further precautions necessary.

Comment · 19 days ago
For panels and inverters, there's really too many to count, but mostly names that one is not typically familiar with. For integrated solutions, familiar names might for example be Anker Solix or Tepto, which offer battery storage with integrated AC inverters. I'm running an Anker Solix Solarbank 2 E1600, which is not really the latest model but rather cheap and runs nicely.

If you want to get an overview of the ecosystem, googling "Balkonkraftwerk" gives you the most relevant results.

Comment · 19 days ago
I really don't understand why most people here act like this is some weird unproven and unsafe technology. This is literally a solved problem. They are everywhere in Germany and it's no issue.

The inverters follow the grid AC and shut off their output if they are disconnected or unplugged, so the plug is never "hot". The power they input into your home wiring/the power grid is limited to 800 Watts as to not overload any installation. And the power meters know not to run backwards if you happen to feed power into the grid. Most can even meter how much power you fed in total (you're not going to get paid for it, though)

If you want, you can add battery storage that follows the same rules but lets you save excess power during the day to feed into your home at night or during demand spikes (washing machine, ...).

The setups are dirt cheap (often 200 - 300 EUR for an inverter and 800 - 1000 W(peak) of solar panels) and pay for themselves in about 1-3 years in saved electricity costs.

Comment · 2 months ago
Is it though? Hetzner gives you 1 TB of cloud storage for 4 USD per month.
Comment · 4 months ago
I'm kind of fascinated by the first diagram on the page. It sits so firmly in the uncanny valley for me and I can't put my finger on why. By itself every part looks ok and normal, but as a whole it just screams AI to me. I don't know if its the color choices or the composition or something else. It all just feels that little bit off.

I mean, I know its AI, the page says so itself, no one is trying to hide it. But it also just gives me AI vibes on such a subliminal level that I can't figure out why.

Comment · 11 months ago
Yes, they say its HDPE, but then conveniently in all their talk about sustainability, they somehow forget to talk about where HDPE actually comes from. Just that it being composed of carbon and hydrogen somehow makes it "clean". Which, I guess, is something you could also say about things like gasoline. Plastic shopping bags are also made of polyethylene. So are they sustainable as well?
Comment · 11 months ago
Sure it is. But it's also nowhere near cost competitive and so no one does. They also don't even claim they're using anything else than "normal" HDPE made from ethylene distilled from crude oil.
Comment · 11 months ago
Which is basically HDPE (plastic) foil with limestone filler. And a whole website full of marketing that somehow never mentions that 20% of the material is non-renewable (made from petroleum products) and not biodegradable.
Comment · 1 year ago
The prompt didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones though. It left a lot of freedom for the model to make the "archeologist" e.g. female, Asian, put them in a different time period, have them wear a different kind of hat etc.

It didn't though, it just spat out what is basically a 1:1 copy of some Indiana Jones promo shoot. No where did the prompt ask for it to look like Harrison Ford.

Comment · 1 year ago
Idk, the models generating what are basically 1:1 copies of the training data from pretty generic descriptions feels like a severe case of overfitting to me. What use is a generational model that just regurgitates the input?

I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.

In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?

Comment · 2 years ago
- Germans use commas as the decimal separator, while periods are only used to separate thousands.

- As stated in one of the linked mastodon posts, the abbreviation for the Deutsche Mark was DM, not DEM

Also, I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars. If anything, embossing the cross itself would make the most sense. Probably they had the tool on hand from another forgery where it may have made more sense.

Comment · 2 years ago
That's basically what beancount does, isn't it? You basically have all the transactions in your plaintext files, and it generates the full ledgers from those on the fly once you want to do any evaluations.
Comment · 3 years ago
Why gatekeep cycling? As far as I am concerned, anything that gets people out of their cars and onto bicycles is a good thing. If they like it, they might still switch to a normal bicycle later. If not, they're still an a bicycle instead of clogging the roads in their car
Comment · 3 years ago
> Bikes that go faster or where one doesn’t need to pedal at all need a license plate and special insurance.

And, critically, they aren't allowed on bike lanes but have to be rode on the road instead, which makes them far less attractive for commuting in the city.

That's why the limited pedelecs are by far the most popular choice of E-Bike in Germany.

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