Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
you have to put at least a little bit of context on asks like if you want a reply. Nobody knows how much water you use, how big of a house / apt, how many bathrooms, etc.
Comment · 1 month ago
heat pumps just run something similar to a reverse Carnot cycle on their refrigerants and use a condenser coil to release the extra heat to the water. So for all practical purposes it heats the water inside the tank in a pretty similar fashion to how a normal electric water heater works, it just delivers it from a slightly different source and it isn't electric resistive.

So no, not possible. Theoretically you might be able to do it with a stupid enough system of coils and a very ridiculous amount of power, but it wouldn't be efficient or practical.

Comment · 2 months ago
To some extent ADHD drugs are abused but to us neurodivergent people those stimulants (or in other cases just alpha 2 agonists) just help us do normal things that normal people can do without drugs, like laundry. Or reading a book, or be able to focus on literally anything that isn’t giving us a high level dopamine response.

The meds (both stimulant and non stimulant) help people with ADHD choose where to hyperfocus, but hyperfocus is an internal trait of the ADHD neurotype, so it isn’t just attributable to the drugs or something.

I.e. normal people use stimulants to go fast, while ND people with ADHD use them to go slow or have their brain actually be able to slow down.

Comment · 2 months ago
Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly
Comment · 2 months ago
You sweet sweet summer child.

Spoken like a guy who has never had to maintain bare metal infrastructure ops at scale. These things break, need re-imaged, have parts that break, have to be configured (now you need provisioning pipelines, monitoring, alarms, etc), have to be maintained when something goes wrong (swapping hardware and software, debugging the alarms into actually figuring out which bits are broken and/or misconfigured), have to be catalogued, have to be planned for, deprecated, and the finances accounted for through complicated accounting to show investors the Capex at quarterly meetings.

Then you have to make fleet decisions on how much of each type of server you will want to buy, expanded storage, how long you will support each generation of server, when you will order new hardware, how to order new hardware, lag for real world installs, hiring actual humans to fly around to all of your datacenters and do the actual installations / maintainance / etc. Then you will have to do contracts with individual datacenter operators for margins, electricity rates, hosting contracts, white glove ops hourly rates, etc.

Businesses that own their own hardware tend to have a lot of employees whose jobs are maintaining it and running the business side of that.

Comment · 3 months ago
Fraud that destroys market trust in a market that mostly deals in surveillance and selling intrusive data that was collected mostly unknowingly from the subject seems great to everyone who has any amount of integrity.
Comment · 3 months ago
Anyone with half a brain can see that destroying the public internet is a very very bad thing. I now have to half assume you are a bad faith argument by a bot.

The good information is again being siloed to hide it from the scrapers, destroying a massive amount of value.

Poisoning the well of human trust is one of the worst things you can do to society.

Comment · 4 months ago
No the Home Screen ads were added in an update 2.5ish years ago. I know this because that is when I decided to disconnect my Roku tv from the internet rather than see ads when I turn my tv on.

I had been a pretty big Roku fan before that point as I had worked with them back in ~2017 and knew how locked down and sewn up they kept customer data, and only shared it in a very anonymized way. Obviously the situation has degraded in the recent years, and caused me to brick the functionality of a very expensive device.

Seems like it’s impossible to have a smart tv now that actually respects privacy, so back to dumb tvs and connections to pcs?

Comment · 4 months ago
If you are being serious; read the tower for much more context.
Comment · 4 months ago
I’m interested as to who this is testing.

I see double click coverage, Amazon coverage, and a tiny amount of Facebook, but missing a lot of large players in the adtech space. I don’t see Microsoft being explicitly called here.

Then from the large scale independent companies I see none of them on here? Shouldn’t you try Trade desk, Magnite, Applovin, Criteo, Xandr as well?

Then you would want to check vs data brokers as well; Experian, Equifax, Axciom, Epsilon, LexisNexus, Liveramp, and CoreLogic at minimum.

Comment · 5 months ago
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.

This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.

Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.

So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.

Comment · 5 months ago
Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.

Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.

Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.

It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!

Comment · 5 months ago
Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.
Comment · 5 months ago
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.

However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).

Comment · 5 months ago
This is a silly take. There is a line of "good enough" for most coding (most CRUD apps and APIs are nothing special), and once we are past that, nobody will care about having the "newest, best" model except extreme outliers. And this base "good enough" model will become an ultra cheap commodity as we already see with GLM, deepseek, etc.

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