cycomanic

Joined 7 years ago

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3,708
Member since
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Comment · 5 hours ago
I have been a signal user from very early on, converted most of my family and quite a few friends. I did use Molly to register my second phone (just found I can do that with signal now, so uninstalled Molly and installed signal).I have the impression that the calling experience significantly degraded over the last year, i.e. calls just not ringing at the other end, sometimes even not showing as missed calls, Video calls being very low quality even though both ends are on high quality connections (and switching to other apps yields high quality). Just yesterday I was standing in a queue inside and a friend was outside. We both tried to call each other but the call was just giving ringtone without ringing on the other end. It's become so bad that I'm now considering setting up my own matrix server and transition to that.

Anyone else experiencing the same? I have been wondering if it might have been me using molly, so will test now after going back to signal for second device.

Comment · 5 hours ago
That has been my main reason for Molly as well. Good they finally understood that people might be using more than 1 phone.
Comment · 5 hours ago
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
Comment · 4 days ago
So the answer is no quotes.
Comment · 5 days ago
So where are the quotes of hard left politicians (and not some fringe politician) saying they want to dominate everything. Also how is that even part of a left/right definition. In fact in my experience the ones who most talk about eliminating others in politics are the self declared moderates, who at every opportunity talk about how we need to eliminate the extremes from politics.
Comment · 5 days ago
Just to clarify I'm not american and I don't support either us main party, but your comment that the hard left and hard right are dominating the primaries sums it up pretty clearly. From an outside perspective only absolute miniscule fraction of politicians in the US are hard left. Most of US politics would be anywhere between moderate conservative to extreme right in the rest of the world.
Comment · 8 days ago
Do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? I have several contrary examples. My mother travelled through much of South/central America as a 60 old, taking buses other means of transport, often she was invited to stay at people's homes. Similarly have a very good friend who as two early 30s women travelled through Iran and had similar experiences.

I want experienced small acts of kindness in many countries and in both rural and metropolitan areas. I do agree that different societies are more or less likely. In my mother's travels, she was met with a lot of distrust in Guatemala (but this was reasonably recent after the end of the dictatorship), similarly my best experiences have been in NZ (just walking around with a map in central Auckland often ended up with someone offering to drive you to where you needed to go).

Comment · 13 days ago
> It basically means they can't compete with solar during the day (unless it's cloudy and solar isn't available), whereas nuclear can because the negligible fuel cost means it can take any current price as long as it hits a given average price, and it can bring the average up at night. Which means that coal isn't even competitive with nuclear, since nuclear is getting something during the day whereas coal gets nothing, requiring coal to receive an even higher price than nuclear when renewable output is low and then gets out-competed by nuclear

You keep saying that nuclear can keep operating during the day, because of neglible fuel cost. But fuel cost has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. So even we ignore opex, if you have to earn $100 a day to earn back your capex investment, if the price during the day is such that you can sell electricity for $0, yes you can still run your plant, but if prices allow you to only earn $80 during the night, you're still loosing money. So it's still a terrible investment. Calculations get worse if prices go negative during the day (but your plant can't easily be switched off) or if we include opex.

Moreover, other technology like batteries, are on an exponential trajectory. So average price differences between night and day are likely going to drop.

Comment · 13 days ago
> The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.

This is where you're wrong. That is the big problem for nuclear in particular. You just can't recover your capex during the night. The night is the low demand time anyway, and you are still competing with wind etc.. Nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors, because it's not economically viable. In fact operators even want to turn off reactors because even their running cost are too high (happened in Sweden, a while ago. IIRC the government wanted to turn it back on for political reasons).

Comment · 13 days ago
> What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low

Variability and fuel costs have nothing to do with why nuclear is a bad idea. The problem why nuclear is expensive is that all the cost comes from capex, which is huge in comparison to all the other sources (which is also the reason why trying to quickly bring down emissions with nuclear is so fraud). But because they are not variable, nuclear has to accept the price which is set by other sources.

This is actually illustrated by Denmark. They are a net importer of electricity in terms of kWh, but a net exporter in Dollar amounts. In other words their energy mix allows them to export when prices are high and import when prices are low.

Comment · 13 days ago
Btw the decision to go down this transition was economically very smart. While Denmark is a net importer of electricity in terms of kWh, in terms of dollars they have a positive trade budget, i.e. they import when prices are low and export when prices are high (at least for the years that I could find data for).
Comment · 13 days ago
That argument doesn't make any sense. Why would the same arguments about investments not apply to a single country? Moreover, considering the size of the China (both geographically and economically) it should be much easier to do this, because they don't have to rely on the decisions of others but can make decisions themselves.
Comment · 22 days ago
The main part of the argument is that the US is very happy to apply their laws to foreign citizens for things they have done on foreign soil and are also happy to legally or illegally extract those citizens from the foreign states. That does in fact directly violate those other states sovereignty.
Comment · 27 days ago
I've run 3.8 flash next k4_xl on my Strix halo box (128GB). And in the work I have done so far it was not significantly worse than recent GPT (running default model on pro plan). Admittedly I was not doing complex work (reorganizing a jupyterbook), but I could not see significant difference in the quality of the work. It was a striking difference to Laguna s 2.1 which I had tried just before (much faster and much better quality).

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