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> The tl;dr here is they also don't want to have to pay to outsource their support staff, so they're paying openai or someone else instead.

I don't think that's the right lens to view this in. Germany in particular is a very difficult market to provide customer service in, given that German-language skills outside of the high-wage DACH region is non-existent, when you compare it to the English speaking market that often relies on the acceptably-accented Phillipine region. If you want to provide customer service in Germany, it's not simply that firms aren't willing to pay enough to hire customer support staff, it's that the pool of people who could work in this field just don't exist in large enough numbers.

By introducing agentic AI to solve some number of support questions you offer patients service that you just otherwise simply couldn't.

> Your face scan is now online waiting for the next data breach

Completely understood, but the point is that it's at CBP or UK Border Force or Bundespolizei, and it's in the security camera system at the airport, too.

If you've been a visitor to Australia recently, you'll be all too familiar with the process of using your phone to scan your face plus passport data.

When you enter the airport, you walk past signs notifying you of extensive surveillance camera use.

I get that this is about preventing ticket reselling, but I have a different question: Can someone explain the controversy around face scans for air travel? Governments have clearly laid out that flying affords zero expectation of privacy, and the airlines won't let you buy a plane ticket without knowing your name (as opposed to bus or subway tickets). If the airline knows your name, and their attendants see and verify your face when boarding anyway, then are we losing anything through the use of face scans?

Domestic flights in the US make extensive use of facial scanning, and both US and EU border agencies digitally scan your face to identify you (Global Entry in the US even means you theoretically don't need your passport to enter the country).

So why should we pretend like face scanning isn't happening? I can understand the idea that at some point, I won't need a boarding pass nor identification to get onto a plane, and at this point, it appears to not cost me any privacy that I've already lost over the last 25 years.

As another commenter noted, this is data from the German online shop MindFactory, which could be understood as the German equivalent to NewEgg. MindFactory would probably overrepresent enthusiast and small business customers, and underrepresent your average consumer who would rather buy their laptop from a big box store (MediaMarkt/Saturn) or enterprise customers, who probably buy directly from Dell/Lenovo/HP/Fujitsu.

The KeePass2Android app gains a bit of functionality if you use it with SFTP instead. You get the ability to, for example, merge changes in the event that there's a conflict. I recommend using SFTP to a machine that then runs SyncThing to the rest of your devices.

> Hydrogen is a terrible battery. Best case conversion to H2 is ~80%, while best case fuel cell efficiency is ~50%. That's 40% round trip while most batteries can do 90%.

While there's no arguing with the physics here, don't forget the economics either. The price of electricity in Denmark on a cloudy, windless early evening can easily be 10 or more times the price in Newfoundland. Then start factoring in that a plane carrying hydrogen is significantly lighter than a plane carrying batteries.

While you might be using 10x as much electricity at the point of generation, you're paying a lot less for it, and you're using it more efficiently.

Because a user sitting in the United States could be served copyrighted content by GitLab. It would likely even come from one of GitLab's servers in the US. In that hypothetical instance, GitLab is in clear violation under US law.

In theory GitLab could decide to ignore the DMCA, as you suggest, but that would mean removing all US servers, firing all US staff and cancelling all contracts with US customers (including those that GitLab has with the US government itself). Even in that instance, you would just move the copyright lawsuit to Dutch courts.

> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam

I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation.

Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times.

Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars.

In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.

I don't have hard numbers, but I can say that spam on both sides of the ocean exist. In the US, we get a lot of SMS spam targeted at homeowners, pestering them about selling their property, since there's a lot of open data about property ownership. In Germany, there's frequently spam pretending to be one of the major shipping companies (DHL for example) or the local customs office (Zoll) saying you have a package that couldn't be delivered and to click on a link. I've found the source for this data to be customer data leaks.

So yes, spam is a serious concern. WhatsApp spam exists as well, but since there's a central authority, unlike with SMS, it's a lot harder to avoid being shutdown.

> My work has 480V 3-phase for our SMT line. We have permanently-installed charge stations on that 3-phase service.

Are all three phases even being sent to the electric cars? The J1772 only supports a single phase.

> while CCS2 can do 3-phase charging

Is that at all relevant for the North American market, where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car? And is it even relevant to the CCS part of the standard, when really what CCS adds on top of IEC 62196 is the ability to use DC charging, at which point phases are irrelevant.

The whole point of connectors is, firstly, how much power they can deliver (both NACS and CCS1 appear equally capable), then, how affordable they are to make and how easy they are to use.

Affordability is objective, NACS is simply cheaper to make. Less materials go into it, and that's a win. Furthermore, it doesn't require a massive charging port (see how Tesla had to work around CCS2 for the Model S/Y in Europe because their charging port cover is too small), so there's further benefits here.

Ease of use is less objective, but for anyone who has used both, clearly NACS is much, much better. It's lighter, less chonky, simpler (you don't have to remove a cover over the DC plugs). I think the consensus here is just clear.

So what, then, is an objective argument FOR using CCS1 over NACS? I really don't see one. The only argument I can see is that we lose some mild amount of harmony with CCS2 connectors that the rest of the world is going to use, but with the differences between CCS1 and CCS2 that exist anyway, that might be a moot point.

It's absolutely fantastic that we have so many runtimes, so quickly, to the point where we have an awesome list.

However, given that the usefulness of chatbots depends more on the model being used, what I would find a lot more useful is a ranking of the various models that are available. Currently I'm having to rely on comments on the internet to find out if Alpaca 7B or LlaMA 65B is genuinely productive to use. As new models come out, I'd love it if I knew how well it tells jokes, answers complicated questions, or generates code.

I can't recommend the long HDMI (or HDMI-over-CAT5, or long Thunderbolt) enough. The noise isolation you can achieve by doing so is unbeatable. Even moving anything short of a 1U server into a neighboring closet means no perceptible noise, so you're really buying yourself more flexibility such that you can use almost any computer without thinking about noise constraints.

Even more than that, I'll bet a lot of people who are connecting a media PC to their living room TV also have another PC somewhere in the house. With a long HDMI cable, you can connect an existing PC to the TV, thus saving the entire expense of a new PC. This is particularly interesting for gaming, since a good gaming PC is a lot more expensive than even some of the longest HDMI cables.