cycomanic

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.

That has been my main reason for Molly as well. Good they finally understood that people might be using more than 1 phone.

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.

So the answer is no quotes.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

> 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).

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.

The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.

I don't know what field you are talking about, but your statement is simply not true for the fields that I'm familiar with (physics and EE). I know plenty of foreign PhDs who went to the US for academic or research positions, at postdoc or faculty level.

There was some statistics on capital in the 21st century by Picketty (maybe from Kindle readers?) that most owners of the books only read the first 10 pages or so. Am on mobile but should be easy to find.

Not necessarily saying this generalises to all non fiction books though

That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).

In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.

It's often denoted plagiarism or self plagiarism as a short cut. While it's probably better denoted duplicate publication (or similar) it still constitutes a similar academic misconduct, because you're pretending something is novel without it being novel

As a side note quite often it can actually be literal plagiarism as well, many journals require you to assign copyright, so using that work without attribution is plagiarism.

Back in the days when I had to take some latin for my studies, our lecturer always used to say "don't ask my why, latin might be more logical than most languages, but it's a language not math. Languages are not logical". It actually became a bit of a running gag because we still had some students who needed to ask why for every rule.

Net immigration was never more than a million (let alone "millions" which was the lie I responded to). It reached a peak of 900 000 in 2023.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...

There are no millions of people every year, stop spreading lies. Net immigration to the UK in 2025 where 170000 people. Decidedly not millions!

"huge uncontrolled levels of immigration". Let's put some actual numbers to this. Net immigration in 2025 was about 170k people, over the next 10 years projections are for about 2.2 million net immigration. So that's about 3-4%. However, UK population is shrinking without immigration so net population growth with immigration is about 1.7 million.

Not sure if that matches a definition of huge, but it's important to note that with a shrinking population without immigration the UK would be in serious economic trouble (like every country). This is even more exaberated due to the aging population that the shrinking population implies.

Immigrants like always are the convenient scapegoat that is being used to distract from the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.

Citation needed

That is simply not true. One example is a hilarious skit by an Australian comedian (John Safran) going to salt lake city and knocking on doors asking if he could talk to people about atheism. The amount of violent threads he received is quite revealing.

In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.

There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and marking times and the cross over point where oral exams were actually taking longer than written exams was surprisingly high, around 180 students or so. To be fair though I think they considered 15 min oral exams, but the gist is that in the scalability argument people tend to forget to account for marking and exam design time appropriately.

> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.

Citation needed

One additional tidbit of info. While the northern coast in Germany has certainly more wind, a reason why wind falls off so strongly towards the south, are the policies of the CSU party in Bavaria, which though not quite as bad as trump has been running Anti-Wind policies and making wind installations extremely difficult to build.