News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

eldaisfish

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:32PM (#50331973)
when a natural disaster happens, especially one that disrupts electricity for weeks, your likely first priority is being alive, safe and being able to eat, not mould or your air conditioning.
Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:07PM (#50328639)
i am regularly shocked by the assumptions that the techbro crowd makes. I should not be, but i still am.

The desire to operate a massive AC just after a natural disaster is just unhinged. Similarly, this idea that your life should be able to continue as before, your neighbours be damned, is also psychotic.

People like me push for the better solution (against great opposition) - neighbourhood-level improvements so the rich don't hoard all the resources while the rest are left to die.

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:04PM (#50328607)
driving an obese, modern EV at highway speeds of around 100 km/h uses about 20 kW.

The average house in the US and Canada uses between 2 - 5 kW around 98% of the time.

and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.

Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.

I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.

might be a mixed bag but when safety of vehicles is involved, the japanese and germans are very good. Observe cars driving almost anywhere in southern europe and you will instantly spot the difference.
indeed. Japan is a compliance and shame based society. that alone is the foundation of a very strong safety culture, something that southern europe is famous for lacking.
it is deeply ironic that a toyota hilux pickup truck - an actually practical pickup truck - does not meet US "standards" but the pedestrian killing, inefficient, wasteful, and expensive "pickups" from US auto companies somehow do.
the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.

If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.

Here's your serious citation - the polar vortex.

These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.

The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.

North American cities very much were built around walking and trams.

The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.

just a meta comment about the comment you replied to.

I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.

I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This is complete and utter horseshit.

Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.

If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @11:20AM (#49845862)
this is not a problem for you, given where you are, and your lifestyle.

Those are absolutely massive caveats.

Where i am in Canada, relying on public charging is just not practical.

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @11:17AM (#49845824)
lol, this is complete nonsense. The average person has non idea how the electricity grid works or how much capacity it has. "The grid will collapse" is just FUD spread by the oil industry and parroted by the boomers who run electricity companies.

Even in a city like Bombay, with a famously unplanned electric grid, people are buying electric scooters not because the government told them to, but because it's cheaper. Bombay has yet to have this "overload" that so many here seem to fear.

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @11:14AM (#49845784)
just a caveat - some EVs, like Hyundai models, require using an app and the internet to enable this. If you use only the key fob, the heat pump compressor does not run.
Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @11:11AM (#49845758)
you're not making the point you think you are. The average January temperature in most of Norway is about 10 C higher than in most of Yukon and Alaska. Norway just isn't that cold.

That said, heat pumps absolutely do work in -20 C. I would know because i have two at home and one in the car. All three worked just fine at -25 C this past winter.

I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

Re:Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @08:16PM (#49636482)
i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.

As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.

Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.

Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.

Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @03:43PM (#49633014)
a better analogy would be a toyota hybrid, which is basically the same as any other hybrid car, except for the one issue of reliability.

So yes, a toyota hybrid and a chevrolet hybrid should be exactly the same, but they are not, the price difference reflects it, as does the number of twenty year old toyota hybrids still on the road.

You are not a transport planner and it shows.

People in the US don’t magically “want” giant pickup trucks and pedestrian killing SUVs. They want cheap and practical vehicles, neither of which are available in large quantities. Notice how the advertising for pickups works? Straight, white, rural men in jeans telling you how your expensive pickup can drive off road? And then you read the manual and warranty where that exact usage is either forbidden or discouraged.

Same with the suburbs. Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives

Where is your data showing that people “prefer” this?

what i personally find most insightful about this website is how the techbro culture will do anything except consider the needs of the many. why bother with good transit when we can automate cars? why bother with copyright when we can just steal content at a scale that few can comprehend.
For anyone curious, this is hyperbole that people of certain political persuasions love to mischaracterise.

These were not "protests", they were a sustained attempt to appeal to the wrong level of government for policies of a foreign government by a bunch of people who were riled up on the internet. Highlights included nazi flags, guns, harassing and threatening women and local residents, etc.

what is most telling is that when you search for commentary about the Canadian federal government freezing bank accounts, a significant portion of links are from reactionary, right wing websites.

this tech bro utopia ALWAYS ignores relatively basic solutions. A great example is reliable, regular, and efficient public transit. We don't need self driving cars and all that mumbo jumbo. A bloody train, tram or a bus would solve most of these problems.
Re:Stopping the smart TV from being used against you on Friday August 28, 2026 @06:20PM (#49484947)
removing the cellular modem from a car can have several unintended consequences.

The geniuses at hyundai refuse to let you operate the heating in some of their electric cars without an internet connection. Yes, you read that right - the only way to operate the HVAC compressor in several hyundai EVs is via their stupid app and the internet. I found out the hard way when i kept noticing that my hyundai EV was not heating the cabin in winter even though i turned the HAVC on. Turns out, as soon as you plug into the wall outlet, the compressor stops.

There is no technical reason for this, other than enshittification.

Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @03:47PM (#49483352)
right now, i cannot even enable Backspace = go back on Edge. I am forced to use Edge on my work computer and i hate that this feature is gone. Not disabled, just gone.

About enter to auto submit, i've been running into this problem more often where some web frameworks just ignore the Enter key. There is a submit button, but i cannot trigger it via the enter key.

Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @02:16PM (#49482427)
you are arguing against a strawman.

Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use?

Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothing.

Re:Turns are Better than Radians on Thursday August 20, 2026 @09:41AM (#49374467)
it is quite telling that wikipedia has pages upon pages documenting pokemon, but relatively limited context about maths or science, beyond what's in textbooks.
All the data about India's demonetisation points to it being a complete and utter waste of time. The goalposts kept shifting and the whole aim was never clear. People died, please do not minimise their deaths.

The absolute disaster of how COVID was managed was a shame, and is a borderline crime against humanity. Again, please do not minimise the deaths of millions of Indians as "the media was blaming every single death on the government". The government of Indian was directly responsible for that entire fiasco.

Why then are you trying to justify invasive hidden cameras in more places? Really, why not just use the existing solutions?

This push for « convenience » is how we ended up with microphones in people’s most private spaces.

I urge you to consider whether humanity really needs more technological solutions to social problems.

but then you are not present, you are distracted by a computer. Just because that computer does not have a clunky monitor, doesn't mean that you aren't any less distracted.

Some of the attitudes on this website, especially ones like yours, are the literal reason we are in this mess today.

Please, please, if you have the power, push back on this nonsense from the inside. We need more people talking to other people like real humans, not like notes in a digital diary.

Older »