nonfamous

ID is already required in the US to vote. You are required to register to vote, and that registration includes an identity check. Performing the check at this stage allows the time to verify identity and correct any issues, well before voting day.

This is standard in Australia. Everyone between 50 and 74 receives a free kit in the mail every two years, and there are regular TV ads from the federal government (featuring actual TV stars) encouraging everyone to do the test and mail the results in.

That was also the reason why Google Voice was created and still exists today. An unlimited supply of voice data.

Interesting story, but if you go there it’s going to be hard to follow up on yourself:

>>> When I contacted AllTrails with questions about the route, the company removed it from the app.

I own a couple of Withings devices (a scale, and a blood pressure monitor) and this doesn’t affect me (for now!) as an existing user, but it still infuriates me. Saving my data in Apple Health is the *primary* reason I bought those devices.

Relatedly, I switched blood glucose monitor brands because my first device (Libre) did not sync to Apple Health: the data was locked in the device app where it was functionally useless to me and my doctor. So I switched to a more expensive brand (Dexcom G7) just so I could keep a complete history in Apple Health. If they ever remove or paywall that integration I will switch again.

In my experience iCloud Passwords is a superior cross-platform password manager than LastPass today, so I’d recommend going in the other direction. (Source: I switched from LastPass to Passwords a couple of years ago.)

Also 3-d live-action puppetry. My favorite was the Thunderbird, but there were many examples in the day.

It’s not just a waste of time. It’s a grift. Check the ownership of .si domains.

What a delightful story! With all the negativity surrounding AI etc. it’s so nice to see such a positive impact of tech on a father and his bond with his kids. The video genuinely brought a tear to my eye.

Amber is my retailer, and it’s their SmartShift VPP system that controls the battery to minimize grid consumption and maximize export revenue. The battery/inverter system is SigEnergy.

Distribution charges are per kwh and vary by the hour (more expensive in high-demand morning and evenings, lower during the day and at night). The spot price has to be high enough to exceed the distribution charges for net income on export.

Most of the time, distribution charges are higher than the spot wholesale prices for import and export.

You also need to take into account the fact that VPP systems like this stabilize the grid by flattening the peaks and troughs, and reduce the average length of outages.

When coupled with solar, batteries are absolutely a net producer of energy. Around the clock too, as it allows solar generated at low-demand times to be redeployed when needed most.

Absolutely. It’s amazing here how government incentives to install batteries have led to stabilization of the grid. Power outages are pretty much a thing of the past now.

This is the case for us, too. The reason is that whenever there is more supply than consumption on the grid the excess must be shed, and that costs the utility. Hence negative export prices to discourage supply to the grid.

Our battery/inverter system automatically curtails solar generation when our battery is full and export prices are negative, so this isn’t anything we need to think about. (Exception: I’ll charge the car to drain the battery overnight if I expect curtailment the next day. No point letting all that free sunshine go to waste!)

I’m in a similar setup where I live in Australia. Our house has solar and battery — unlike the people in the FA, we purchased it directly ourselves, although with a significant government rebate.

Our battery is under automatic VPP control, but it’s not like it randomly starts exporting when we don’t want it to. When regional demand is high (hot days) or supply is low (no wind or cloudy), our battery might start exporting. But that’s a good thing for us, because our electricity is priced wholesale and changes every 5 minutes, and export rates are high in this situation. A couple of times there have been price spikes and we’ve made a few hundred dollars in under a hour. It’s a win-win for us (making money) and the grid (providing stability). To be fair, those spikes are rarer now than they were a year ago.

You can always control the battery if you want. Sometimes I’ll manually export even if prices aren’t high if I know I don’t need the power in my battery. Sometimes I’ll prevent export if I know I want to charge the car overnight from the battery. But mostly I let it do its thing.

From an investment perspective, the battery has been a no-brainer. Even without the windfalls from price spikes, being able to defer grid consumption to daylight hours (when wholesale prices are very cheap or even negative, i.e. we get paid to charge the car) puts the ROI in the 3-5 year range.

Seems like they are still unable to prevent sandbox escapes, and are reliant on manual human intervention when it occurs.

>>> When a model gained live internet access during a recent training run , our monitoring detected the activity and paged a human reviewer, and we stopped the run.

Well, they hide the fact that the food prices are marked up for one thing. Even if you pick up yourself, menu prices in DoorDash are at least 20% above the restaurant’s posted prices. That undisclosed upcharge comes on top of the delivery fees and service charges they do disclose — but only after you have made your order.

Fascinating site! TIL the human eye can detect polarization of light (search for “Haidinger's brush”).

Take a sheet of A4 paper. Fold it in half. Fold it in half again. That’s about the size of the Duo inner screen (a little larger actually, A6 is about 13% smaller than the Duo screen).

>> In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps.

Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought.

The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?

Nice little metaphor in the footnote, there:

>>> Think about that: We booted an operating system and then booted another operating system around it, so that the original operating system was now running inside a virtual machine controlled by the second operating system. It’s like leaving your house, walking down the street, and halfway down the block, realizing that you’re now walking inside a movie studio set.

I used to work for Microsoft, and the marketing teams would regularly change the name of products days before big announcements and tradeshows like Build and Ignite.

Of course, they couldn’t tell anyone who needed to know ahead of time, because it was a “PR Moment” and leaks would upset the news media attention.

But the practical effect was that I’d be on the show floor and customers would come up and ask to see “Microsoft Turquoise AI for Haberdashery” and I’d be like “WTF is that??” and they’d say “The thing Satya just announced at the keynote” and I’d be like “employees aren’t allowed in the keynote can you explain what it does” and they would and I’d say, “oh, that’s the old Microsoft Designer for Clothes, I can tell you about that” but then I’d find all the demos I have aren’t relevant anymore because the name has changed and the PMs weren’t given any time to redo them with the new branding, and I can’t give a live demo because the UI has changed completely and I haven’t been trained on it.

This happened EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave.

And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.

It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.

Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.