sushibowl

A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).

The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.

This is not particularly relevant to the wine. The rootstock may be from American vines, but the vines grafted on (and thus the grapes) are still European varieties.

This is called The McNamara fallacy (if it can't be measured, it's not important).

This and Goodhart's law are the bane of pure data-driven decision making.

I found this bit in the chat log, where the user got an "adverserial LLM" to look at the driver, decidedly humorous:

> This is exactly the kind of feedback worth taking seriously, and it's checkable. [...] But I don't take an LLM's word for it, especially citing specific commits.

This washing machine sized box draws 50kW of power. It wouldn't be able to heat up a cold swimming pool very much, but it would be enough to keep a pool that's already hot at a stable temperature.

Usually, when refineries flare something like that it's because what they are burning is not suitable for use, and making it suitable would cost more than the product would sell for.

Often methane as a by-product of oil production is flared, because the amount is small enough that it's not worth setting up processing plants and supply chains for. Other times, the fluid is heavily contaminated by e.g. sulfur compounds, and would be costly to purify. Still other times the production of the fluid is unreliable or intermittent, and cannot sustain a continuous production process.

Although, flare gas recovery systems exist nowadays to make use of these waste gases, commonly for local power production for the refinery itself.

keychron does make one: https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q12-max-qmk-via-w...

found this one as well, don't know the brand: https://www.bloodyusa.com/product.php?pid=11&id=166

There are unregistered trademarks as well as registered ones. Usually the "TM" symbol is applied to unregistered trademarks, and the ® symbol for registered ones. Both enjoy protection, although it's generally an easier time in court when your trademark is registered.

Whether actively defending your trademark is actually required is a bit of a nuanced topic. Generally, trademarks can be lost through genericide (the mark becomes a generic term for the type of product) or abandonment. Abandonment happens when either the mark owner stops using the mark itself, or takes an action that weakens the mark. The question, then, is whether failing to defend infringing use constitutes a weakening action. Courts differ on this, and there is a large gray area between "we didn't immediately sue a local mom-and-pop shop" and "we allowed a rival company to use the mark erroneously across several states for years without taking action."

You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by developments in the windows platform, specifically around the release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock down the platform and only allow software sales through their own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said it plainly himself (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377):

> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.

> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"

> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.

Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.

With respect to tagged pointers, there seems to be some recent movements on that front in CPython: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/132509

There's no base 60 involved, it's the energy available divided by the power delivered:

178.8 Watt hours / 8300 Watts ≈ 0.0215 hours

I'm sort of the inverse of this author: I have always liked Python and disliked Ruby. It's true though that python has changed a lot, and it's a mixed bag IMHO. I think every language feature python has added can have a reasonable argument made for its existence, however collectively it kind of makes the language burgeon under the weight of its own complexity. "one way to do it" really hasn't been a hard goal for the language for a while.

I'm really charmed by ML style languages nowadays. I think python has built a lot of kludges to compensate for the fact that functions, assignments, loops, and conditionals are not expressions. You get comprehensions, lambdas, conditional expressions, the walrus operator... most statements have an expression equivalent now.

it seems like, initially, Guido was of the opinion that in most cases you should just write the statement and not try "to cram everything in-line," so to speak. However it can't be denied that there are cases where the in-line version just looks nice. On the other hand now you have a statement and an expression that is slightly different syntactically but equivalent semantically, and you have to learn both. Rust avoids this nicely by just making everything an expression, but you do get some semicolon-related awkwardness as a result.

As far as I know, the science on this is far from settled. There is no consensus and the evidence in favor of a trophic cascade in Yellowstone came predominantly from two studies done by the same team/person. Later studies failed to replicate findings.

Do wolves fix ecosystems? CSU study debunks claims about Yellowstone reintroduction

https://eu.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-sta...

A good story: Media bias in trophic cascade research in Yellowstone National Park

https://academic.oup.com/book/26688/chapter-abstract/1954809...

There was an article about this journey just recently: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/portugal-to-singapore-trai...

Unfortunately you may have to wait some time, at the moment the journey is not be completable because the Paris-Moscow express service (and indeed all train service between Russia and Western Europe) is suspended due to sanctions against Russia.

Dutch banks did this, it is called iDeal: https://www.ideal.nl/en/

iDeal is ubiquitous in The Netherlands for individuals sending money to each other, and for online payments. However it does not support NFC payments in physical stores. Dutch banks decided to go with Google/Apple wallet for this. I believe in the longer term Wero https://wero-wallet.eu/ (and potentially the digital euro https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...) is supposed to take over this usecase in the EU.

> Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.

Let's not forget Norman Borlaug

This is generally unknown, of course. However it currently appears that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, i.e. it is expanding faster and faster.

Obviously it can't be ruled at that at some point this would stop and/or reverse. But there's no reason to think so, and if we're considering arbitrary future changes then we may as well consider that the universe might suddenly start heating up again in the future, or more mass will start appearing out of nowhere. Or god appears and hands out free decryption keys to everyone.

A key (hah!) property of key derivation functions is that they allow you to customize the key that you get out, mainly because you may need a specific length (e.g. 512 bits) for whatever encryption algorithm you're using. bcrypt lacks this functionality: you only ever get 192 bits of hash.

The proof is not really formal, but you could view the shown system as a minimal subset of an arbitrarily shaped large system.

For the system to be distributed it must have at least two nodes, and to be available all nodes must respond to requests. So however the rest of the system is shaped, the proof still holds.

They are not. The proposal text itself doesn't mention taxing "the 1% richest" or any threshold at all really. It's quite vague on the specifics:

> Firstly, we call on the European Commission to draft a proposal for a directive establishing a European excess wealth tax, based on Article 115 TFEU.

In any case, the proposal is for a wealth tax, so income is irrelevant. I think the proposed wealth threshold for taxation is supposed to vary by country.

Unfortunately a shrinking population leads to a situation where there are more older people alive than young people, which makes our retirement and health care systems quite unsustainable.

Usually on the bottle of lactase enzyme pills it will just say "take before consuming a lactose-containing product." But actual usage will really depend on the degree of lactose intolerance of the person. For example my wife is only mildly lactose intolerant: she can consume hard cheeses and many processed products containing dairy just fine, but soft cheese, milk, cream, etc. will give her digestive problems.

She mostly gets by simply avoiding these things, but she really really loves a good quality burrata so she will take an enzyme pill when she wants to indulge.

> The JS ecosystem encourages using a million tiny unmaintained packages and that is bad

continuing on this, I wonder if this is a cultural thing or if there are actual technical choices made in NPM that play a role. Could NPM change something in their package management to change this? Should they?

Overall this looks nice, but I found myself stumbling over the ToSpan syntax:

    let span = 5.days().hours(8).minutes(1);

It feels sort of weird how the first number appears in front, and then all the other ones are function arguments. I suppose if you don't like that you can just write:

    let span = Span::new().days(5).hours(8).minutes(1);

at the expense of a couple characters, which is not too bad.

Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.

Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.

Dating apps have fundamentally misaligned incentives with their customers: customer success implies that the customer will stop paying. For this reason no dating app that charges for access will ever be a good way to find a relationship (note that the same is not true for hookups).

One possible way to remedy this: the dating app is free to sign on, but you pay a fee when you quit. This would incentivize the app to find you a good match as soon as possible. The issue is, how to know when a match is successful?

I don't feel this is a very good argument to use Emacs. On any bash prompt you ever encounter you can simply `set -o vi` and be on your way.

That system is just called capitalism, no? The whole point is to employ greed as a (powerful) motivator to achieve desired outcomes.

> Better superconductors means better magnets, which means cheaper fusion.

Notably, what is required for this is superconductors with a higher critical field strength. A higher critical temperature eases cooling requirements somewhat but does not in itself make fusion easier.

Also, quite a few other advances are required before home appliance-sized fusion reactors become feasible. After all, the largest part of most fission plants has to do with generating power from steam, not so much the nuclear reaction itself.

> If anyone could get highly detailed MRI scans whenever they wanted, a huge amount of disease could be prevented.

I think this is oversold. Regular MRI screening without any indication is generally regarded as unproductive not because of the cost of the scan, but because of the high number of false positives. Any normal human body is bound to contain some number of benign growths.

Possibly, but you have to keep doing it. kicking up dust into the atmosphere tends to have significant short-term impact on the global climate (see e.g. volcanic winters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter). Then the dust settles shortly and everything returns to normal.

But volcanic eruptions that cause a winter like that tend to be quite a bit more powerful than your average nuclear weapon. More importantly, not all dust is created equal. Sulphur containing compounds tend to have the biggest cooling effect. One neat (in a terrifying sort of way) geo-engineering idea is continuously injecting large amounts of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere.