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vvbull

Re:Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:19AM (#49151879)
And, for me, it recontextualizes a lot of his writing knowing his racism. Who he thought "the other" was and how they appeared in his work is colored by who he thought the other was in real life.
Re:Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:17AM (#49151866)
If I can find more media than I could ever possibly consume that a) I'll love to death, b) has a fan community who loves it with me, and c) is written by authors I don't viscerally reject, why would I ever compromise on those?

Vanishingly few works are so good, so life altering, that I'd need to set aside my qualms with the author to read them. Like, I'm sure master and commander is a fine series of books. I'm sure it's many people's favorite series. There's no lack of historical fiction out there though. And more of it is being written every day. It's not dismissing the work, but it's more like making it a low priority. Once I've consumed all the high priority media ahead of it, I'll read it, it's just.... the amount of high priority media is effectively infinite.

It should just be randomly generated when the page loads. "Oh, this user has the 'dormant' flag set? Generate a uid on page load" so all their comments have consistency for that one viewer for that single page load. Then if you click that user to see all the posts by them, you get an empty set. (Have the search queries return nothing for dormant users.)
This feels like bloviating. You are unlikely to be subject to this law, and even if you were your lawyers probably wouldn't advise you to ignore laws in states where you operate. (If you don't operate in California or on California residents, then you are obviously not subject to this law.) And you're lawyers would definitely not recommend posting publicly that you plan to willfully break this law. Which suggests to me that you are just blowing hot air online.
You'd hate practicing law.
Re:Karpathy's Pelican on Monday August 03, 2026 @01:44AM (#49151653)
Did he really say that? What an absurd thing to believe, let alone say out loud.
Re:Has the New Cocaine Arrived? on Sunday August 02, 2026 @10:19AM (#49144957)
If you don't know at least a few chemsex enthusiasts, you might be leading a pretty sheltered life. While I'm not into chemsex, it's not exactly uncommon either. Plenty of folks out there getting high and going at it because they enjoy the experience more.
Why not when grid connected? The problem arises when you are grid connected.

You draw 31 amps from the grid, you draw 6-7 per battery or solar installation behind the circuit breaker. The circuit never trips because the amount crossing the breaker is 31 amps, but the wires could be dealing with 37+. With battery and solar that could be 43+. Some idiot puts two or three of these in their house or puts them on an extension cord, wires are going to get warm.

Yes. We have circuit breakers for a reason, and rooftop solar is not risk free.
Ah, so you are taking the anti capitalist stance. Interesting to see that pop up here.

Australia sells its fossil fuels on the global market rather than prioritizing its local market. So when disruptions (like the various wars around) drive up prices, Australia sells the gas at a higher rate. This, in turn, drives up prices locally.

Combined with aging and failing coal infrastructure, which isn't producing as much or as reliably, you have a marginal rate that can get quite high.

Meanwhile, Australia has retail electricity providers and not a single government owned utility. Those retailers must make a profit, and they've invested heavy capex into smart metering. So they charge customers as much as customers will tolerate.

You might be right, it might be time to nationalize some of that fossil fuel usage, and remove the profit motive from energy retailing. That could drive down costs for end users.

But I don't think solar is really a major input here beyond replacing baseload. Expensive marginal priced peaker plants are one of the key drivers of high energy costs. When the sun sets, those plants have to come online. Better battery storage would smooth that demand significantly, as in parts of Australia solar production is already producing negative energy prices.

Right. The problem is the kitchen outlets or some other heavily loaded circuit. Running the microwave and kettle and fridge. And powering via these plus the wall. Or putting three of these on an extension cord.
What happens when a consumer buys three and sticks them on the same 20 amp circuit?

Cause people will definitely do that. Going to be some warm walls.

It's not the batteries that are the concern. It's skipping the fuse box.
The problem isn't the battery catching fire, it's that you no longer have a circuit breaker between your appliances and the generator. Meaning you could, especially if you have several batteries, push load through wires in the wall in excess of what is rated for.
Australia emits 1-1.5% of greenhouse gases. Tripling that would absolutely impact global concentrations, especially over human time scales.

But agree, Australia exporting fossil fuels should be reflected. If you counted their export of fuels it would be closer to 5% of global emissions.

IMO, getting to zero would knock over a whole integer percent off the global goal, that's notable. And if you stopped exporting oil, we'd be 1/20th of the way to the goal already!

Re:Google kills Earth AI generator after one day on Sunday August 02, 2026 @01:12AM (#49141307)
One click. One click is much much easier than screenshot, save file, open different website, upload file, etc.

I recognize you aren't wrong, the existing barrier isn't high. But the difference between a minimal barrier and no barrier is substantial for users.

Re:Google kills Earth AI generator after one day on Saturday August 01, 2026 @09:44AM (#49134387)
This is predictable... they built a misinformation engine capable of generating things like falsified drone strikes, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, and threatening images. Seems like no one paused and thought "what would the malicious internet do with this?"
Re:Apple's hostile App Store rating system on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:52AM (#49099095)
Wait, do developers control when those nags appear or does Apple? I originally thought it was the devs, but then they all were so consistent in presentation I thought maybe Apple prompted on every app after some amount of time.

I originally rated any app that nagged 1 star, but stopped after thinking that maybe they couldn't control it. But it sounds like maybe they can?