The name of the band is for their quest to become a full circle, a feat they have not attained thus far even though they have gotten close on several occasions.

I agree, that’s exactly my point. Farmers who can do shit like that and truckers who can block roads have a disproportionate amount of power with their protests. The rest of us is relegated to peaceful protest on the side of the road (or usually in a field or on a square). Which becomes a real issue when the truckers ride in convoys for fascism and farmers support the far right.

This game is awesome. Fair warning tho: it is hard af

Yeah it makes me so mad when I see farmer using their farming equipment to protest, or truckers using their trucks. Everyone has the right to protest, but that right should be equal. So if they want to organize a protest, gather together somewhere in a large group, that’s fine by me. But once they start using their equipment that’s where I draw the line.

The reason they are allowed (and often licensed) to use that equipment is because they need it to do their jobs. As soon as they use it for any other purpose, they should not be allowed to do so. It’s super disruptive, often unsafe and an abuse of their rights and privileges. The impact their protest has is amplified greatly by the use of the equipment. The right to protest should be equal. I work in IT, what the hell am I supposed to do? Start throwing my laptop at cars? I’ll be put in jail if I did that, and rightfully so.

They can all just protest like the rest of the plebs, like me. Any farmer, trucker or whatever appropriating their equipment for anything but their job should immediately lose access to said equipment. They earn the right to use the equipment through permits and licenses, they should lose it if abused.

It’s way too early in the day to be hit this hard right in the feels my man

so I can retire.

So you can become homeless you mean :p

One thing I’ve also noticed is people doing code reviews using ai to pad their stats or think they are helping out. At best it’s stating the obvious, wasting resources to point out what doesn’t need pointing out. At worst it’s a giant waste of time based on total bullshit the ai made up.

I kinda understand why people would think LLMs are able to generate and evaluate code. Because they throw simple example problems at them and they solve them without much issue. Sometimes they make obvious mistakes, but these are easily corrected. This makes people think LLMs are basically able to code, if it can solve even some harder example problems, surely they are at least as good as beginner programmers right? No, wrong actually. The reason the LLM can solve the example problem, is because that example (or a variation) was contained within its training data. It knows the answer not by deduction or by reason, it knows the answer by memorization. Once you start actually programming in the real world, it’s nothing like the examples. You need to account for an existing code base, with existing rules, standards and limitations. You need to evaluate which solution out of your toolbox to apply. Need to consider the big picture as well as small details. You need to think of the next guy working with the code, because more often than not, that next guy is you. LLMs crumble in a situation like this, they don’t know about all the unspoken things, they haven’t trained on the code base you are working with.

There’s a book I’m fond of called Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. I always used to joke it contained the answer to any problem a software engineer ever comes across. The only trick is to choose the correct answer. LLMs are like this, they have all these patterns memorized and choose which answer best fits the question. But it doesn’t understand why, what the upsides and downsides are for your specific situation. What the implications of the selected answer are going forward. Or why this pattern over another. When the LLM answers you can often prompt it to produce an answer with a completely different pattern applied. In my opinion it’s barely more useful than the book and in many ways much worse.

Yeah I don’t really see how that’s possible. Even if you get a material that’s able to harvest at 20% efficiency, getting the energy out is a big issue. It’s a lot of power and transporting it through a layer a few micron thick is very rough and leads to huge losses.

I also don’t know what “math” they actually did. I think it was some back of the napkin extrapolations and not actual data. For example they state: “one scientist suggested covering an entire car with the new solar paint, ramping up the surface area to more than 11m2” That leads me to believe they didn’t actually do anything but were just extrapolating and speculating for the press.

They also state: “scientists hardwired the body panels to the Benz’s high-voltage battery”. This makes zero sense. In order for energy to flow from a solar panel into for example a battery, the voltage of the panel needs to be higher than the voltage of the battery. Otherwise the current will flow in the wrong direction. But Mercedes EQS batteries run at 400 volt, you can’t connect “directly” to the battery unless you want the panel to explode and the car to catch fire. And even if you connect it directly into some charger system that can convert the voltage from the panel into something the battery can use to charge, you wouldn’t want to do it like that. Including a voltage optimizer in the system is key for getting efficiency out of a solar panel.

I think some journalist misunderstood some Merc tech demo and made up this BS story.

Yeah this is total BS.

The sun delivers about 1.3kW of energy per square meter and an average car takes up about 8 square meters of space. So that’s about 11kW to work with, but even very efficient solar panels only harvest about 20% of that. So that leaves us with about 2.2kW to work with. Now in order to convert that energy into something usable and charge the battery, more losses are added, depending on the situation this would be around 20%, leaving 1.76kW. This means charging a 50kWh battery would take around 28 hours. Obviously we can only expect around 6 hours of really good sun on an average day, with the rest of the day having much less energy available. So charging the car would take several days in perfect conditions. If it’s cloudy, if it’s raining, if you’ve got shade over the car, if you drive the car etc. it will take more time to charge it.

In reality however, this is with modern commercial grade equipment, oriented perfectly to the sun at the proper angle. Putting that in a car isn’t possible. Stuff is going to get hot, which leads to reduced efficiency, active cooling costs energy so that’s probably not a good solution. The car isn’t going to have all of it’s surface facing the sun, by definition a part of it is going to be in it’s own shade. If the sun is perfectly overhead for max efficiency on the roof, the sides aren’t going to get anything. Angles are going to be wrong and people prefer to park their cars in the shade or under cover. Cars also tend to be used, so they get pretty dirty driving around, that reduces efficiency further. So if they get half of what I described, they would be doing real good. Just takes a week to charge the car, but still, doing good.

But then there’s the real kicker. It isn’t possible to get anywhere near 20% out of a paint or surface finish. Modern solar panels have many tricks to get their efficiency as high as 20% (and even nearing 30% with the newest techniques, but that isn’t commercially viable at the moment). Solar paints are way worse and do badly even in perfect lab settings. One of the issues is the energy generation isn’t as optimal to begin with, but another issue is getting the energy transported out of the material is problematic. This leads to efficiency numbers in the 1% range. This means going from charging in a week, it will take months, if it charges at all.

Except for niche use cases, putting solar on anything except roofs usually makes no sense at all. It’s handy for camping, on top of the RV or for example on a boat, where having a little bit of DC is handy when no other sources is available. But when there is a roof available, just put it on the roof and use the power from there.

Yes.

Even in a unjust world mob justice isn’t justice. This means a mob deciding someone is guilty and acting out punishment is unjust. But also a mob deciding a crime should go unpunished is unjust.

There’s plenty wrong with how insurance works and plenty wrong with the justice system. But instead of giving up, we should be trying to fix these issues. It’s all to easy to give in to our basic instincts and point to someone to blame. We punish them instead of fixing the issues. Killing one ceo might feel good, but it doesn’t really change the big picture and in fact constitutes layer upon layer of failure. We should be better than that. History is full of people (singular and groups) being used as a scape goat to deflect and feel like something is being done, whilst in fact not actually fixing anything and just feeding hate.

Also in a capitalist world, the people with the most money have the most power. If we collectively decide it’s open warfare, purge style distopia, they are going to have the upper hand. So purely from a self interest point of view, it would be better to work on fixing shit instead of reverting to monke.

Because it’s broad blanket statements that boil down to: “Just do better”.

I have had some experience working with logistical processes for example. They always have their flaws, but trying to improve them beyond some point quickly becomes impossible. It’s easy to make big gains at first, but once you get into the weeds more and more small issues start popping up. It gets to the point solving these issues is more trouble than it’s worth.

So when the thing says we need to reduce food waste by having better logistics for example, I call bullshit. Modern logistical processes are often at the max of what’s possible. And we saw with covid how fragile those processes are. We’ve sacrificed flexibility for efficiency and as the world became weird for a while, the whole thing crumbled and still hasn’t fully recovered.

15C while I’m away, 17C while I’m in. Gas is expensive and my home isn’t that well insulated. I just put on a warm vest and it’s fine by me.

With millenials often there’s a split made between the early millenials and later millenials. People born before 1990 will have gone through a lot of early life and education without the internet. Where people born in 1990 and later will have had internet for most their childhood and education. This means the early millenials are a lot like gen-X and the later are much more distinct.

The correct amount of Nazi rallies is 0

You say that, but without the US military support it will be rough for Ukraine. The EU has spent a bunch of money to get all other kinds of aid to Ukraine, much more than the US. But the US has supplied more military support, more than the EU. If the US stops helping out, the EU will probably not be able to fill the gap. And Trump can put pressure on the EU by threatening to pull out of Nato again. If Russia decides to invade more countries and the US leaves Nato hanging, the EU is in trouble. Now these are a lot of ifs and since Trump has been elected the EU has been preparing. Plus laws have been passed in the US to prevent Trump from pulling out of Nato, but you know how much Trump cares about laws. Once the EU feels like they don’t need the support from the US any more, Trump has nothing to say anymore, but we ain’t there yet.

If it works and it’s stupid - It’s still stupid but damn those make for good pictures on the internet

We always put a couple of bells on the bottom of the tree. Because they are shiny and round, the cats always go for them first. This alerts us and we can verbally berate them for messing with the tree. This works most of the time to keep them in check. Even when I’m upstairs and I hear the bells I call down: “I know what you are doing” and they slink off. Sometimes they just ignore me and play with the tree anyways, which is fine because the bottom row is all plastic balls they can play with as much as they like.

I remember the first time one of our cats saw a Christmas tree, when he was a little kitten. I turned around for 10 secs, looked back and he was sitting proud on top of the tree. I laughed my ass off, until he realized he had no real way of getting down. So I laughed some more and fetched him off the tree. Good to get it out of the system I think, because he didn’t try that again.

And when you try to stand back up you make this involuntarily grunt sound that alerts everyone as well

I always feel like Microsoft is watching meeeeeee! And I have no product key woo ooo ooo

Yeah I love Ubuntu, it’s really fine. But I think because it’s easy and for a lot of people their first Linux, it’s seen as like the baby version of Linux. So people bitch about it a lot, as if it’s somehow inferior to other distros. Like if you don’t compile everything from scratch you are somehow not worthy?

Hard “Real programmer” vibes. https://xkcd.com/378/

And yes, I use pico as a text editor, it’s fine really.