- We know how each of the "parts" work, but there is a gazillion of parts (especially since you need to take the model weights into account, which are way larger in size than the code that generates them or uses them to generate stuff), and we found out that together they do something that we do not really understand why they do it.
And inspecting each part is not enough to understand how, together, they achieve what they achieve. We would need to understand the entire system in a much more abstract way, and currently we have nothing more than ideas of how it _might_ work.
Normally, with software, we do not have this problem, as we start on the abstract level with a fully understood design and construct the concrete parts thereafter. Obviously we have a much better understanding of how the entire system of concrete parts works together to perform some complex task.
With AI, we took the other way: concrete parts were assembled with vague ideas on the abstract level of how they might do some cool stuff when put together. From there it was basically trial-and-error, iteration to the current state, but always with nothing more than vague ideas of how all of the parts work together on the abstract level. And even if we just stopped the development now and tried to gain a full, thorough understanding of the abstract level of a current LLM, we would fail, as they already reached a complexity that no human can understand anymore, even when devoting their entire lifetime to it.
However, while this is a clear difference to most other software (though one has to get careful when it comes to the biggest projects like Chromium, Windows, Linux, ... since even though these were constructed abstract-first, they have been in development for such a long time and have gained so many moving parts in the meantime that someone trying to understand them fully on the abstract level will probably start to face the difficulty of limited lifetime as well), it is not an uncommon thing per se: we also do not "really" understand how economy works, how money works, how capitalism works. Very much like with LLMs, humanity has somehow developed these systems through interaction of billions of humans over a long time, there was never an architect designing them on an abstract level from scratch, and they have shown emergent capabilities and behaviors that we don't fully understand. Still, we obviously try to use them to our advantage every day, and nobody would say that modern economies are useless or should be abandoned because they're not fully understood.
- > No, because the figure I have was for normal solar panels, not the balcony ones which are even worse. I haven't seen anyone reporting real yield for balcony panels yet, would be interested to see the numbers.
„which are even worse“ is an assumption you make, you do not have any data to back that up. From what I regularly see, they are not worse at all. People without sun on their balconies do not buy balcony solar kits in the first place. Also there’s the fact that people can spend time to meticulously optimize every single panels’ location (which they usually don’t when someone places 30 panels on a roof in a single day, it’s just about getting them up there quickly). If you are interested in numbers, browse https://www.reddit.com/r/Balkonkraftwerk/ - it’s German language but Reddit does quite well with auto-translation as far as I know. Every month, people post their yield numbers for comparison there.
> No, because when you get any significant amount of solar installed you start to get negative prices on sunny hours and need to shut them down. If home solar setups won't shutdown then some other panels in the grid would.
You are equating the time during which a home solar owner cannot use his own solar power with the time during which there are negative electricity prices. This is grossly wrong. In 2024, Germany had 457 hours of negative power prices (see https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/03/bundesnetzagentur-457-...). That’s roughly 5% of the year. Typical home solar power usage if no battery at all is installed is about 50%. If we talk about batteries, which are increasingly getting common in balcony solar installations due to significant price drops, it’s more like 80-90% of power that the owner can use directly.
> You confuse the "maximum possible outcome" with real life. No one knows if these $300 setups will last 30 years, that was never tested because that requires well 30 years. My estimate is they won't because electronics from the lowest price range very rarely do.
The panels are the exact same panels used for large-scale solar installations. These are tested and guaranteed by the manufacturer for 30+ years. Nobody doubts that they’ll reach that lifespan in most cases. The inverters are a negligible amount of kWh invested, as I pointed out in the parallel threads’ posting. So you can easily buy one or two replacements over the 30 year timespan without impacting the EROI of the panel at all. Also, a lifespan of 30 years does not mean that the panel fails after 30 years. It just goes below a defined point of efficiency (80% of original peak power). You can very well use it for another 10 or 20 years, you just have to accept that it produces only 80% of the original output.
> Then even if they could last that long, half of them will end up in a dumpster after a few years because people move and can't always take their panels along.
That’s not what I see, because it is surprisingly hard to dispose of solar panels in practice. They do not fit into the typical „dumpsters“ people use to dispose their regular trash. You would be able to dispose of them for free at the next recycling center in Germany, as they are mandated to take them, but most cars cannot be used to transport solar panels as they are too large, so it’s not trivial to get them there. From what I observe, people therefore simply sell or donate the panels to the next renter/owner when they move, which is obviously a good idea as they are usually installed on a balcony or garden house or whatever and you usually buy the matching installation equipment for a particular situation which you wouldn’t be able to use at your future home anyway.
I find it quite interesting that you did not object to my second argument about the psychological impact/use of this technology.
- > A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally.
Non-optimal positioning is already included in your "Measured (not projected) yield in Germany". Because that is the difference between a projected yield (under optimal conditions) and actual measurements of actual panels, which are practically never optimally placed.
> Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe.
That is relevant for an economic calculation, but it is entirely irrelevant if you want to determine the point after which the panel breaks even regarding the energy used for its production vs. the energy produced by it. In that case, every single kWh counts, whether the owner of the panel economically profits from it or whether he or she just donates it to the grid without compensation.
And clearly, we are discussing the energy break-even here, as indicated by "The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm."
> However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment.
As I've demonstrated with concrete calculations, that you seemingly accept as valid as you perform the same calculations with roughly the same numbers, the EROI of solar panels even in Germany over their lifespan is clearly in the positive range. Maybe they "only" recoup 3x or 5x their investment, and not 20x, but they are a net positive regardless. Any number above 1x is.
In addition to this, as I've described in another posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45490555) there's the psychological side of things, where cheap and easily profitable balcony panels for everyone are a gateway drug for "normal people" to get actively involved in the field of renewable energy and must not be underestimated in their ability to open the minds of people for other, more efficient actions to get closer to a carbon-neutral energy economy. Since those activities tend to be heavily inhibited by broad refusal that's often not based on factual arguments, but simply on inertia in people's minds ("we've always done it the other way") and a certain lazyness to actively grapple with new technologies and developments, this effect is at least as important as the actual impact on the energy grid. Just like on the stock market, the raw numbers are only half of the story. Psychology is the other half.
- > Then you also need to include inverters which are energy-heavy.
Scientific publications say otherwise. It's quite hard to come by any numbers, but page 11 of https://www.wisdomlib.org/uploads/journals/mdpi-sust/2025-vo... says that typical solar inverters require about 15 MJ/kW of power for their production in total, which would amount to approx. 4 kWh per kW of inverter power. A solar panel square meter produces about 200-250 watts of peak power, so it needs inverter power that cost about 1 kWh to build. Let's triple that, because inverters have a typical lifetime of 10 years in contrast to the 30 years of solar panels. 3 kWh for the inverter is negligible when compared with 300-2000 kWh for the panel itself. So we can just ignore that.
Batteries are interesting. According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24, it takes about 35 kWh in total to produce 1 kWh of battery capacity. Let's say we'll need 250 Wh of capacity for our 250 WPeak solar panel square meter (the rule of 1 kWh capacity for each 1 kWp is a typical estimate applied when sizing solar installations for residential homes). That makes up about 8 or 9 kWh to produce this battery capacity. Admittedly that doesn't include the raw materials, of which the cell requires quite a few expensive ones. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good resource on that, so I resorted to asking ChatGPT for a rough calculation, and it came up with about 140 kWh for our 250 Wh LFP cell, which doesn't sound entirely wrong, as it assumed a cell weight of 1,5 kg and splitted that up into different materials. The weight matches what I would expect from personal experience with LFP batteries.
Basically, we can just ignore the inverter and must add about 150 kWh for the battery to our 300-2000 kWh for the panel. That does not substantially impact an EROI calculated from a 1000 kWh assumption for the panel alone.
And this is a calculation based on Germany. Again: weather conditions are far from optimal for solar in Germany. It's much better in many regions in China, where solar panels are made. They can easily achieve EROIs of 20+ with solar there, which is probably the reason why China installs absolutely HUGE numbers of panels. But according to you, they must be "delusional" over there.
- > Today solar panels make sense in terms of money ROI but not in terms of KWh ROI
That is clearly wrong. Even the worst-case embodied energy assumptions for solar panels estimate the cost of producing a square meter of solar panel area at 2000 kWh (the best cases are around 300, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph... ). A square meter of solar panel area produces an average of 200 kWh of power per year in Germany (which implies a pessimistic assumption, more sunnier countries can get a multiple of that). This means that even in the worst case, the solar panel has amortized itself from the perspective of embodied energy after 10 years. On average it will be more like below 5 years. Solar panels however have an expected lifetime of well over 30 years and require no maintenance if installed correctly.
- Actually, it is pretty common for homeowners to first install a balcony solar power plant and eventually "upgrading" to a full-scale solar power installation on the roof. The first is very easy and cheap to do and can be done on a weekend, the latter is costly, requires dealing with bureaucracy and partially-sleazy system sellers, and thus requires overcoming way more substantial hurdles, for which one must muster the motivation first.
Balcony solar power plants are sort of a gateway drug into actual, practical participation in the renewable energy sector. They are easy to install, cheap, have a clear and fast way to profitability, and provide significant gamification value (people who buy these kits tend to start with constantly monitoring their energy generation and usage in apps afterwards). That "ice breaker" effect should not be underestimated. It can pave the way to way more substantial actions (or to the acceptance of actions taken by others) that people wouldn't have considered otherwise simply due to inertia of the status quo.
> look ugly
That is YOUR taste. I consider most balconies with solar panels to look futuristic and cool. Garden houses with solar panels on the roof also look way cooler and more modern than without them.
- WiX basically lets you directly write the internal data structures used by Windows Installer to run the MSIs. Just in XML instead of some ancient binary database that is used in the MSI files to store things.
So the actual "byzantine incomprehensible mess" (which is indeed the correct description) is the MSI format and Windows Installer, not WiX.
- Don't forget that they'll change their API every so often, so you'll spend days and weeks to adapt to "v2" before "v1" is deprecated and eventually removed. You will usually get nothing in terms of desirable features for doing that work, quite often you will get new bugs instead that weren't present with the old API, or even worse, features you depend on are removed because "almost nobody really used them" or "they aren't a good fit in the new interface anymore", and of course you won't have the choice of simply keep using the old version of the thing for an arbitrary amount of time to perform that update on your own pace.
- Hetzner is not US-headquartered, so I'd say it should not be possible for the US government to make Hetzner turn out data from its EU locations.
They will most certainly be able to make the US subsidiary of Hetzner turn out any kind of data it technically has access to. But if Hetzner is not entirely stupid (and they are usually pretty smart) they set up their internal networks such that the US admins cannot access data located in the EU.
The problem with EU subsidiaries of Amazon and Microsoft is that the principal corporation is located in the US and subject to US jurisdiction, and that eventually, the owning company is always able to make a subsidiary comply with its demands, so it's virtually impossible to set up an impenetrable barrier between them. It's the other way round with Hetzner. A subsidiary can't command the owning company around, not even if the US government wants it to.
- I'd say it's about 2-3x at most, in the best case scenarios. When I have to write some kind of wrapper or glue code on a green field, I approach that factor. And I really love using AI code completion in those kinds of task.
However, writing that kind of code maybe makes up 5% of my work. Analysis, trial-and-error, discussions etc. make up the other 95%, and AI only seldomly helps with that. It can sometimes be useful for research and spec ingestion, but it quickly becomes dangerous in those cases because as soon as you enter any kind of niche area (and unfortunately my work has a lot of those) LLMs tend to hallucinate and present made-up "knowledge" with enviable certainty.
- It is not just a problem with Pis, but also other use cases in which the SD card is used 24/7, or at least for long stretches of time, especially if the use case involves writing of data. Dashcams are also notorious for destroying crappy SD cards due to their high write load, for example.
- The Lithium ones that they suggest to use do have a decade or more of shelf life, and they also don't leak!
I've got an old pinball machine. Those use AA batteries to store highscores and settings in a battery-powered RAM chip. Typically the batteries must be replaced once a year or at least every two years, largely because of self-drain, and it's a common occurrence of them leaking, which can quickly destroy the 30 year old circuit board they're on. That's why most pinball collectors suggest to use Lithium AA batteries: you get 5-10 year lifetime, no danger of leakage.
- Playmobil has a horrible number of super-small parts that'll go missing really quick when taken outside.
Lego has these, too, of course, but with Lego you at least have the benefit of being able to infinitely combine these parts to build stuff from them. Playmobil is "dumb" in that regard, you can't combine anything except in those ways in which it was specifically designed to be combined.
The real alternative to Lego in my opinion is Duplo, from the same manufacturer. They have no really small parts at all, so these are really good for outside play. But still infinitely combinable.
- We have the "Jooki Box" in use since its inception (the version before the current one), and it's a pretty good substitute. Allows to connect figurines to Spotify playlists, so if you have a Spotify Family subscription, you have a huge number of songs and audiobooks for kids at your fingertips with no additional cost.
The original box itself was way more expensive than the Toniebox, like double the price, but I think they've made it considerably cheaper when they released the second hardware version of it. And the original box still works until today, continues to be supported by their app and has already been built in a very sturdy way (I've opened it up once to add magnets inside, so the figurines stick on it, which they normally don't do - that's the one thing the Toniebox people got right).
- > The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.
That's not exactly true. The single market has been a great thing for companies producing physical products. That's also what was in mind of the people who designed the single market. They wanted to unify standards for physical stuff. Because back then, there were no digital services to speak of. "Analog" services were naturally limited in their scaling capability so they weren't in focus, but mankind had back then just learned to scale up physical production, and the single market for physical goods has largely worked out great to shape global standards and stay competitive in the area of anything that's traded and touchable.
What's been created is a bad fit for digital products and services, unfortunately. The legal frameworks covering purely digital services are far less unified than the standards for physical goods. And digital services are way more reliant on localization than physical stuff is. No amount of EU single market legislation will ever be able to eliminate the language barriers, much less other cultural barriers that are often hindering digital services successful in one EU country from being adopted in neighboring EU countries.
Therefore, for those digital services that benefit greatly from network effects, it'll be hard for European variants to ever beat their US counterparts on the domestic turfs, and virtually impossible on the global market. However, not all digital services are dependent on network effects, so there are good reasons to continue trying to make the EU single market more applicable to digital services and to foster domestic offerings whereever possible, even if that strategy will probably never lead to the next Facebook or Instagram or Amazon to be built by a EU company.
- Also, Hetzner is way bigger in the EU than in the US. Good access to services hosted by Hetzner is thus more relevant to EU ISPs, because customers in the EU will probably use more services hosted on Hetzner infra. This gives Hetzner more leverage in the EU to negotiate beneficial conditions with regard to its uplinks and peering agreements.
- Because this way, the delay is parameterized within the Secure Enclave firmware by hard-coding it, which is a thing that only Apple can do.
If you were to allow a user to change it, you'd have to safeguard the channel by which the users' desired delay gets pushed into the SE against malicious use, which is inherently hard because that channel must be writable by the user. Therefore it opens up another attack surface by which the inactivity reboot feature itself might be attacked: if the thief could use an AFU exploit to tell the SE to only trigger the reboot after 300 days, the entire feature becomes useless.
It's not impossible to secure this - after all, changing the login credentials is such a critical channel as well - but it increases the cost to implement this feature significantly, and I can totally see the discussions around this feature coming to the conclusion that a sane, unchangeable default would be the better trade-off here.
- > Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
Even the US being a big country doesn't help much. The value of land for the purpose of living on it is largely defined by the infrastructure around a particular piece of land: are there schools, shops, doctors, ... nearby, or do you have to drive through an empty desert for hours to reach them? And unless faster forms of individual travel are invented, this will limit the amount of "usable" land even in an imaginary country with unlimited boundaries.
- What I find fascinating is that they have a form to request single UPC barcode numbers. But that form is effectively putting an item in a shopping cart of an online store.
So they perfected the "numbers as a service" business model up to the point that your average Joe can now buy themselves their own UPC number for $30 with almost the same simplicity as buying a book on Amazon. Maybe they should literally start selling UPC numbers on Amazon next?
- Europe has banking, too. Even better: nobody in Europe sends paper checks around anymore, we use instant wire transfers here! European banking is way ahead of US banking in a lot of ways.
So, banking is not exactly something that the US can use to coerce a European company. There are much more effective avenues for coercion, though. But IIRC, in this case, the US gov basically convinced the Dutch gov that making ASML adhere to US restrictions would be in the best interest of both of them, and not much coercion was necessary. After all, both countries are on the same side when it comes to the system conflict with China.
- The only viable option for reliably keeping data is to care.
Keep several copies in different locations or on different services. Use these storages regularly so you always know they are accessible and working, or at least check them once in a year. If one of them goes bad (service discontinued, media unreadable, technologically outdated, whatever): find a new location for your data and copy it all over.
Everything else isn't reliable long-term storage, but a lucky shot that might work for you in 50 years, but might as well irrecoverably go down the drain in the meantime.
Overly confident, but poorly informed articles aren't commonly written by teenagers anymore, but by LLMs.