- There have been seconds order effects that have led to lower fuel consumption. Cars typically consume less fuel for the same distance driven compared to two decades ago. Part of that is increased fuel economy, part of it is smaller / more efficient cars growing in popularity.
- I'm old enough to have been on the internet before social networks, back in the days of forums / bulletin boards. Even then there was always a new drama in the community. I feel it's human nature.
- I had a friend who used to work as a QA for an ANPR parking system. He said that they had to investigate an issue where the car with 11111 kept appearing in the system as unpaid, but at different places across the network at the same time.
The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
- I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).
The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.
- Right, as a UK tabloid I'm surprised they didn't mention that the UK has similar laws. If you are overcharged you can ask for a refund, and the store has to honour it:
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).
We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.
- Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse.
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
- I had a couple of netbooks, and they weren't very useful other than as basic devices to check email or SSH. The screen was too small, the aspect ratio and resolution was weird, they keyboard was too small, they were severely under powered - in that they would struggle to play a YouTube video.
I had a couple in the late 00s to avoid having to lug around my 15" MacBook Pro when on-call. For that they worked great, but other than that I avoided it.
Later I got the 11" MacBook Air, and that had many of the same issues (especially weird screen size). It also wasn't that small, by today's standards, as it had a massive bezzle.
Nowadays I have to check if my 13" MacBook Pro is in my bag, as it's small and light enough not to notice. However I'd love a MacBook Air that is same aspect ratio as the 13" just smaller width and depth (No Apple, it doesn't need to be thinner), maybe with a 60% keyboard so typing isn't weird.
- For nearly a decade I've been using Google Photos with a love-hate relationship. I've tried a few alternative photo apps, even tried building one myself as a side side side side project, but nothing really felt like it could replace how I use Google Photos (haven't tried in the past couple of years mind).
I have a daughter, and my family lives in another country, so I want to be able to share photos with them. These are the feaures I need:
- Sharing albums with people (read only). It sounds pretty simply, but even Google fucked it up somehow. I added family members by their Google account to the album, and somehow later I saw someone I didn't know was part of the album. Apparently adding people gives (or did?) them permission to share the album with other people which is weird. I want to be able to control exactly who sees the photos, and not allow them to share or download them with others. On the topic of features, I should note that zero of the other social features (comments / reactions) have ever been used.
- Shared album with my spouse (write). I take photos of the kid, she takes photos of the kid. We want to be able to both add our photos to the shared album.
- Automatic albums or grouping by faces. Being able to quickly see all the photos of our kid is really great, especially if it works with the other sharing features. On Google you could setup Live Albums that did this... (automatic add and share between multiple people) but I can't see the option anymore on Android. I feel it could be a bit simpler though, just tagging a specific face, so that all photos should be shared within my Google One Family.
- The way we use it is we have a shared album between us or all the photos, and then a curared album shared with family members of the best photos.
Other than that I just use it as a place to dump photos (automatically backed up from my phone) and search if needed. Ironically the search is not very good, but usually I can remember when the photo I need was taken roughly so can scroll through the timeline. In total my spouse and I have ~200GB of media on Google Photos, some of it is backed up elsewhere.
- From 2017-2023 I had Thinkpads and some Acer which was well supported by Linux and sleep was the worse part. On numerous occasions across different devices I'd put the laptop to sleep, put it in my bag, and pull it out in a coffee shop to find it was on and now the battery is down to 50%. Why is sleep so hard?
- Right, and in my country you can even mix and match it.
I went to see my GP, paid for by public health, they referred me to a specialist.
I chose to pay €100 to see a private doctor who was available sooner (the next day) and had better ratings.
They referred me for an MRI which was done at another private provider, paid for by public health.
I went back to the private doctor and paid for a non-surgical treatment, which wasn't available on public health.
If that doesn't work, later I can opt for surgery, paid for by public health.
And even more importantly: There is one system that tracks all diagnoses, treatment, medication etc used by both public and private healthcare providers, so medical history is available instantly to everyone.
- I was involved in the early days of OpenTTD and one of the big issues was the first version was basically just a decompiled version of the original TTD binaries. Giving any kind of blessing would basically relinquish control of IP - that due to publisher contracts he may or may not actually be able to do. Legally this is the only thing he can say.
- I would be surprised if this hasn't existed for a few decades already.
Back in 2009 I was working at a place where O2 was a client, and they gave us an API that could identify the cell tower (inc. lat/lng) any of their customers were connected to. The network needs to track this data internally to function, so the API is basically the equivalent of their DNS.
- I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage. In the summer it can be heated with solar thermal to around 90c, and in the winter heat can be drawn out and go through radiators or underfloor heating, with a mixer valve. You just need a few pumps and valves, not even a heat pump is needed.
If you assume a modern house with a heat load of 1800kWh per year (fairly standard for a new build medium sized home where I live, in Northern Europe) that means you'd need a tank roughly 50m3, or 10,000 gallons for Americans. In terms of insulation you'd need around 50cm of XPS foam, and it would be buried a meter below ground.
It's nothing terribly complicated in terms of construction or engineering. Of course you'd pay more upfront, but then your heating bills would be practically zero. In warmer climates it would be much simpler, you could probably get away without burying it.
- > pay me for the privilege to work
This is basically how services like Uber Eats work in my country. The basics of it are foreign students want to earn extra income by working a few hours per week. This is allowed on a student visa, but it's limited hours, so real businesses like restaurants or bars don't usually want to hire students.
First of all you need a means of transport. There are small companies that will rent to you - on a weekly basis - an electric bike or a 20 year old Toyota Prius that is barely legal to drive (we have strict technical inspections here, so it's not that bad). They handle all the maintenance and insurance, you just pay your money and get a vehicle.
Next up you probably can't use your drivers license from home here to drive, as once you have a residence visa you need a local license. Many people just risk it, but if you want to do it legally you need to have a minimum number of lessons with an instructor and then pass the test. The test is only in the local language, so if you don't speak it (zero chance as a student that's been here 3 months), you need to hire a translator to accompany you on your test. They may or may not help to ensure your answers are correct. (You can only exchange a driver's license from other EU countries)
Finally you need a worker account on the delivery service, and the bag. You can register as self employed, file all the documents, go through the training course. That will take time, plus I think they are not always looking for new people due to high demand from workers. So you can skip all that and just rent an account from someone else, and hope they pay you at the end of the day.
So there is an entire industry dedicated to helping people earn a side income. I'm surprised the delivery services themselves don't start getting involved in this as it is a lot of money they are leaving on the table - although most of it has a questionable legal status.
- That's actually happening. Commercially you can buy a 0.55T system such as the Siemens Free Max for around $500k.
There are also developments in ultra-low-field fMRI (<0.1T) which use permanent magnets, which are estimated to retail in the five figure range, however it's more for structural usage (can identify a tumour or stroke progression).
What you are saying sounds like being able to control your own heart rate if you see it on a monitor. Maybe combining low resolution fMRI with models trained on higher resolution data, could give you enough visibility that you could learn how to activate other areas of the brain that you wouldn't normally use for tasks.
- There was an AMA about conjoined twins on Reddit a couple of years ago, and one of the interesting parts was that they could each sense how the other twin is feeling in terms of emotions. This is due to a lot of emotional states being based on hormones that flow through their shared blood stream.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cgetlq/were_conjoined...
- Whoa there, you don't need to be so sadistic to your team. It's not GraphQL, but having a document describing how your API works, including types, that is important.
I expect you could achieve the same with a comprehensive OpenAPI specification. If you want something a bit stricter I guess SOAP would work too, LLMs love XML after all.
- We won't be seeing a TSMC plant in France anytime soon then.
- No OP but I left right before Brexit and live in an Eastern European country now. We still have a lot of the problems as the UK, but what I like is that individual autonomy is a lot higher.
That has two faces though, as it means if you are earning minimum wage or have some kind of disability and can't work it's probably a worse place to be, as the social support is a lot weaker.
On the other hand if you are earning a decent wage (think generic office worker) you can live a pretty good lifestyle. Safety, health care, education, housing, opportunties are all much better than the UK. Taxes are about the same, corruption I'd say is worse (on paper it's better), roads are worse (partially due to our climate being harsher).
https://www.neste.com/products-and-innovation/neste-my-renew...