The increase in applications for remote jobs that I've observed is much more dramatic than indicated by this article. I'm seeing jobs with 200 applications per day. It's crazy. And these aren't high profile FAANG jobs. I'm talking regular companies with normal salaries.

I don't think this reflects a sudden glut of IT talent in the market. It's just that people apply for more jobs because, when you're not restricted by geography, why not? Ultimately, there aren't really 2000 people for every job, so it shouldn't have a huge effect on employees, but I have to wonder what this is doing to HR departments. There's no possible way to give each applicant a reasonable evaluation, and there's a high chance that any application you do try to move forward with will end up abandoning their application in the middle of the process.

Don't know why I kept typing ChatGTP rather than ChatGPT. Wish I could edit my posts.

I've used ChatGTP for both coding and for writing text. Every single time I've used it, it's produced plausible, but wrong answers. When writing prose, the answers tend to be overly wordy. When coding, it produces decent looking but incorrect code, but normally gets the API parameters right.

It doesn't matter.

The hardest part of writing prose is getting started. The hardest part of coding is remembering all the API calls. ChatGTP provides a starting point for prose, and the API calls for code.

I take ChatGTP output and either edit it heavily, or just use it as a source for cut-and-paste snippets of code. Saves a ton of time.

Peak wind generation is at night, though.

And that actually presents a huge opportunity. There would need to be a way to dynamically change the charging rate for the cars, but if you have enough of them you can use the combination of wind and cars to simulate reliable base load power.

Most of the time you don't need your car to be fully charged every morning. Keep it at around 50% and you can suck up energy when it's plentiful, and forego charging for a day or so if the supply is low.

Combine that with a slight over-provisioning of wind power and you've got a system that looks very much like reliable base load power to the non-car consumers.

The grid is ready today, at least at the aggregate level. There may be isolated areas that need upgrades, but the system overall could handle this now.

The grid is sized for peak load, which takes place at around 6pm. The peak load is generally at least 50% more than the overnight load. I haven't attempted to do the the actual math, but eyeballing the charts here, you have to figure that at least 25% of the grid capacity is unused, and available provided you charge at off-peak times.

Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year, and a Tesla uses about 0.24 kWh per mile. So we'd need about 800 billion kWh per year to power everybody. Total electricity consumption in the US is about 3.8 trillion kWh per year. 20% of that is 950 billion kWh. So the current spare capacity on the grid is enough for everybody to drive an EV.

As I said, this is in aggregate. It could be that some local grids require upgrades. But 10 years is plenty of time for that.

I was saddened when Sun abandoned Openlook in favor of CDE.Openlook was clean and beautiful. CDE was cluttered and ugly.

From a development perspective they were more-or-less the same, but the Openlook UI was nicer.

The majority of SpaceX investors can use this as an exit, hopefully making a good return on their investment in SpaceX.

Elon, meanwhile, could use the money to buy up the rest of SpaceX and go to Mars.

Wish I could mod you up. Absolutely the right approach.

I do something similar. I do keep my mobile with me most the time, but it's out of sight, with ringer off, and no voicemail.

People who know me know how to get in touch with me. For most people that's e-mail, and for my wife it's Google Chat. The rest of the world doesn't need to get in touch with me that urgently.

You're not the only one.

However, language can change pretty quickly. I used to hate the idea of using "they" as a non-gendered pronoun, just because it sounded wrong. Nowadays (I guess about 20 years later), I do it all the time without thinking.

I still get annoyed at people who don't use "who" and "whom" properly, but even professionally edited newspapers have now stopped using "whom". My way of speaking must sound really old fashioned to anybody under 30.

In 40 years the handful of "compelled speech" people will feel like dinosaurs. They'll be bickering about this in their retirement homes, while the rest of the world moves on.

I turned my ringer off and stopped picking up years ago. It's annoying that I can no longer use my phone to receive calls, but I've gotten used to it, and most people know to email me now.

If the spam calls go away, it will be like re-living the 90s and getting a mobile phone all over again.

This is indeed very cool. I just skimmed the paper (so far), but I fundamentally like the idea that not treating dx/dy as a fraction is just a historical artifact.

Bought your book.

I get way too many spam calls for this to work. It takes time to listen to voicemail.

I just turn my ringer off, and disable my voicemail. People who really know me understand that I can be reached through email or text message.

Unfortunately a lot of companies aren't set up for this. They demand a phone number and try to call me. If it's important and I'm expecting a call, I might turn on my ringer temporarily. Mostly I just let them ring, though.

Only true if you're releasing stored energy (as iwith fossil fuels).

The light that hits your rooftop will end up as heat regardless of whether you have solar panels on your roof. The difference is that the solar panels capture that energy and do something useful with it before releasing the heat.

I don't think they're doing badly, but I don't think they're living up to the potential of the site either.

Slashdot used to be a place where the comments were worth reading because, often, you'd see experts on the given topic debating the finer points.

Nothing like that exists now, anywhere. Smart people don't discuss real issues online in a respectful, informed manner because there's no forum where that's realistic or fun.

I'd try to turn Slashdot into a place like that (again).

[Disclaimer: I haven't forgotten about the days of goatsex, etc. And trolling has been around forever. But I also remember a lot of interesting and informative discussion. ]