This is a good example of one of the major pitfalls of using ChatGPT to write code -- since it's trained on a bunch of code scraped from the internet, much of it badly-written, it makes the same mistakes that novice programmers make.

The author of the article claimed that writing the code to accept a number with two digits after the decimal would have taken them "two-to-four hours of hair-pulling" (this was to replace three lines of code), so he obviously doesn't have the ability to determine whether the solution that ChatGPT spit out was any good or not.

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.

The Terms & Conditions (PDF warning) for their paid "audit support product" make it clear that they are not providing you with legal representation:

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice... but if you receive a notice from the IRS, and they want to "discuss" or modify your tax returns, you should obtain legal representation right away.

The IRS is attempting to create its own free-file system independently of Intuit et. al. While it probably won't be useful for every tax situation, it may help lower fees for people with simple returns. What does everyone think? Any takers?

Part of the point is that since this energy is going to be used for heat anyway, so you don't have to convert it back again. With that in mind, it's certainly possible that this is more efficient and cost-effective than a rack of Li-ion batteries.

Although the author of the article presumably doesn't understand that, since while energy storage in sand makes sense in some circumstances, it certainly can't replace li-ion batteries for most uses.

The competitors never really pulled much of the traffic; what really pressured them to drop the beta was that the comment section became a complete wasteland with huge amounts of anti-beta spam and moderators playing along by modding down on-topic posts and modding up the anti-beta posts. One of the editors took to moderating everything critical of the beta down, but found that they couldn't keep up against the prevailing opinion.

The other time something similar happened was when SourceForge (part of Dice, same parent company as Slashdot) started bundling malware with the GIMP, and the /. editors refused to post anything about it. Again there was a revolt in the comment section until they finally relented and allowed a post about it.

Definitely some parallels to the reddit situation, although I don't know that the reddit userbase can come close to working together like that.

It's not "allowing the protests" when you remove the moderators engaging in the protests and replace them with people more amenable to doing what they're told.

Well, it's no longer just hearsay. I went through a couple days ago and deleted all my posts. (I did not delete my account, though.) I checked that they were gone.

Today I checked again, and ... all my posts that I deleted are resurrected.

I do go through and delete my older posts about once every six months. Ones that I had deleted previously are still gone. So it looks like they are restoring old posts from a backup before this whole thing blew up, probably to try to limit the damage from so many people mass-deleting their content.

There's been at least a few reports from people claiming that they recently (in response to the changes) deleted their accounts and posts, and reddit reinstated them. It's hard to be sure that's true, though.

Except switching phone providers might take a total of an hour, if you spend a lot of time researching your options. The difficulty involved is nothing like the difficulty involved in moving to a new home.

Prime is $140 a year, not $200. $180 if you insist on paying monthly (but then why are you quoting a yearly price?)

Probably it wouldn't. I'm not very interested in it either.

They're pretty obviously not examining a subset of drives that are representative of all hard drives. They're only looking at drives that failed (so leaving out all drives that are retired without failing) and also only examining ones that are sent to this company for data recovery.

There might be some useful data to gather from this, but the conclusion from the Ars Technica headline "HDD average life span misses 3-year mark" is obvious nonsense.

Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose.

I always appreciate problems that can be solved with the application of a good rageshake. Let's hope it works.

Wrong! Biden voter here.

Idiot.

So, if Biden is going to take the credit if a recession is avoided, will he step up and take the blame if there is a recession after all?