Unless the Internet is lying to me, Leo orbits around 600km and Starlink around 350-600km. So it doesn't appear that will make a lot of difference.

Most of the latency in my Starlink connection is because the signal comes down in the US and has to route back from there to Canada if I ping my office from home instead of going direct through a cable. So I wouldn't expect to see much difference if I was using Leo instead.

Yes. One thing to remember is that Boomers are retiring en masse and older Gen-X are saying 'screw this' and retiring early because it's not worth the hassle of working any more. So it's not just people being laid off but also people deciding they don't want anything more to do with the awful work culture of the modern world.

They could charge a subscription so other "Smart Glasses" users will see you wearing pants. If you don't pay then the other users' glasses will automatically AI-remove your pants whenever the glasses see you.

Although I guess some people might consider that a feature rather than a bug.

Yeah, I have bigger batteries in the basement connected to the solar panels in the yard but they're not powerful enough to run AC. Can run a few fans though.

And our wifi is the only one on the street that's up when the power is out so curious neighbours could figure out something's going on at our house.

Looks like it's currently $849 in Bluetti's summer sale. That's for about 2kWh of battery, 2kW-ish inverter and solar charger in one box, which is a lot less than it would have been five years ago.

Designed to fit on top of a fridge but it can be used for powering other things too.

Oddly enough the UK was the only place where we had a generator hooked in to automatically take over power for the house when the grid went out. That was partly because we lived in a wood where falling branches would take our power lines, but it was also because the power company couldn't be bothered to clean up the lines so falling branches wouldn't take them out.

It works as a UPS but you can also attach solar panels to it for off-grid use. I didn't because I don't want to have to run cables through the walls into the house.

I recently hooked up a battery to my fridge because I got tired of not being able to open it when the grid power went out. Now I use maybe 10% more power because even though it passes AC straight through when the grid is working, the electronics still need to suck up a few watts to keep it working.

I suspect a lot of these battery purchases were made for similar reasons: we no longer live in First World countries where you can rely on the power to stay on and now we have to adopt Third World practises like having generators and batteries for when the power is out. I now have enough batteries to run lights, the Internet, the TV, my work computers and a few other things that we don't want to be without when the power goes away again.

I went to school in VA. There was rarely a day that the heat would get turned on. They're big monolithic heat islands full of children, calorie powered.

We also didn't have A/C back then, either. Windows would be open all day. I doubt they do that now.

I know this comes off trollish, but: why can't these power companies (which are usually public utilities) just build more power production instead of jacking prices? What's the deal? Why is this a "hate on AI that runs in datacenters" problem, and not a "just produce more power" problem?

How many different types of drone are you planning to carry on your back when running across a field while under attack by artillery and the other guys' drones?

I said "Drones CAN be defeated by a mesh net," I didn't say that a mesh net will defeat all drones. And the reason I said it was precisely because that guy I mentioned who has spent much of the last few years working with, fighting with and training Ukrainian troops mentioned it as one of the simplest defences against Russian drone attacks. They do it because it works against the kind of cheap drones which are typically launched against them.

> Stealth aircraft don't yet have countermeasures.

Yugoslavia shot one down in the 90s.

Russia regularly shoots down Storm Shadow missiles which are not much easier to detect than an F-35.

So yes, countermeasures are out there and have been for decades. This is why Israel doesn't fly its F-35s over Iran, and never even flew them over Syria.

Sure, but that's another thing you need to add to your drone to make it useful, just on the offchance that your target is hiding behind a net.

It makes sense to use them when you're attacking one of the transit routes which have nets spread around them because you can cut a hole with one drone and then fly other drones through it. But you don't want to put some kind of net-cutter on every single drone because pretty soon you're carrying ten kilos of things-that-might-be-useful-in-some-circumstances and the drone is no longer cheap and can't carry any useful payload.

Drones can be defeated by a mesh net. Bullets can't.

Despite the propaganda, they're not a wonder-weapon. I believe the record for most FPV drone hits survived by a single tank in Ukraine is now thirty-two, and it's normal for tanks to be hit ten times and still get back home alive. And against humans they're allegedly only about 10% effective.

It's also worth noting that Eastern Ukraine is ideal for drone warfare it's mostly flat and open. There's an interesting video on Youtube by a guy who worked with Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine and then went to Taiwan to test drone tactics with the Taiwanese military and discovered it was vastly more complex there due to lots of hills and trees... cheap FPV drones don't work if the other guy is on the far side the hill you're hiding behind, for example.

It kind of does when you're spending over quarter of a billion dollars making and marketing the movie.