I have account number 13,802 here, which I've never been able to persuade the admins to recover for me. Notice how there's no activity on it. That's because when I created it and saw that user number come up I thought "huh - no point in carrying on here then, how could anyone possible read or make sense of anything with nearly fourteen thousand people on it?".

Since then, the chorus on various sites has become rather larger than merely fourteen thousand. The background noise is incredible. I'm amazed any signal gets through at all vs the constant noise to be honest.

Spirits walk among us.

It should change slightly, I think. It should now include questions to filter out idiots who believe what this Anthropic loon just stated.

The local teleco switched to Fiber. I get 2Gbps up/down. + phone for $80 a month. I had Comcast Business for $200 a month, I had a 3 year contract for 160 the first year, then 180, then 200. Except it didn't stay that consistent. Their fees increased. the contracted base amount stayed the same.

So I'm saving 140 a month now. i may drop the phone and save another 30. And my speeds are better. So far I haven't had any issues.with reliability. 2 months of service, it's been up while I needed it.

I can't say that for Comcast either. Even on a business account, I had regular outages.

It's not either/or though - if you're generating more than you're using, then you can redirect that back into the battery (or sell it back to the grid). I have limited winter experience at the moment, but the battery is fully topped up during the day while still powering the house from solar. That said, the darker nights/evenings right now means you kick into battery power earlier, so for me for example at roughly the same lattitude as London, the battery is drained by about 9pm.

It's interesting to watch and fun too if you're in to that kind of thing. Which, quite clearly, I am.

That's increasingly true here too (UK). I'm on an EV-focused tariff which guarantees me up to 6 hours cheap EV charging per day, and in addition there are lower, cheaper overnight rates for the electricity.

What's been noticeable recently is that these periods are now tending to be different. I've been driving EVs for eight years and on roughly the same tariff (the 6 hour cap is new), and usually the "cheap EV charging" and "overnight low rates" coincided. Now however, I've noticed that if I plug in the EV during the day it pretty much starts charging instantly and you're right - I could say that's 100% around lunchtime. My usage means I can't really take advantage of that much since I commute in the day and plug in in the evenings, but it's still a noticeable pattern for the days that I am either working from home or its a weekend.

Oh, fluffernutter.

ICE is only convenient because of a hundred years of infrastructure build-out. But you think having an electrician spend two hours running a 50 amp line from your panel to the side of your house, which takes a few hours, is somehow an insurmountable block.

"Nice horseless carriage, Mr. Ford, but can you produce enough to switch *all* transportation to it? As of today, call for horseless only transportation means that personal vehicle ownership becomes impossible. To put it differently, you can drive your horseless carriage only because other people drive horses."

US male life expectancy is 76.5 years. If I tell you every year that you're probably going to die by the time you're seventy-seven, and you hit seventy-eight, do you now believe you're immortal?

Completely agree, however this should just be rolled into the "how much does a data centre cost?" bill. Add the solar, add the necessary battery storage...that's your cost. Not "we'll build it without anything and hope everyone else will give the power instead".

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

Stayed at a rental in Omaha... Beautiful neighborhood and a very nice house. From a glance. Great location. But the lawn wasn't great. Leaves needed raked, basically they did the bare minimum mowing. The trash was heaped up and overflowing. Did anyone show up and put the trash cans on the curb? The deck was getting a bit old, the grill seemed like a toss aside charcoal grill that wasn't super safe. (You couldn't kill the airflow when you were done to quickly drop the temps. I grill/smoke on charcoal a lot and would've thrown it away.) The inside was not great. Furniture was an odd ball mix of things from who knows where. Basement was very dank/musty/stinky. Other clues like that too. Basically this house should've just been sold off to a family that could love it and take care of it and make it a home. Very sad. Basically had all these clues that the owner/manager was doing the very minimum they could get away with. But hey, let's worry about what the renter should/shouldn't do...

USB-C? Apple were laughed at for only including USB-C on their laptops and there are still weird antique societies around keeping USB A kicking when it should have been buried over a decade ago.

If you mean only the world of phones - Apple changed their charging and connection standards three times. 30 pin -> Lightning -> USB C. Each one lasted about a decade, which is what they always said. Lightning came out in 2012, USB C didn't even exist as a standard until 2014. Should they have changed yet again after two years, thus annoying everyone?

Meanwhile, over in the rest of the world you had an assortment of barrel connecters, USB Mini, USB Micro, USB C. USB C emerged the winner (although you still get these hateful USB A->USB C power-only cables. I hate the USB C 'standard', never know what cable you're picking up), and yes Apple was arguably forced to change but then so were others. I'm still plagued by more USB Micro devices than I am USB C, a connector that Apple entirely skipped (thank god).

I'm still using Steam. Gabe hasn't done anything to abuse my trust.

Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.