Power grids are interesting in that at any given moment the power being consumed needs to match the power being generated; in theory every time you or someone else turns on or off a light, a generator somewhere needs to spin a little faster or slower. In the time lag between the light turning on and the corresponding generator speeding up, the frequency of the grid slows a bit until the corresponding generator speeds up. Realistically no single light (or small load) being turned on or off has impact because there are lots of lights being turned on and off and it all averages out. There are also things like the inertia of spinning mass and banks of capacitors and batteries that smooth the balance of grid consumption and generation. Power grids are engineered and tuned to handle a certain level of consumption swing.

Anyone here a grid engineer that has a real understanding (beyond my vague conceptual understanding) that can comment what a lot of 1MW swings (anytime someone plugs in or unplugs one of these truck chargers) does to a grid or grid design? Are 1MW "lights" being randomly turned on and off a challenge for our grids, or are or grids so large that even 1MW swings are just noise?

That's encouraging news

The Spotty plugin for Lyrion Music Server, formerly Logitech Media Server, formerly Slimserver - one of the best, if not the best open source music player ecosystem out there appears to be a casualty of this. Looks like after "the big scrape", Spotify has tightened down their APIs and have for the time being locked out 3rd party players of Spotify music. Lyrion itself of course still works fine, but you can no longer stream Spotify via it. This sucks because while I can use the Spotify app on my phone or computer, if I want to have music playing throughout the house, there isn't a good way to synchronize multiple Spotify players. Lyrion has been able to synchronize players for multi-room playback way back to the Slimserver days (and way before Sonos was a thing.)

If the Spotty developer can't get it working again, I will likely drop my paid Spotify subscription and have to get my streaming music elsewhere, as the only reason I pay for Spotify is that it has been easy to stream through Lyrion. I suppose I can start downloading from Anna's...

Absolutely no beef here against the Spotty developer, they had the API rug pulled out from under them, and it's not yet clear if there will be a technical solution.

Dropping API support for paid customers is a great way to drive those customers to piracy.

How about a small percentage tax on every trade? Accomplishes "taxing the rich", reducing incentives to high frequency trading, and raises revenue.

If it were truly end to end encryption the consumer endpoint wouldn't be the toilet, it would be the consumer. However I don't think we really want end to end encryption in this case. If so, we might be asking the company to tell their customers to "Take this certificate and shove it up your ass."

One of the reasons we have two pilots is for redundancy in the case that a single pilot becomes incapacitated (or during emergencies, overloaded). How would a technology enforced rule that requires two pilots to agree on something work if one of them is incapacitated? Sure, you could have some system where a single pilot could override that rule, but then you are back to a single pilot making the decision. You could have additional monitoring so that if one pilot does something weird, the other is alerted, but in this case the other pilot noticed immediately (the voice recorder caught one pilot asking the other, "why did you do that"?), so additional monitoring would not have helped.

As others have noted, ultimately you have to trust the pilots as there are lots of ways a pilot desiring to do so could crash a plane.

Normally I am annoyed by the clickbait use of the word "shocking" in a headline, but in this case I guess it's appropriate...

This discussion makes me think of the movie Real Genius The tech is dated (1980s), but the concept similar...

That would be fine if we were willing to require art classes. Shop classes could also train for fine motor skills as long as the projects included some precision work. I believe the requirements should include *some* form of fine motor skill development.

Depending on your opinion of if the goal of primary school should be to train free thinking or train compliance (I think schools should do a bit of both), training cursive teaches kids to follow instructions and achieve a specific result (well formed cursive letters that others can unambiguously identify) whereas art is generally a more free form effort (one kids drawing of a horse may be very different than another's, and all don't need to agree that it is a horse). If you want to train compliance and prepare people for the workforce and general societal interaction, shop classes might be a better cursive alternative than art classes. Of course art has value to society as well.

Refreshing to see a post title that has the key information needed and isn't asking a question. I wish all submissions were like this.

Or more recently from "Jimmy Lovine" by Macklemore

"We’ve been watching you, so glad you could make it
Your music, it's so impressive, and this whole brand you created
You're one hell of a band, we here think you're destined for greatness
And with that right song we all know that you're next to be famous
Now I’m sorry, I’ve had a long day, remind me now what your name is?
That’s right, 'Macklemore,' of course, today has been crazy
Anyway, you ready? We’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars
After your album comes out, we’ll need back that money that you borrowed"
"So it’s really like a loan?"
"A loan? Come on, no
We're a team, 360 degrees, we will reach your goals
You'll get a third of the merch that you sell out on the road
Along with a third of the money you make when you’re out doing your shows
Manager gets twenty, booking agent gets ten
So shit, after taxes, you and Ryan have seven percent to split
That’s not bad, I’ve seen a lot worse
No one will give you a better offer than us"
"Mm-hm," I replied, "I appreciate the offer"
Thought that this is what I wanted
Rather be a starving artist
Than succeed at getting fucked

Yeah giving an AI the ability to completely act as you, leverage your saved credentials, and respond to prompts from content you can't reliably inspect on random web pages seems like a bad idea.

We can always fight over leap seconds.

Just move the clocks forward half an hour and leave it that way year round. We make everyone happy by not moving the clocks anymore and we make everyone unhappy because they don't get to keep standard or daylight time. Effective compromises are when everyone is a bit happy and a bit unhappy. There are many timezones in the world that are on half or even quarter hour offsets, so it would not be without precedent.