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 old UI design wizards generally seem to agree things are degrading.

But now everything looks so modern and polished, though. Rounded corners! Pleasing and low-contrast so it won't cause injuries.

Yes although they dearly wanted to end that also. Starting recently it requires waiting 24 hours to enable side loading. And there's nothing that prevents them from shutting off side loading frequently, requiring another 24 hour wait for the next time.

Apparently the EDS blocks it because malicious txt files can cause arbitrary LISP code execution. Also Vim and Neovim are often apparently blocked for similar concerns. Fortunately VS Code has a Vim mode.

What a world we live in. I remember laughing at the thought of an image or text file being able to compromise a system.

Yeah that does sound crazy. You'll have to provide a lot more detail than that!

I mean EMACS *is* a LISP interpreter. It's kind of what it does, run scripts from any user-provided source. Heck you can shell script with "#!/usr/bin/env emacs --script".

Meanwhile Google illegally cut down 1.5 million trees in Finnland to make way for a data center. While this is small scale compared to deforestation in other places, this devastated the local environment and will have consequences for generations. It's pretty sickening really. Way to be not evil, Google.

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.

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.

Well they have a funny way of showing it then. Because much of Trump's crackdown is targeting legal immigrants. In fact very little of it is directly targeted at preventing illegal immigration.

No idea but the Russians have been using their microwave weapons against American diplomatic personnel for the last 10 years with devastating effectiveness. Seems that they have been targeting personnel and their families who served in the Ukraine stations.

Also Canadian diplomatic personnel have been targeted too by the Russians.

Ironic they are developing this weapon while at the same time denying that Havana syndrome is real and accusing the victims in the diplomatic core of mass hysteria. Not that long ago they bought a weapon on the black market from the Russians. I'm sure they have been testing it extensively while they make their own version of it.