I'm not OP, but I can give you my answer to what you're asking:

A script mainly executes *external commands*.

Most languages can be used to write scripts. They can also be used as a "real" language. Some with more difficulty than others. Bash being an extreme example. You can do a heck of a lot in "pure bash" w/o relying on unix commands. Most people don't bother though. Thus, they write scripts.

When I started using perl some ~27 years ago, a lot of my initial stuff was scripts. I used backticks throughout my code, executing unix commands to get what I needed. Thus, I created perl scripts. More and more, I replaced my `ls` with readdir(), and so forth. They became programs.

Same for python. If you rely on python internals (which most folks do) - it's programs. If you shell out for most of your logic, it's scripts.

At least that's my take.

This used to be true, but is no longer true - and will be even less true year over year.

Battery prices are continuing to decline. China has been manufacturing solar planels like crazy, and are now manufacturing batteries like crazy.

I'd highly recommend that you read the June 22nd 2024 edition of The Economist (https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2024-06-22 ). Their main feature is not their front page, but rather their "Dawn of the Solar Age" feature.

I was extremely surprised. Up until June last year I was "yeah, yeah, Solar is still for specially interested people". Now I'm in the "OK. Solar will happen no matter what, given the economics" camp.

Battery prices are dropping. Residential, municipal and grid-sized battery solutions will be used to store solar for when the sun doesn't shine.

The good thing is that battery prices are dropping, and expected to continue to drop for quite some time.

Not american; don't know the exacting details - but my understanding is that no new projects will be approved on "productive farmland".

Furthermore; given that solar is the cheapest alternative there is per kwh - economic conditions alone will ensure that lots and lots of solar capacity will be added by enterprising individuals, and companies.

The trick is that now that battery prices are plummeting in addition, battery capacity is needed for when the sun doesn't shine, and flywheels are needed for inertia.

Even with that, it's cheaper than any other power plant solutions.

You missed the point. Notre Dame is still in use because they can fix it *with external resources*.

The population of the vessel cannot get *external resources*.

Every thinking person cares.

Wasting the wealth on being nonproductive means we'll become poor again in a generation or two, having wasted our wealth by being prodigal spendthrifts.

That would be sad.

The "to poor to rapidly invest themselves" is simply false.

Egypt has a GDP of $396B . Morocco has a GDP of $144B.

To buy 1GW of Solar panels clocks in at $100M . A 10GW solar farm could be had for about $1B. ROI for such an investment is in low single digit number of years. Of course, there would be extra infrastructure investments in addition.

You're entirely right that Desertec et.al smelled of green imperialism, but implemented from the African side there's an incredible export profit to be made, and later on developed into more and larger solar farms to export even more - and also provide power for more local industry and infrastructure.

If we have a look at solar influx maps, or just have general geography knowledge, it's pretty obvious that Northern Africa has enormous available areas that can be used for large scale solar plants. And lots of them at that. They can use solar towers for nighttime generation, and large areas filled with solar panels for daytime peak generation.

North Africa can, by investing on their own, become entirely energy independent. If they buy up some of the Chinese panel overproduction, and then generate their own expertise in installing large solar parks, they can easily supply domestic needs - and with cables, they can sell a heck of a lot of energy to an energy hungry Europe.

This again can be supplemented in both Europe and Northern Africa with grid scale battery storage, for nighttime usage. Northern Africa should of course invest in solar towers too - to ensure nighttime generation is also existent.

There's more than enough available space. The enormous untapped solar energy resources can be used for both export and for large domstic benefits such as water desalination etc.

> Fast chargers are not the issue. Norway has some 30,000 L2 chargers as well

You need both fast chargers, and slower chargers for whenever you reach your destination. I've got a nice home charger which I use for 98% of my charging needs. Whenever I go on a trip to visit family, or longer road trips, I really do like that I can pop by a supercharger along the way.

So, I'll claim that both are important. The superchargers are of outside importance as people *expect* to be able to use their electric car on the occasions where they drive farther. For me, that's 5-6 times a year. The rest of the time - I charge at home.

> Same as using seconds since 1970 is the most robust time keeping solution (except we don't, as Unix time follows UTC, not TAC.)

I'm afraid Unix time is an abomination. It's one of those things that really can't be defended. The fact that we 27 seconds, so far, that we can't reference properly is terrible. The fact that 54 seconds are impacted by this is horrible.

And we're only about 5.5M people. That is one fast charger per 580 person or somesuch.

The US has quite a bit more population, but you only have one fast charger per ~6200 person.

We're spoilt when it comes to charging infrastructure for our electric cars. Given that most folks charge at home, I think we've pretty much saturated our need for more at this point.

I have to admit that I upgraded from 4G -> 32G of RAM, and from spinning rust to NVME for my /home dir only a few months ago for my home desktop (which is my main home computer).

Firefox had been getting slower and slower and more and more memory hungry for years. Now it's lean and mean again. :-)

A heat pump isn't more than â1500-â2000 for a good air-to-air one here in Norway.

I suspect people are being 'oversold'. That they think they need a full HVAC system, while they only need it in the main room - and the heat will seep through the rest of the house easily enough. Unless they have an asbolutely huge home. Then maybe they'll need two of them.

Installing vast amounts of ducting etc. is entirely unnecessary.

AI certainly have a LOT of substance, and the hype around it is awesome for the development of it. It means lots and lots of investment and new tech is being invented. It means things are getting cheaper and cheaper. It means things are getting more and more efficient.

It might not seem that way, as it requires more and more GPU power, more and more electricity etc .. but after deepseek was released, and other models will be released over the next year; affordable AI is here in that smaller companies can get by with one GPU - and play with it.

The thing that *does not* make sense to me is how there will be a large ROI for those who develop and research it. It will benefit the industry as a whole.

As an example, many smaller IT companies, not in AI, now have their own internal LLM running on their own servers. With the models that are available for free download. No need to pay for tokens. It's a one-time investment in a pretty good GPU, but then it's just "use it as much as you want". Employees are delighted to be playing around with LLMs - and the company gets "free" internal LLM.

Been using Ubuntu since 6.06. I'm growing tired of it. Snap is annoying me no end.

It might be time to give SuSE a spin again. Left SuSE for Ubuntu back in the day. Or maybe go back to Debian, although I'm still sore about the deprecation of security updates for 2.0 (slink) a very, very short time after potato came out.