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.

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).

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.

I'm going back from before he used Bitkeeper. There was a long period of time he didn't want to use source control at all. Bitkeeper wasn't used by him until the 2000s.

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

I like this stuff but...

• Blade Runner (film not book) - 1982, 44 years old
• Godzilla - 1954, 72 years old
• Star Trek - 1967, 59 years old
• Star Wars - 1978, 48 years old

Even the Marvel stuff dates back to the 60s. I think pop culture is a bit stuck in a rut - there are good sci fi series out there, and new ones need to emerge as major cultural touchpoints as well. It's all feeling a bit retread at the moment.

If it were open source and someone cared enough to fork it, then presumably there are open licensed contribution to the repo that Siemens won't own the copyright to.

What happens to those? Can they be taken closed source at all?

Just to note, the WSL containerisation approach is horrible for anything I/O intensive. WSL 1 had ELF binaries supported by the kernel and ran natively, this is a far superior approach to WSL 2's containerisation when it comes to raw speed.

I benchmarked this a few months ago and it was between 300%-600% slower on raw disk performance I/O.

It's not real. It's not intelligent. It's a probability matrix - a very good one, but that's what it is. When people say they 'convinced it', what actually happened was they started using language recognisable in a subset of the model's training data and the model responded using probability with data from that same subset as it's statistically closer.

In this case, they used language which is the kind floating around with people negative to AI, and so the AI constructed a sentence using data in their "negative to AI" section. Nobody got convinced of anything. It's very impressive, but it's 'just' a probability matrix.

I was listening to this on BBC news on my commute this morning (in the UK). They said it attacked a Medicare site, which is the Australian national health system. My immediate thought was "ah, so someone in the US asked it to do something with Medicare records and forgot to limit it to just the US then". So off the AI trots to do exactly what it was asked to do - "collect records on Medicare', without any regard to geography at all. Hence this 'hack'.

I mean, I'm just guessing so that opinion is worth what you just paid for it. It does sound plausible to me though.

"there is no right or expectation of privacy in public"

I agree (UK so different laws, but the principle is the same). However I increasingly feel this needs to be revised somehow. I'll admit up front I don't have all the answers here, but just intuitively it feels to me that this principle predates the era of cheap, automated mass surveillance whether government or private.

In the UK, privacy is protected via the Human Rights Act and UK GDPR. It provides for some level of protection, but it really seems to me that specific rules to address this kind of blanket recording need to start coming in. The definition of 'commercial', for instance. Is it commercial use if I record you on my glasses and then post it to Youtube? Arguably yes, since YouTube is a company and derives revenue from that. Same for Meta. But it's very, very far from clear to me if that claim has enough weight to prevail. A specific set of rules to address what is essentially a new phenomenon needs to be brought in.

Recording is not new. Photographing is not new. But the ease and scale via which it can be achieved, manipulated, tracked...that is new.

The thing here is that there isn't "Apple". There is Apple-the-parent-company, and Apple UK. From the perspective of law, Apple-the-parent is a supplier to Apple UK. Apple UK will have been ordered not to disclose information, including its suppliers. Therefore nothing restricts Apple-the-parent other than its contract as a supplier to Apple UK.

Yes I'm aware that sounds odd, but I deal with these situations fairly regularly (although am not any form of lawyer, this is absolutely not legal advice etc.). Contracts between international entities are common, and Apple US would not be in breach of US law but would be in breach of contract and would place Apple UK in breach of UK law by doing so.

Am not taking the UK government's side on this - I personally think the order is nuts and yep, I'm British. I'm just trying to show why the relationship would be more complex. Legally Apple US could disclose of course. However I'll bet you it has a supplier contract with Apple UK, a legally distinct entity, that says something like "the terms of this agreement will be bound by UK law". Hence it would be in breach of contract, and that could place Apple UK at legal risk in the UK.