Depends on what you mean by working. I have 450 kw of grid-tied solar and when the power goes out, they go offline because they have to. Yes it's theoretically still available, but without the baseline power frequency to match, solar and wind systems have to go offline or they will cause a lot of damage to the grid. Any deviation in grid frequency between segments will cause major problems. Now many grid-tie inverters do have the ability to simulate rotational inertia which is helpful when the grid is under heavy load. But in order to keep renewables online when other sources fail, we need a system to communicate extremely accurate frequency information to all inverters on the grid, including home microgen.

Too funny. Yes the level of far-right wokeness is quite astounding these days! Complete with cancel culture (Trump's feelings were hurt by someone who worked for netflix). Talk about a snowflake. Not sure how these types of folks can function with all this cognitive dissonance.

Firefox is the only browser that supports the full uBlock Origin plugin now. Any Chrome-based browser, including Chromium can no longer run it thanks to plugin manifest v3 that Google crammed down everyone's throats. No, supporting uBlock Lite is not good enough. Even Vivaldi, which has its own, much-less-effective ad blocker, does not support even uBlock Origin Lite. So yeah really Firefox, along with its forks and derivatives, is the only one left that lets you decide what you want to see. So for all its warts and for all the stupid things the firefox committee does to drive me away, I still use it. In fact I also use it on Android (F-Droid Fennec version) and will never use any Chrome-based browser on Android .

From what I understand it was Anthropic that sought out the contract with the military.

Heck there was a time the GOP thought that about Trump. But he did turn on them and with a minority of really extreme diehard supporters he's managed to completely co opt the party and pushed moderates out. And some that were moderate he's managed to completely turn to the extreme. Fascinating (and horrifying) to watch it unfold in real time.

I didn't know about that. That sure makes whoever was in charge back then look intelligent doesn't it. Not sure what those "ties" were in the first place, other than using the software.

Regardless we're rapidly approaching a new phase, already reached in countries like Russia (familiar after decades of soviet rule), where we will have to keep our opinions to ourselves, or face the wrath of the leader.

As a farmer I was struck by something in the article, which touches on a looming agricultural crisis in North America, and probably other places in the world. And also brings to mind some uniquely American issues with regards to farm succession. Notice the age of the farmers in the article. The main person is 80 years old and almost certainly semi-retired from actual farming operation or will be completely retired very soon, perhaps not by choice. And she's not alone. Despite a few prominent young youtube farmers, the average age of farm owner operators in North America is getting close to 60 now and is not trending down. For a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment, younger generations are not taking over agriculture. If the AI bubble lasts a few more years, the company in the article won't have to pay an inflated price for the land. They just have wait until the farmer has to sell in order to retire. Or if the owner dies, the land goes to her heirs, who will be glad to sell because they have to pay the 50% inheritance tax and the only practical way to do that with a land inheritance is to sell. All of these factors do not bode well for American farms' future, nor for the future of farms and food security in many parts of the world including Canada and Europe. Even China is grappling with this issue after decades of promoting urbanization.

Raise their own prices?! You don't know much about farming do you. Farmers sell commodities. As such they don't set prices. When a farmer wants or needs to sell his crop, grain buyers put out bids based on the futures market and a basis level. Farmers take it or leave it. That's it. Farmers can hedge or speculate in the futures market but individually they have no influence on the market.

During the pandemic when artificial shortages caused companies to arbitrarily triple input costs for farmers, someone said to a friend of mine, I guess now you've got to raise your prices to stay profitable don't you. He was speechless that people generally were that ignorant of the basic facts of food production.

My luck with Google Notebook LM and pdfs is incredibly good. At least if you want to be able to summarize and lookup information in a pdf. It seems able to understand tables and everything. Not sure why Gemini struggles when Notebook LM has few problems.

Decades ago when magazines were gushing about the prospects of RAD, VB6 was released and had rapid uptake by all sorts of amateurs and non-programmer types. Here on slashdot, and by many professional programmers, it was widely panned as enabling all sorts of low-quality garbage because it very much lowered the barrier to entry, and could generate most of the boiler-plate code. This which was definitely resented by many. But all sorts of useful, one-off utilities (loads of shareware) were done using it by people who would not call themselves programmers. Drag and drop GUI form design and event-driven programming was a powerful concept that is now fairly mainstream post VB6, although I think many VB6 users disappeared after MS abandoned the platform and users when it came out with VB.net.

Having used AI coding assistants (currently using four different models concurrently) for the last few months, I believe Coding LLM agents are a modern incarnation of VB6. While many here on slashdot poo poo them, in the last few months I've managed to finally do several projects that I've been wanting to tackle for years but just lacked the knowledge and time. I haven't let the bots do everything, but in guiding them carefully I've learned a lot and got things done. I've added features I need to existing open source software, written in languages I have no experience in and toolkits I've never used before. I've used them to convert entire projects from one language to another, or upgrade them to new language and toolkit versions. Recently I was able to bootstrap my learning of KiCad using these tools. LLM agents can create schematics and board layouts from scratch for me to get me started. Also more impressive, some of them can take an image of a component and description of the physical layout (either my own description or from the data sheet) and create both a custom symbol and footprint for it, if it wasn't already in the KiCad libray.

In short I've made more progress on my projects in the last three months than I have in the entire year before this. Granted while what I'm doing is related to my profession, but I'm not paid to develop software, so I'm not a software (or electrical) engineer nor a professional programmer.

Like VB6, we can ask, is this a good thing? Will it dilute the profession?

My fedora workstation boots today in about the same time as it did 10 or even 20 years ago of in honest. UEFI is definitely not fast to get to the grub screen. But after that takes about 30 seconds to get to the login screen which isn't impressive IMO. Done of that is zfs importing and getting the root filesystem up.

Windows 11 boots in about half the time. Although I just worked on a laptop that windows 10 took about 5 minutes to boot and 10 minutes to get usable.

I assume you also stay off the roads and avoid using any and all government-provided services as well. And you're not connected to your local government-owned utilities either.

Yes we used to think that. Now we know that there are many chemicals that at low does accumulate in the body to detrimental affect. For example, PFAS chemicals and also the chemicals mentioned in the study: BPA and BPS.

You really think things will go back to normal in three years, don't you? You really are unable to see the damage that has been inflicted on your nation, much of which will never be repaired. Particularly the damage to the constitution. The last year was a reminder to us all that the constitution is just a piece of paper; it has no power to save us except as people in power (and indeed all people) voluntarily honor it. The DOJ is actively working to circumvent the limits of the constitution and in fact is currently in literal violation of the law, yet courts are powerless to do anything other than pass rulings (by design), and congress also sits idle and does nothing to check the executive. The system only worked before because people, especially presidents, agreed to abide by it. Not anymore. Don't think for a moment this isn't doing permanent damage to the Republic. I thought the Star Wars prequels were pretty bad (and they are), but Lucas' story of the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire have real parallels in what we see happening today. Trump may be a rambling old man, but he's surrounded by people who aren't rambling and aren't senile, who very much want all of what he has said he wants, including "having Greenland." That's why we take it seriously.

Multilateral agreements, be they about peace or trade, are dead, even if a sane guy gets in the white house in a few years. No one wants to take the risk of signing something with the US only to have it be torn up when the next crazy guy gets elected. Free trade and globalization is dead. There will be no new north American free trade agreement. No one in the administration wants it, and congress doesn't want it either. By all accounts the president wants everyone to self destruct, sowing division, and then he'll come in and steal what's left for himself. That's the way he ran his businesses, and that's the way he runs the country.

There are no winners. Things have been fracturing for decades, but Trump finally threw the brick that shattered it. Whether it was inevitable or not, you'll forgive us if we aren't exactly thrilled about him ripping it all down.

Diesel heaters have been used on ICE heavy trucks for decades for cold starting. Webasto made their name in North America selling such heaters. They are used on all sorts of heavy vehicles and agricultural machines where there's no electricity to run a block heater. Webasto isn't the only game in town either.