I dunno, I felt like the IIe was peak Apple 2.

We're talking about different things. I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance. You're not wrong, but that's not what I was talking about.

The point of load shifting is that if I have a task I need to do today that consumes power, I can do it when the sun is shining or when it's not. If the power company lets me do it for free because the sun is shining and there is excess power, that helps them to keep the grid balanced during the day, which is good, and that's what you're talking about.

What I'm talking about is that if you have a task that you were always going to do, and you would have done it at, say, 7pm, when renewables generation is low and load is high, and I incentivize you to do it at 4pm, when demand is high and renewables generation is higher, then you aren't going to do that task at 7pm, which means the total load on the grid at 7pm will be less. If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm. That can bring my cost per mwh down from £500/kwh to £40 per mwh. Load is high at that time, so that can save millions of pounds over the course of an hour.

It's really not nonsensical, actually. Base load can be incredibly expensive. If they can avoid firing up the most expensive plant, they make more money. It's really that simple. Even though it seems "free" to you, what's really going on is that you have become part of the supply side of the equation by using power when it's there, and then _not_ using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on. This is really a case where everybody wins.

Wait a minute, they showed the Artemis crew a story about a guy who is drugged and kidnapped by his space agency and wakes up 11 light-years from home with the rest of his crew dead to bolster their spirits?

...on its face as it boots up?

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.

It may not be as much as we need or hope for, but I still about fell out of my chair laughing. Now I can make things shitty without even getting up!

The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement. Right now the amount of money people have to save for retirement in the U.S. is actually a problem, because there's no safe place to put that much money. And so we wind up with things like private equity and various other forms of securitization a specific group of which led to the 2008 crisis.

All of these securities are just ways of storing value, but you can't actually store value—value is work. "Stored value" is an obligation that someone else will have to work to pay back: I use my wealth to pay you money to do the work that I need done.

So public support for people who need it is actually the same thing as living off savings, except that living off savings is individual, and public support is collective. So public support can take advantage of the law of averages, and private savings can't. Which massively increases the amount you have to save as an individual to be sure you'll be okay in retirement.

And this motivates wealth inequality, which makes things worse and worse for the people who are creating the value you as a person with a decent amount of retirement savings need done. We've already had people saying "no more taxes" because they don't want to work to pay for other peoples' retirements. This is the same thing, and at some point it either turns into runaway inflation, which means your savings loses its value, or else it turns into regime change, which means who knows what? Right now, it means that a bunch of elected people are just raking in money through fraud, which isn't likely to end well for the rest of us.

It's weird how people think of socialism as being somehow expensive in comparison.

...that this sort of thing was a possibility when the first ATX power supplies came out. I still say that if you can't disconnect the power source, especially if it's a difficult to remove battery for a laptop or phone, you can't really turn it off.

...not guilty plea, even if you are caught with the chicken head bitten off and you're covered with blood, because it leaves the door open for a plea deal, which you can sometimes swing by saving the government the cost of a pointless trial. It's just one of the rules of the game.

This is what happens when you lack the ability to express emphasis in your output. Perhaps he should have posted his opinion in Markdown for clarity.

I know of several legacy industrial systems running DOS, as they depend on software with built-in drivers which must communicate with long EOL ISA or PCI interfaces. It's expensive, but there are sources for legacy hardware (as well as old surplus) for this very market. Yeah you might pay USD$10K for a machine capable of reliably booting MSDOS 3.3, but it's cheap compared to the $250K CnC lathe or mill for which there are no more modern controls.

Well, and not only that, but the article itself clearly says that it was the tariffs that killed the company, not Lena Khan. So the headline looks a bit like it's just clickbait nonsense, and Lena Khan had nothing to do with this. Sure, if Amazon had acquired them, maybe they would have operated at an apparent loss in order to collect all that hot hot private home use data, but that would not have been a win.

The worry that iRobot would be acquired by Amazon was reason enough for me to disable my device—I hadn't actually heard that the merger was canceled, because I moved shortly after that and we sold the Robot so we wouldn't have to move with it. :/

We cancelled our subscription to the Post after the ownership kiboshed a the editorial team's presidential endorsement last year. Bezos is really pushing the editorial team into his point of view, and the paper is becoming more and more just a mouthpiece for him. This AI thing is amusing, but it's not like it's a surprise.

The only good thing left there is Carolyn Hax.

Arduino responded to this recent drama just a few days ago, saying "Our 20-year commitment to open-source is unwavering" with a good explanation of the new T&C.

https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/1...

I believe Arduino is sincere with their statement.

One man speaking with Adafruit's social media accounts seems to feel otherwise. He probably believes he's doing good by raising the alarm. Maybe some of the points have some merit? But the tone really looks like an attempt to stir up drama and harm Arduino's reputation.

Adafruit does have history with Arduino. In 2015 when Arduino had serious internal division and conflict, Adafruit was manufacturing brand name Arduino Uno under some sort of license deal. That arrangement ended sometime in 2016. Adafruit quickly launched a product line of essentially Arduino clone boards named "Metro". Does any of that matter? Maybe, maybe not. But when reading what really looks like an attack on Arduino's long-established reputation coming from official Adafruit channels, best to keep in mind those 2 companies have a history.

I also have some history with Arduino, having made an Arduino-compatible board and contributed code and help over the years. I've personally met the Arduino developers and Arduino leadership folks several times at conferences. They are genuinely good people who've poured a lot of effort into trying to good in the world.

Maybe Arduino change for the better or for the worse with Qualcomm. I don't have a crystal ball. But I'm trying to keep an open mind and not get caught up in fear over basically boilerplate legalese.