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Comment Re:Fix for that (Score 1) 29

Don't ban from arvix for not proofreading something like citations on a hot result. Where do you draw the line? Drawing the line is hard to do so just push them into the secondary queue. Then they have to redeem themselves to get back into the main one.

This is so obvious, if they start banning people a second competing service will emerge.

Comment Re:Fix for that (Score 2, Interesting) 29

A better idea is to simply have two submission queues. If you get banned from the high quality one you have to use the low quality queue. If they don't do that someone else is going to do it. It is a fact of life that papers are going to have AI generated writing in them going forward. Just accept this fact and make two queues.

Comment Re:Octopus (Score 1) 151

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.

Comment Re:Octopus (Score 4, Informative) 151

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.

Comment Re:Sony TV enshittifiaction (Score 1) 81

How is this profitable to them? They sell the same TV all over the world. AFAIK the US is the only company with a monopolist controlling TV listing guides. This monopolist changes them a monthly fee for every active TV, Sony getting no further revenues. I haven't looked in a while but you as a consumer, can also subscribe to this service. I think they want $3/mth from retail customers. I haven't dealt with this in over ten years so I am forgetting the details.

Comment Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score 3, Interesting) 80

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.

Comment Re:The USA could do better. (Score 1) 98

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.

Comment Re:Claude Code is good (Score 5, Insightful) 69

In my experience... if I ask Claude to help with something that's my strong point (like my core coding), it's like training a junior programmer, and I can solve my problems faster myself. But... when I need something outside my core expertise, like helper programs, wrappers, or interfaces to other technologies I'm not familiar with, it's a very fast way to get 95% of the way there without wasting time climbing the learning curve myself for a one-time need.
Like any tool, you have to know when to use it and when not to, and what its strengths and weak points are.

Comment Re:Imagine that (Score 4, Insightful) 33

All jokes aside, this is more useful as "a button next to my bed that shuts off all the inside and outside lights, closes all the doors, activates the alarm, turns down the heat, makes sure the tv is off, and disables notifications until the morning."

I've also seen one used as "a button to hit on your way to work to shut off all the things you forgot to shut off."

A panic button next to your bed could be "turn on all the outside lights, save all the security camera footage somewhere extra, and tell me if any motion detectors outside this room go off any time in the next 10 minutes."

I imagine someone will want one that makes their cell phone make a noise, so they can find it.

Or, it's a simple way to add a second switch to a room (or hallway) with one inconveniently-placed switch.

For a young child who is afraid of the dark, a button to dim the lights to 20% after they're in bed, and automatically turn them off an hour later.

A wireless doorbell.

Etc.

Comment Re:Not the Only Model (Score 2) 106

I suspect a large majority of the money spent towards open source is in the form of support contracts, yes, but large contracts paid by large companies to large projects. The problem is that a majority of the *projects* are small, often single person, and *those* do not have a good way of funding their work. There is no web of small companies paying small projects keeping the greater open source community healthy, and so smaller projects have to look to other ways to fund work.

Comment Re:Luddites (Score 1) 54

"I really don't see how people aren't more productive with AI."
A couple of things:
1. The right tool for the job. We know how to use AI productively, but for us, AI in search is not it. YMMV.
2. DDG users tend to be a self-selected group of people who don't want computers to remember everything we said and maybe regurgitate it later to someone else
3. Every new technology has a choice between "go slow and understand the ramifications" and "go fast and break things". We prefer to not break things.
4. We know how to ask ChatGPT stuff when we need an AI answer. We don't need everything on one page.
5. Some people prefer the comfort of the known, to the stress of the unknown, and need more time to adapt to new tech.

Comment Re:Just balance the budget. (Score 1) 121

Pretty sure that all taxes are paid by humans in one form or another, I don't think robots are paying taxes yet. Sure you can tax a corporation, but you are just indirectly taxing the shareholders, and they are people too.

You vastly overestimate the taxation capacity of the economy. Go read the fed's papers on optimal taxation and you will see that the US is close to the optimal rate right now. The theory of optimal taxation is to maximize tax collections over time. Sure you can raise taxes a lot right now, but if you do that people stop investing and you lose future taxes. Optimal taxation theory shows how to maximize the combination of current and future taxes.

Since we are sitting pretty close to the optimal number currently, we need to reprioritize spending, not just spend more. Spending more simply increases the debt. Increasing the debt increases interest expense. And the more the government spends on interest, the less it can spend on other priorities.

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