this part from TFS makes rivals pointy hair boss productivity logic.

Oh, you're a founder and long time major contributor to this group? Well, we'll strip you of membership and thus voting and any say in decision making, but we'll condescend to allow you to keep fixing bugs and putting up MRs to make our product better....
What?! why are you upset? i'm doing you a favor by letting you continue to do unpaid work for me!

Simpsons Did It! Simpsons Did it!

There's apparently a new path bypassing the Khumbu Icefall that is opening this year (2026) and it indeed includes a 270 step via ferratta.

So not all the way to the top, but between Base Camp and Camp 1 i guess.
https://theworld.org/stories/2...

Interesting. Though i suspect it's more of a tax / to raise revenue by requiring people to spend more $$ in the country than just a safety thing.

(TBH i think the whole Everest thing, especially in its modern form with guides and sherpas carrying everything and the ice fall doctors setting up and maintaining the route is overdone and doesn't really PROVE much anymore)

TBH i have no idea how /. makes any money... i assume it's still around just because it doesn't cost too much to host and run.
(i'm resigned to the fact that it'll prob. be shut down sooner or later...)

As to the "tech" connection of this story i think it's somewhat relevant from the big systems,security, and fraud pov. Like for the life of slashdot a big chunk of "tech" has been the whole data processing and IT side of enabling business (and government) processes and everything that goes with it. And security and fraud prevention and detection are an increasing chunk of that.

Dude... going on an outdoors adventure and being (lightly) poisoned by the guides for medical insurance fraud is pretty messed up.

IDK what area of the world you live in, or what kind of world you want to live in, but fortunately most places in the developed world (and even in most of the developing world) are not like this.

Alright. I don't have anything against Polestar, but again, wtf happened to basic journalism?

It seemed strange that consolidating production in the US would save anyone money, but also this line about raising equity financing was weird:
  " Since December, Polestar has also raised $1 billion through three equity financing investments".

A quick search or two later we find out (maybe it is known to some, but i didn't know) that they had to do a 30:1 reverse split in Dec 2025 to get their share price above the $1 threshold NASDAQ requires (and they got a new CEOs in a bit before that too).

And while that "34 percent increase in sales." in 2025 MAY have been good... they still lost ~$35000 per vehicle sold.
I wish them the best and maybe they'll pull it out, but the upbeat tone of the article is kinda misleading.

and, sadly, bidding this way is probably rational. If you did it more realistically you'd be at 2x the price of other bids and wouldn't get it.

it's like... ecology or selection... this is the "organism" that's apparently fit for the environment. which I didn't mean that it shouldn't be improved... but I'm not so eager to label the participants evil or dumb... (I mean I AM , but try to keep it in check through such reframings)

huh. phys.org is legit afaik. and testing the TFA link in Brave even with its ad blocker disabled didn't send me anywhere. just got an ad for "the Pitt" on Max+.

maybe a bad ad got through, but might be time to run a Malwarebytes scan just in case.. (also generally I recommend ghostery extension fwiw).

What part of "this" should never happen? I'm not a fan of massive contracts going over time and over budget... and this particular one seems to be an outlier, but the reality is that the majority of these large acquisition projects go over time and over budget and some of them outright fail. And it's been like this at least since "The Mythical Man Month" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) was first published 50+ years ago.

So just saying, as TFA does, "look at this project that's like 3x over duration and n x over budget, isn't that terrible?!" is not providing very many bits of information. It's just "yup. same ol same ol". So that's what i mean that it's only rage bait and not really that informative to people even passingly familiar with the DOD acquisitions or just large projects in general.

(this GAO report from Sept 2024 https://www.gao.gov/products/g... has some more info on the program up to that point at least... but it's all project manager speak e.g. how some acceptance testing ended up taking 14 months instead of 5 months because they found "defects" during integration. but again no real tech details. i didn't dig too much to see if more info is available elsewhere)

and TFA is a "there at it again..." type rage piece without giving even a taste of what many things really went wrong along the way from a design or other tech POV.

I'm not glad that exceptions passed because i'd rather it were used somehow (e.g. via appeals courts) to force sunsetting the dealer system in the US.
But still, maybe if Rivian survives then they and Tesla can serve as a counter example that the alternative is better and maybe that'll push legal change.

(also ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Chip. a relevant (*) chracter who i'd forgotten came to a bad end).
*) if you accept the conceit that ATHF is, or even can be, relevant to anything

Interesting. Sounds like they're imposing the full solar requirements.

it looks like there's proposed legislation this year in CA (SB 868) that's aiming to allow 1.2KW plug-in systems w/o those changes.
we'll see if it goes anywhere.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca...

(via https://pv-magazine-usa.com/20... )

What kind of system are you talking about? i.e. what output and how would it be connected?

My understanding is that, in a few states at least, they now allow "plug-in balcony solar" at 800W or 1200W (?) which literally plugs into normal socket. TBH it sounds a bit sketchy to me but i can't enumerate a unique risk compared to other things like space heaters. (maybe if the inverter does "something weird" and mumble mumble "fire!" ... but that's true of like... everything )

https://www.sierraclub.org/sie...

relatedly, i'd like to highlight how much world view gets smuggled in in THIS line:

Umm.... "physical labor" is among the lowest barrier to entry for labor that there is. The workers there don't need decades of schooling or some particularly scarce talent.

So if a company can't find such workers... then it's because they're not paying enough (in the broad sense of wages + benefits + stability + work environment).

(to what degree i'm applying sober systems thinking to the problem vs just becoming a commie moocher in my middle age idk... but just today the whole concept of "labor shortage" seems dishonest / offensive)

I read the headline. Was excited.

a second later saw it was an "electrek.co" link and my heart sank.
Clicked through anyway... and sadly confirmed that it is a kernel of truth, but wrapped in misleading exaggeration. It's propaganda and boosterism rather than a concise and informative take. And this happens basically for every /. story from them.

e.g. i look forward to this summer's inevitable series about the records for how many hundreds of days California has run on 100% solar energy....
i forget exactly the phrasing, but it's the same technically true, but it doesn't mean what they claim it means thing every time.

basically it is not "p-hacking" it's "importance hacking":

from https://www.clearerthinking.or...

i got this concept from the "Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg" podcast where it comes up every once in a while. He's some math PhD dude who some years ago started running replication studies in Psychology. He's some sort of mover in the Rationality space... i should look up his full bio because i've only inferred his path so far. In any case, the podcast is not about the replication stuff per se, just interviews with various people about data / thinking / psychology stuff.
  Often a good podcast https://podcast.clearerthinkin... i wish he was somewhat tougher on his guests, but still generally gets them to fair presentation of their views, for better or worse.