The big energy companies are looking at their business shrinking significantly. Solar and batteries are cheap and getting cheaper, and more than that they are a great investment with a better return than pretty much anything else. The UK is mandating solar on new builds, and other places will follow.

If they don't go along with it, it will just push more and more people to stop relying on the grid entirely, or creating their own micro grids.

If they have tracking panels then the peak output can be much longer.

I have a flat roof and was sort of wondering if I could get motorized panels on there. Hobby project, probably not really worth the investment and maintenance, but the kits from China have been getting decent reviews. A simpler option is manually adjustable stands that you can switch a couple of times a year to take advantage of the lower winter sun.

I would say 8 years from end of sales of machines that are not compatible with Windows 11 is reasonable.

8 years seems like a reasonable support period for hardware. In line with things like car and phone support/warranty periods.

Thank you for watching it. I think it's really important to preserve these memories.

It's actually a problem for some keyboard layouts. Japanese keyboards already have a fairly small spacebar because they need some extra language keys down there. Adding yet another key is going to make the average spacebar about 3 units wide (as wide as 3 normal size keys). Less if Microsoft insists on CoPilot being a 1.5 unit key.

"Worked" is a bit of an exaggeration. It rapidly filled up with crap and many users ignored it, just keeping icons on their desktop instead. Finding stuff was made harder because companies started putting apps in folders named after themselves, so you had to remember not only the app name but who made it too.

Any attempt to organize was tedious and usually undone when the app updated and re-created its default Start Menu shortcuts.

Search is better, but needs tags. Instead of searching for Libreoffice... I think the spreadsheet is called Calc... You should just be able to enter "spreadsheet" and have it come up. Enter "browser" and see all installed browsers.

The Chinese government just announced that its industry will be obliged to buy renewable energy. It's already the cheapest, but now there is an obligation to adapt to variable availability and storage too. They clearly don't think that it's going to tank their economy - quite the opposite, in fact.

It's being touted as a boost to industry. A reason to build and buy more.

In the UK commercial operators have things like time-of-use pricing and power factor pricing. They are strongly motivated to time shift, to improve the power factor (a major cost for energy suppliers) of their operation, and to reduce consumption. The bigger ones even get into buying their own power.

There are reasons to think that. Private companies are vulnerable to being taken over by asset strippers, as happened repeatedly in the UK.

Private utilities, even heavily regulated ones, always want to make a profit too. And pay out big C level bonuses. There will always be some extra cost to the consumer to fund that, compared to a government owned non-profit. It can be run like any other business, just put any excess cash back into upgrades or investments, not shareholder pockets.

I've tried ChatGPT and Google's Bard/Gemini, and they often make really stupid mistakes. In one example I was trying to device which seat to book on a long haul flight, so I asked for the pros and cons. ChatGPT started told me one of the benefits of a window seat is easy access to the toilets, but also that you don't get disturbed by people passing down the aisle.

These things don't think in any meaningful way, or understand the world at any more than a superficial level.

I'm sure many of these stories are people who had some of these ideas before and just needed AI to confirm them. Most AI seems far too keen to please, even if it means making up nonsense.

The crew probably wouldn't be convicted anyway, as they likely had little idea what the consequences of their actions would be. It was the first time an atomic bomb was dropped on a city full of people.

The people who made the decision to drop it on a city though, that's another matter.

NHK recently covered a new VR experience based on the experiences of a survivor who was 11 at the time. Even this short news report is a hard watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I've been to Hiroshima. I would urge anyone to go, it's a profound experience. Regardless of what you think of the rights and wrongs of the bombing, understanding what it did to people will change your perspective.

It's not a great idea to use + here. A logical OR is better. When doing binary manipulation, avoid introducing arithmetic, even if in this case it will work.

In the UK you can get a tariff that pays the spot price for electricity when you export to the grid. I've looked at it, but overall it's actually slightly better to take the flat feed-in rate, at least from what I can tell from historic data.

People in the UK do this and it works out quite well for them. They get a cheap overnight rate that is a little under half the rate they get for feeding energy back into the grid during the day. Charge the battery at night, run the house from it during the day, and export 100% of the solar generation.

That seems fair. The rate is what commercial suppliers pay, or more. Pays off the battery in a year or two tops, and those things last at least a decade. The time-shifting really helps decarbonize and denuclearize the grid, lowering prices for everyone. It's actually one of the best investments you can make, the return outstrips even the best funds quite easily.

Not just jokes, but all kinds of behaviour. Most people screw up to some degree as children, and it's often just accepted as part of growing up. If going by the letter of the law, it might be a criminal matter, it might warrant severe punishment. That leeway gives children the chance to make mistakes without it ruining their lives. It's even baked into some legal codes, with childhood convictions being forgotten when they reach adulthood.

Things get bad when people start trying to enforce the rules too strictly against children. It's often cited as one of the ways that non-white kids are disadvantaged, facing severe consequences where a white kid might have just been given some harsh words and grounded.

Surveillance and AI are just more tools for the overzealous to ruin lives with. It's one reason why some countries have a very strong expectation of privacy.

My favourite was when a 15 minute delay on a 5 hour trip was going to cause them to miss their flight.

The reality is that battery tech is already good enough for most people and many commercial uses. Europe has EV trucks (as in big goods vehicles carrying 40 tonnes, not an F-150 wankpanzer) doing thousands of kilometres to make deliveries (which charging stops, obviously). Batteries continue to improve and get cheaper, charging continues to get faster.