>Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise the price of electricity? Yes—at least if you don’t count the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, says Richard Schmalensee, MIT’s Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..
The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are externalized costs.
Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we switched to renewable.
>“If you take into account the total cost of running a system that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be cheaper,” Schmalensee says
Even without net metering the solar panels cover a lot of the electricity spent and I assume they would pay for themselves eventually.
If you do the math, a single 10W light bulb consumes 0.24kWh per day if you let it on all the time. A single solar panel is rated for 2kWh per day. Many appliances are also under 2kWh per use.
Any electricity you spend during the day will be saved by the solar panel automatically. If you live alone and leave during daylight hours that might not be worth it, but for a lot of family households it's free electricity.
Yeah, the big variables are utility electricity price ($0.10/kWh utility pricing makes solar less effective than $0.50/kWh), price for the panels + installation, and ~capacity factor. If the panels last long enough, and they usually will, as long as the installation is appropriately sized it likely eventually pays for itself. It's just usually longer than two years.
I clicked on their profile to check and saw "Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!" and I thought this was spam but it's actually part of the footer of Hacker News. Hovering over the link, the URL reads "ai-sus".
Very few social platforms have figured out that the right way to get money is from the readers supporting the posters, not from the posters themselves.
Reddit gold is a pale version of this. Neither Twitter nor Bluesky show any signs of getting it.
Hard to say that isn't the "right way" when they are making money with it.
If we're talking hypothetical right ways, I think what "social" media gets wrong is to envision an anarchy for its users. People are never equal in a society. A teenager isn't the same thing as an elder, nor is a doctor the same thing as a nurse.
I think I've read before that anarchy doesn't work because eventually people find someone who is reliable and naturally that person becomes their authority on the subject, creating an hierarchy.
Social media tries to put all users in the same bucket even when it's well-known that most users belong in the "never posts anything" bucket while very few users belong in the "power user" bucket. There are passive users and active users.
While hierarchies can become ugly fast, I don't think resigning on implementing them in any form is the right answer, specially now that everyone is on the Internet.
The question was what internet applications. Not intranet. Also the original article fails to point out that multiple time servers can get you synced quite closely. Also if you do need high precision times you are running your own stratum one time sources on your own network providing your own clocking source with minimal deviations.
So again what internet applications actually care about millisecond or even submillisecond precision?
I wouldn't want to be new to the Internet these days.
Everything requires your phone number, sometimes photo or even ID. You can get flagged as a bot randomly and they won't even tell you.
When I signed up for Instagram, I was banned before I could even log in, but they didn't tell me about it, so I thought the sign up process had just failed. I only found out after googling it.
I had similar problems creating a Twitter account. On Reddit, you can't even post threads on most subreddits at first.
Conversely, signing up on Tumblr, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Mastodon was pretty easy and didn't require a phone number or app.
The weird thing is I love Lazarus for the GUI but I'm too used to VS Code to deal with their source code editor. Coupled with the non-C-based language, I kind of feel like I couldn't write a complex program in it if I tried.
For example, if I wanted to display a .webp in a desktop GUI, I'm confident I could manage it in Python, Zig, C++, C#, and even Java although I don't have a lot of experience with it. With Pascal, I won't have my Python libraries, nor my out-of-the-box C interoperability. In fact, I don't think I've even learned how to use a library with Pascal.
I don't know if in Delphi the editor is better, or the documentation is more accessible. It feels like it has a lot of potential but barriers for entry make it not as interesting as just programming something in Python with Qt.
>Consider a developer working with a cutting-edge JavaScript framework released just months ago. When they turn to AI coding assistants for help, they find these tools unable to provide meaningful guidance because their training data predates the framework’s release. This forces developers to rely solely on potentially limited official documentation and early adopter experiences, which, for better or worse, tends to be an ‘old’ way of doing things and incentivises them to use something else.
I can't help but feel that a major problem these days is the lack of forums on the Internet, specially for programming. Forums foster and welcome new members, unlike StackOverflow. They're searchable, unlike Discord. Topics develop as people reply, unlike Reddit. You're talking to real people, unlike ChatGPT. You can post questions in them, unlike Github Issues.
When I had an issue with a C++ library, I could often find a forum thread made by someone with a similar problem. Perhaps because there are so many Javascript libraries, creating a separate forum for each one of them didn't make sense, and this is the end result.
I also feel that for documentation, LLMs are just not the answer. It's obvious that we need better tools. Or rather, that we need tools. I feel like before LLMs there simply weren't any universal tools for searching documentation and snippets other than Googling them, but Googling them never felt like the best method, so we jumped from one subpar method to another.
No matter what tool we come up with, it will never have the flexibility and power of just asking another human about it.
The main issue with AI, and ironically the reason why ChatGPT is the best one, is whom it works for.
AI doesn't work for the user. It couldn't care less if the user is happy or not. AI is designed first and foremost to make more money for the company. Its metrics are increased engagement and time on site, more sales, sales with better margins. Consequently, the user often has no choice or control over what the AI recommends for them. The AI is recommending what makes more sense for the company, so the user input is unnecessary.
Think of AI not as your assistant, but as a salesman.
One interesting consequence of this situation I found was that Youtube published a video "explaining" to creators why their videos don't have reach in the algorithm, where they essentially said a bunch of nothing. They throw some data at the AI, and the AI figures it out. Most importantly, they disclosed that one of the key metrics driving their algorithm is "happiness" or "satisfaction" partially gathered through surveys, which (although they didn't explicitly say this) isn't a metric that they provide creators with, thus it's possible for Youtube to optimize for this metric, but not for creators to optimize for it. That's because the AI works for Youtube. It doesn't work for creators, just as it doesn't work for users.
People are complex creatures, so any attempt at guessing what someone wants at a specific time without any input from them seems just flawed at a conceptual level. If Youtube wanted to help users, they would just fix their search, or incorporate AI in the search box. That's a place where LLMs could work, I think.
When you look at things this way, the reason why Netflix/Youtube get rid of old stuff has nothing to do with users, but with some business strategy that they have that differs from the music industry.
>Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise the price of electricity? Yes—at least if you don’t count the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, says Richard Schmalensee, MIT’s Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..
The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are externalized costs.
Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we switched to renewable.
>“If you take into account the total cost of running a system that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be cheaper,” Schmalensee says