And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification".

I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.

So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.

Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.

No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.

I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.

Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.

The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...

They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved

RAM consumption on startup is 50% (of 16Gi).

I asked claude to help me remove bloat and was horrified by all the different background services and "enhanced" and "advanced" features that are always ON.

I don't think it's fair to say "no AI in any app", however. That should depend on the value delivered in the app.

But I do wish there was some honest restraint on all these weird OS services that no one wants/uses.

Don't get me started on tiktok...

And EU farmers are subject to a ridiculous number of regulations and costs. The thing is, these may very well be good for environmental reasons, but it doesn't work if we just start importing from countries that do the opposite.

Still, I think the grid is very vulnerable with that amount of weather-based energy. If there can be enough batteries to sink all that power generated and have it during evening til morning then that's great.

Perhaps that _can_ work in California, I really don't know what an acceptable level of storage would be. That is, how many days worth of battery power you'd want in case of bad weather conditions.

Regarding California; you are right. I was misinformed. I would say that the grid is still very, very vulnerable due to the huge reliance on solar and overproduction during midday. That's why these examples of "I exported power to the grid" is not very interesting.

Most grids aren't built that way anyway. The residential units are sinks, not sources. In Sweden we don't even have much solar power but already there have been policies aimed at reducing grid exports from residential units, because they are mostly redundant and even harmful.

I consider 2 weeks of supply a bare minimum.

Those prices are outdated now since practically all metals are surging.

There has indeed been great growth in battery capacity but it's as I said nowhere near able to supply a country like Sweden during the winter. It is off by orders of magnitude. We need 5TWh for that. It is not going to happen any time soon.

I understand California is different. Still, one would need to do these risk scenario calculations. Have they been made?

I know California has rotating blackouts already as it is. I really don't have any idea how people find that acceptable. If it happened in Sweden the government would be replaced on the day. It would be a real disaster.

I will be a bigger believer if a state like California can actually show its possible.

For sure I hope technology improves but the current ideas of solar+battery are simply highly unlikely.

The grid needs to be up 24/7. And while peak usage is just that, the grid capacity still needs to support peak usage.

This can theoretically be done using batteries but not for an extended amount of time. To say we can have batteries for 2 weeks of normal consumption is highly improbable.

The metals do build those batteries do not exist. Or put in a worse way, the mines do not exist.

An off the cuff calculation of costs and the massive amount of batteries required in the context of Sweden can be found (you need to translate) here: https://www.tn.se/naringsliv/40181/utrakning-60-globen-batte...

In other words, 60 full scale Globen arenas of batteries to replace current Swedish nuclear production.

So for small houses these investments can make sense currently. But from a larger perspective it's not that interesting.

That doesn't mean things can't get worse.

I pray the majority of Venezuelans really have had enough of socialist dictatorships and can find a way to govern themselves. The US should not govern Venezuela - but neither should Maduro or his cronies.

Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".

Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.

Pretty sure that will change very quickly.

The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.

I don't know if AI can change that but when using python, there is a feeling that there is an awesome quality library for just about anything.

I would love to spend more time but even though Microsoft gives it plenty of support (nowhere near as much as C#), the community is just too small (and seems to have gotten smaller).

Looking at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ numbers fall off pretty quickly from the top 5-7.

Guessing this is the same for OCaml, even if the language as such is nice.

I fail to see any significance of this one chart.