When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.

So do lawnmowers and chainsaws.

>Fuel storage is complicated (you will need 30+ gallons a day, or about 2 sedan tank’s worth.

You put it in containers and put them in your garage.

>Connecting to your panel is expensive at least $2k+.

You don't have to do that. Just run some extension cords through your house.

> They are smelly and noisy.

So is everyone after a couple of days in the South without air conditioning!

> And if it’s a real emergency, everyone will know you have one , and eventually come knocking.

This is a feature, not a bug. It's how communities take care of each other.

Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.

Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.

My point is just that a cheap battery backup does not have a significant effect in the resiliency strategy for most people.

I am certainly not a prepper, but even viewing that scene from the outside, it is absolutely rife with what I would call "preparedness theater". Things you can buy (it's always about buying stuff) that would save you in some imagined horrific scenario but where the odds of the scenario happening in just the right arrangement where that object helped are infintesimal.

Like, yes, if your car drives into a freezing cold deep lake and you are somehow too incapacitated to open your seatbelt but not too incapacitated to use a knife, then keeping a dive knife in your glove box next to the ceramic "break windshield" thingy might be worth it, but you're more likely to win the lottery than have that happen.

There is a set of people whose brains are wired such that they are easily nerd sniped into obsessing about these sorts of things. When they do, they are also compelled to share it and spread it like some kind of mind virus. It takes a certain amount of mental discipline to not fall down every one of those rabbitholes. I believe the author telling the world to arrange joint battery buying parties for friends is well along that path of crazy.

Don't waste time and money organizing a joint battery purchase for your friends. Keep some non-perishables and a few gallons of water in your house. Fill your gas tank before it gets all the way to empty. Learn how to cook and some basic first aid.

Sure, but that's not a remotely accurate description of a house without a backup battery or generator.

I grew up in hurricane country and weathered many bad storms. Losing power does not put you immediately in an emergency. If you don't open the fridge much, your perishables will last a couple of days. Non-perishables will last much longer. Having a battery is the difference between "we can hang out and grill dinner for 5 days before we need to hit the road" and "we can hang out and grill dinner for 6 days before we need to hit the road". That distinction does not significantly change your strategy.

Losing water is a much bigger emergency but is thankfully rarer and a backup battery won't help.

Climate change will change this story somewhat in the South. If you are in a very hot climate, elderly, or have other health issues, then losing electricity and air conditioning in the summer can be an immediate emergency. Again, though, A/Cs consume so much electricity that a backup battery won't help you much.

I think you're significantly overestimating the emergency value of a battery backup. Loss of electricity is rarely a rapid emergency. In cases where it is, a generator will at least give you as much power as you care to store fuel.

Knowing I'm sitting there consuming the uncaring out of a machine just makes me feel sad and alone and I'd rather avoid that feeling.

What a sad dystopia we are creating.

Possibly somewhere amazing, but see also: https://x.com/pronounced_kyle/status/1768852493092680036

These two perspectives are not completely separate. In practice, every object has some mixture of human care and machine optimized productivity.

Likewise, as a producer of objects to be used by others, I want them to have a meaningful connection to me as the maker. But I also want to be able to produce more objects more efficiently so I can affect the lives of more people.

Again, those are not entirely separate stances. With my books, I hand-lettered every single word in the illustrations. But I scanned those and cleaned them up in Photoshop instead of painting over mistakes with correction fluid, and I use the magic of the web and print on demand to put those books in front of thousands of people.

I think most people have had a very uneasy truce with the amount of soulless manufactured junk in our lives versus the crafted things that we cherish. Most of us have a nagging feeling as we sit in our IKEA-filled homes watching parasocial videos on our phones that despite all the material boons industrialization has given us, we are suffering from a poverty of meaningful connection. But, also... we keep buying that stuff because stuff is nice and solves real problems.

AI has set off a bomb right in the center of that uneasy truce and now all of us are struggling to work through the psychological fallout. It is a true fact that AI will make it much easier and cheaper to produce more digital goods with real utilitarian value. It is also a true fact that it will flood our social spaces with slop and make it even harder to find a real connection with a real human in that hazy smoke of AI bullshit.

Reconciling those is the existential question of our generation. I don't believe it will be solved by taking a side. It will be solved, if at all, through some sort of more meaningful synthesis of the two halves.

Having an AI write docs which are then saved and served strikes me as in the same uncanny valley as fax machines. It's a halfway step that doesn't understand the full import of a new technology. In that case, what you really want is emailing PDFs around and docusigning.

With AI documentation, let users request the docs they need on-demand.

I understand the history behind where that term came from. (The people who were making musical decisions while standing behind the mixing board often were initially producers: people whose job it was to oversee the entire production and coordinate between the musicians, engineers, etc. Then when DJs at discotheques wanted longer versions of songs for dancefloors, remixes were invented. Producers took existing recordings and made longer versions. Then electronic dance music sort of evolved out of that.)

But it still feels like such a soulless term. And most "producers" today are just sitting at home alone with a laptop and Ableton, so the role is very different than it was.

This is, I think one of the biggest differences between a skilled and amateur photographer. Amateur photo and video work looks flat because they are pointing the camera at a scene that looks fine to them in reality, but the resulting 2D image is flat and they don't know why or what to do about it.

I find a particularly stark example is forests. Walk into a random forest and you will find your sense of being surrounded and in an immersive, evocative, deep space to be very strong. Then fire off a quick photo and the result will be a chaotic uninspiring flat mess.

Being able to compile ML quickly in the 90s tells you little about being able to compile Roc or some other language today because the language design enforces hard constraints on the algorithms necessary to compile it and the hardware today is much more complex. It's not hard to write a fast Pascal compiler that targets a 1980s chip with shallow pipelines. But that's not the problem being solved here.

I don't know much about Roc but it looks like it's got some amount of overloading and the linked article alludes to sophisticated algorithms to avoid heap allocating closures. Those can enforce algorithmic complexity in the compiler that is essential and can't be eliminated.

Once you're at the limits of algorithmic optimization, all that's left is reducing constant factors. I've written code in many languages in different performance regimes over the years and it's certainly the case that higher level languages, especially managed memory ones, put a hard floor in terms of how low you can go when optimizing to improve those constant factors.

I have seen in real-world code where explicit control over memory layout improved performance by more than an order of magnitude. I have friends in the game industry where much of their career is this kind of work. Those people would love to live in the luxurious world you describe where all they need to do is find a sufficiently clever algorithm and all of their performance problems will disappear.

Swift is able to avoid monomorphizing even when the type arguments have different GC shapes and allocation strategies. To do that, the dictionary (what Swift calls a "witness table") has entries for the functions the memory manager needs to allocate and trace a value of type argument's type.

Go's notion of dictionary and Swift's witness tables share a lot of DNA with how Haskell compiles generic code using type classes.

C#/.NET does an interesting hybrid approach. When source code is compiled to .NET bytecode, the generic code is only compiled once. Then at load time, the JIT will take that bytecode and monomorphize it to native code for each instantiation using a value type (primitive or struct). But instantiations of reference types all share a single JITTed implementation.

I'm no expert, but you could do a whole deep dive on the sociology behind dueling to get a better sense of what socioeconomic conditions led to it.

Just saying "the stegosaurus is like a peanut butter cookie" to establish an analogy doesn't immediately confer wisdom. An analogy has to actually be between things that have meaningful similarity. If we were, say, talking about street racing for pink slips, then maybe the dueling analogy would be more useful.