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AndrewDavis

707 karma · joined April 29, 2017

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AndrewDavis··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
In Australia it's not uncommon on moderate temperature sunny days for the wholesale price to enter the negatives. Lots of solar production, with minimal heating and cooling demands.

Many plans offer a 3 hour period where electricity is free to encourage shifting your load to that time. Which is amazing if you're able to charge an electric vehicle in that time, a standard single phase charger could provide 21kw/h in that 3 window all for free.

AndrewDavis··on When oil prices spike, where does the money go?
> A few public servants in Australia

A few public servants in Australia? I'm not sure what you mean?

Superannuation may have been limited to a public servants and employees of large corporations in the 1970s, but was expanded to blue collar workers in the 1980s (see industry super funds), and mandatory for all employers in the 1990s. Almost every worker in Australia has a superannuation fund. Whether a given person's fund is invested in fossil fuels is another questio (mine has a radio button to choose green only investments or not).

AndrewDavis··on BYD looking to build 5-minute EV charging network in Canada
I wonder if they'll have the same impact they have had in Australia, BYD's everywhere the last year or so.

As of this week the BYD Atto 1 is the cheapest new car in Australia, not (just) cheapest electric car ... cheapest car. $19,990 drive away (ie including taxes and registration). It's not the best car but in a city where most families have two cars having one of them an Atto 1 is a value choice.

AndrewDavis··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
On 1.4 "Integration of Fixed Low-Capacity OS Drives"

eMMC bad because un-upgradeable and/or repairable. m.2 bad because if it wasn't there a user could put a big storage device there.

I'm not even sure what the author wants here?

AndrewDavis··on LG monitors installing adware on Windows PCs
My recommendation for some time gas been get the best value smart TV and don't connect it to the internet. Use devices you trust to play content. Problem solved.

... But this. Is crazy, but has been possible for some time. Years ago I plugged a spare mouse at office in, and it happened to be Razor branded. Within a few seconds I had razor software popup on my screen (at least) asking me to click a button to install their suite. I was horrified.

AndrewDavis··on Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
While I can't speak for other states (though I'd be surprised if they were different), power bills in Victoria are split into supply and usage. Eg each day costs 90c, then 30c per kw/h.

So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.

The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.

As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.

The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.

AndrewDavis··on 3.4M Solar Panels
I really liked the land usage discussion. That (for the US) if you took the land currently being used to grow crops for ethanol based motor fuels. Turned them into solar farms you'd cover 80% of current grid demand.

I was already pro renewables for a myriad of reasons. But that put the scale into a much better perspective.

AndrewDavis··on GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone without requiring personal information
This is something I've never understood. If consent is remaining on the line after a message "this call may be recorded (for training and quality purposes)", the simple answer is in places where you have to have consent have the phone send a similar message.
AndrewDavis··on SSH Secret Menu
Further blow their minds by showing them `apropos` https://manpages.debian.org/testing/man-db/apropos.1.en.html
AndrewDavis··on Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025
I'm now at the point I research parts to see where the LED control is stored.

My keyboard LED is controlled internally without software. My mouse requires software to set, but there is open source rgb control software that was trivial to install and set once, uninstall and forget.

The only one I got wrong was my GPU, which apparently isn't rgb but just has a strip of coloured light beaming at all times.

Thankfully my case isnt mesh everything, so most light is kept inside.

AndrewDavis··on Ask HN: Notification Overload
> Leave your phone on silent permanently, setup your emergency contacts like partner and kids to ring on silent, and turn off all notifications except email and SMS/WhatsApp. That’s the key to a simple life. You won’t miss anything important and that realization is the most freeing

This is pretty similar to my setup. Always on do not disturb. Typically my family and close friends communicate through a chat app, that doesn't make sound but if it's time sensitive an sms or call will make sound for starred contacts.

Back on the day when phones had notification LEDs I'd setup apps to have specific colours. These days with always on OLED displays I use an app aodNotify to setup a a little spinning circle on the screen. Purple is family/friend chat app, blue is a call, green sms etc.

Everything else I periodically poll for information. ie I go out of my way to check emails etc

AndrewDavis··on iPhone 5s Gets New Software Update 13 Years After Launch
I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc.

I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.

Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.

AndrewDavis··on Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them
Wow! Never thought I'd see my little Alma Mater on Hacker News!
AndrewDavis··on Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
AndrewDavis··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.

I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line

AndrewDavis··on More dynamic cronjobs
Great post. And if you want some control support for your cronjobs perl App::Cronjob[1] can provide features such has exclusive locking, so a job won't run if the previous run is still going, or provide a timeout, and some options for sending mail on success or failure

[1]https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Cronjob https://metacpan.org/dist/App-Cronjob/view/bin/cronjob

AndrewDavis··on Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
> I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that.

It has been around for a while, circa 2021. They made a forum post when they released it.

For reasons unknown the link no longer works but here it is on the wayback machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20210512205620/https://us.forums...

AndrewDavis··on Perl's decline was cultural
> There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.

AndrewDavis··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are.

900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

AndrewDavis··on Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer working.
AndrewDavis··on Where do the children play?
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12

A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"

I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"

AndrewDavis··on Winamp clone in Swift for macOS
You joke. I still use an old winamp 2.81 on my windows machine.

About 15 years ago I came across some plugin dll files that added flac support.

The only issue I ever run into is some non ascii characters in ID3 tags make that file unplayable. But winamp is perfectly capable of editing them.

It's even pretty good in the high dpi monitors because Ctrl-D enables "Double size" mode on the main window and equaliser. And the playlist window has customisable font sizes.

AndrewDavis··on Android developer verification: Early access starts
It all depends on how the flow is implemented.

If it's a one time unlock, eg like developer mode then hopefully it'll just work.

If it's a big long flow per install... Yikes, that's not much better than adb install

AndrewDavis··on Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
That's similar to me, I started using FreeNAS back in the 9.x days.

At the time the FreeNAS documentation recommend installing to a usb drive. This proved unreliable, but dedicating a drive to it was silly given it couldn't be used for anything else. I had all the things I needed but I wanted to peel back the layers and this seemed like a good excuse

So I threw in a drive and installed freebsd 10 and spent a few days familiarising myself with everything, learned how to configure samba myself, learned how to setup jails with iocage (the old shell version), and finally imported my pool.

Years later very little has changed.

AndrewDavis··on What we talk about when we talk about sideloading
Interesting, that's been the opposite of my experience.

My Mum converted her homes down lights to LEDs over a decade ago. Hasn't lost a single one.

I moved into my current house 5 years ago, haven't lost a single one either.

AndrewDavis··on JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart
> Stalwart is essentially the first server implementation of JMAP

Just to clarify. Stalwart is the first to have JMAP contacts and calendars. Cyrus has had JMAP mail since the beginning of JMAP.

AndrewDavis··on Peanut allergies have plummeted in children
Funnily enough, one of the things we were recommended was a pack of mini nut butter jars. Made specifically for the purpose of being a easy way to expose little ones to a variety of nuts before they could eat the nuts themselves.

Then at each meal put a tiny amount on a spoon and give to the little one before feeding the actual meal, and each meal use the next one butter.

It was great. Sure I can buy peanut butter, or maybe cashew at a grocery store. But I've never seen pecan butter, Brazil nut butter etc.

AndrewDavis··on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel
Hi,there's a lot to unpack here.

> They could always move to a compatible license? > No, it was always designed to be hostile to Linux from the outset. It's a project that doesn't want to interoperability with Linux

I'm not sure why you've jumped here. I didn't mention a specific project or licence.

But, nonetheless I'm going to assume you mean OpenZFS.

1. No they can't change the license. Much like Linux contributors retain their own copyright, OpenZFS can't just change the license. The only group that could hypothetically change it is Oracle given the clause the steward of the license can release a new version, but that's unlikely and Oracle has absolute nothing to do with the existing project.

2. Staying on the license and compatibility. It's really quite confusing on what's compatible in the eyes of Linux. The very fact they have separate export and export GPL symbols suggest Linux as a project sanctions non GPL modules, and considers them compatible if they only use those symbols, perhaps in the same vein as they consider the syscall boundary to be the compatible with non GPL? If someone who is actually in the know about why there are two sets of exports if love to be know.

3. Always designed to be hostile to Linux. Whether that's true or not is the debateable, there are conflicting opinions from those who worked at Sun at the time. Also the comment criticises a community that had no hand in whether or not it was intended to be hostile to Linux or not. In the end is copyleft software, very similar in spirit to the Mozilla public license. And by definition copyleft licenses are inherently incompatible without specific get out of the jail clauses to combine them (see MPLv2 for example).

4. Re interoperability. Strongly disagree. OpenZFS takes great strides to be compatible with Linux. Each release a developer sends hours pouring over Linux changes and updating a compat layer, and the module remains compatible to compile against multiple Linux versions at any one time, there are even compat patches to detect distro specific backports that while the version hasn't changed the distro have back ported things that change behaviour. That's a serious commitment to interoperability. And a large number of openzfs devs do their work against Linux as their primary platform, hence why the FreeBSD rebased their ZFS upstream on ZFS on Linux, leading it to become the official upstream OpenZFS. I can't see how anyone could say in good faith they don't care about Linux compatibility unless they haven't looked over at the openzfs project for over a decade.

4. Re why do I think Linux folks should maintain APIs for them.

The way you worded this strongly implies I was saying Linux should maintain an API for them. In no way did I say that. I was replying to a post that was adament that Linux doesn't remove things. I provided a perspective that Linux does in fact remove things. I wasn't arguing for maintaining any API, Linux doesn't even guarantee internal APIs for themselves. I was pointing out changing a symbol export from export to everyone to export GPL only isn't changing it, given it's the exact same API they've just simply removed it for some groups.

None the less I think it'd be great if Linux could maintain some APIs for out of tree modules. But they don't and that's fine. I just find changing exports from open for everyone tomorrow GPL only to be rather hostile.

Really, no one in either of these communities had any say in their license (sans Torvalds). Both creating great stuff for we as users to run. And it'd be great if people working on free software could get along, and those in the peanut gallery didn't prescribe malcontent between them because of a difference in license they didn't pick.

AndrewDavis··on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel
That's all a matter of perspective.

Is moving a symbol from EXPORT_SYMBOL(some_fun) to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(some_func) actually changing the API? Nope, the API is exactly the same as it was before, it's just changed who is allowed to use it.

From the perspective of an out of tree module that isn't GPL you have removed stuff.

I'm honestly not sure how one outside the kernel community could construe that as not removing something.

AndrewDavis··on RedoxFS is the default filesystem of Redox OS, inspired by ZFS
I can only speculate, but maybe they're referring to the same thing Andrew Morton meant when he described ZFS as a rampant layering violation.

ie ZFS isn't just a file system. It's a volume manager, raid and file system rolled into one holistic system vs for example LVM + MD + ext4.

And (again I'm only speculating) in their micro kernel design want to have individual components running separately to layer together a complete solution.

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