XorNot

That rather implies the world is full of idiots.

If you know how your emotions and opinions and neurology can be used against you and don't use that to inform your media consumption habits then that's just stupid.

There's no safe way to watch propaganda. There isn't even a safe way to watch it secondarily: an endless stream of debunking videos pretty quickly still does the main thing propaganda needs: repeats the core message.

What's really restoring my agency right now is Claude's APK reverse engineering skills.

I've been tearing through the apps on my phone and just adding the features I want.

My biggest problem is I'm going to need actual good home CI and some compute: having these check in on new releases and maybe once a month give me a summary of what we need and build a new copy.

The problem is all of that is competing with "just charge it". Over the lifetime of the vehicle now, whatever route you have that is underserved by chargers is likely to gain chargers soon.

Sure but no one's stopping you? I know a great many things of no direct practical value to me.

There's also things I don't know and don't have the time to learn which are very helpful to have AI do for me: web interfaces are really useful and I look forward to them now working exactly how I want. I'm not ever going to regret not spending more time trying to figure out how to center divs or which framework I should use because they're all deprecated.

Telecommunications did that, not really software. Twitter started out as an SMS compatible service remember.

I do think there's something there though: I've spent the last 2 days building an app I've always wanted to build for myself with my computer in the corner running Claude and Claude Remote. Prototypes land on my phone and I don't even look at it for more then a few minutes before doing something else.

It's software, actually useful software, which doesn't take 100s of hours to build.

So I didn't even really spend two days on it: I mostly didn't look at all. I'll spend more time setting the result up on my home server.

They're talking like Amazon Bedrock doesn't exist, which is exactly the service which provides private data and processing for models including Claude.

But also they quite clearly have no idea how classified information systems work: air gapping is step 1 of that process, and no one from Anthropic would be working on those systems without a security clearance.

I was saying this morning that LLMs have given Star Trek the last laugh.

My software development process feels exactly like every debugging session in the holodeck that seemed terribly unrealistic to me.

I'm in SRE so systems reasoning is something of the value. But me writing code or even configuring stuff? That's dead. It is a total waste of time - Claude can do it better, faster and it works.

What the heck are you talking about? Basic grounding problem: who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much? You know that place where 100% of your customers and the hostile legislative bodies would be.

No it's also all the minor problems: lubricants don't flow the same, grease dries out on bearings, rocket launches shake the hell out of their payloads, the thermal differentials across a structure are enormous, vibration doesn't damp into the earth it just rings through the structure till it's lost as heat.

All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.

And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).

Permits are not costing as much as a space launch and all the extra costs associated with that environment.

If it's too expensive to outsource to another country, it's definitely too expensive to put in space instead.

My 2004 Prius had AC, radio and defogger controls on the steering wheel. I could control all of it without taking my hands off the wheel.

The only notable thing I couldn't do was adjust the fan level if it was on automatic, but I could turn it off.

IMO if you might need it while driving it should be on the wheel or the stalks. Center console? That's for my passenger to mess with only, or for when I'm stopped.

Eh...I honestly don't care anymore.

Provided there's steering wheel and stalk controls, what do I really need to adjust on a center console while driving? I just want a big nav map or camera feed there.

Too little too late. I bought a BYD Atto 2 this month and it's great.

My statements up till now were "yeah I'll get an EV when Toyota makes one" except here we are.

It is unbelievable how badly Toyota has fumbled the EV market.

The same physical location showing a different SSID every week but the surrounding ones not changing would be deanonymizing you much more aggressively.

People mostly don't change SSIDs or even move networking hardware - e.g. AirBnBs.

Edit: and also are you still carrying a smart phone while doing this? The device which has GPS and a cloud internet connection?

I'm more interested how this would effect providing VM graphics with migrations between hosts.

The dream would be put the user OS in a VM in a lab, and then be able to suspend and resume seamlessly if you need to push it to a new workstation, with locally accelerated graphics available.

We're nowhere near it. Article 5 is armed conflict between nuclear armed nations.

No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.

I also need an easy backup strategy for it. I want a single file blob somewhere I can throw in Syncthing l, and have it get backed up to the cloud.

I mean I'd love if toolbars would stay and people would stop messing with window decorations.

I want boring consistency.

China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.

When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.

All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.

At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.

Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.

Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.

That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.

Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.

Steel takes about 4.750 kw-hours to produce per kg.[1]

A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]

So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.

Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.

Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.

A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-do...

[2] https://www.cahomesolar.com/feeds/blog/solar-panel-energy-pr...

[3] https://www.mascotsteel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/st...

There's no seam, and it depends on being a button by guessing that you're not scrolling.

It's annoyingly non-deterministic.

I've never had a laptop mouse button ever break down on me.

I can't say I've ever been impressed by an Apple track pad. Or their insistence on removing actual buttons for them.

The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.

Data centers aren't just physical buildings though - the vast bulk of data centre costs is the racks of servers in them, and those are being bought and installed on credit at very high costs.

Its not about "is a computer thoeretically useful" its about if it's going to deliver value to cover the cost of installing it in the first place over it's expected lifetime.

You aren't substituting generic compute: you're substituting highly optimized GPU dense server space. The application is more limited then it looks.

The eventual utility of the Internet did not stop a lot of people losing a lot of money in the dotcom crash.

It's not like they're going to do it only once though, and some is a lot more then zero.

I mean I'm going to install neither of these because going about my day obsessively focusing on something like this seems weird.

Yes there could be but there aren't, because conservative state governments have had to resort to trying to subsidize coal power plant investment because no one wants to touch it.

Two things can be true: solar can be unable to provide reliable base load power, and it can be far more profitable investment return then building a coal fired power station.

Which is what has happened: and now, with the falling price of batteries, batteries are a far more profitable return then building a coal fired power station.

Coal is expensive: solar, other then some light cleaning costs, is one and done. There's few mechanical parts and no fuel costs and you can build it anywhere there's an electrical grid (which is everywhere).

Batteries are similar: sure they might degrade, but that's over 15 years. At the right time of day, charging them can be between free, and profit generating due to all the solar.

A coal power plant is gigantic. It can't be built anywhere - it needs to be physically proximal to either a port, or an actual coal mine (which the one's near Hunter Valley in NSW are - I've driven next to the train lines for them, for example), and usually a water source too for cooling. It's a large, maintenance intensive structure (the reason the ones we have are shutting down is the maintenance has gotten very expensive because the whole structure is aging out).

And after all that, it also needs fuel - throughout it's lifetime it will need to constantly buy fuel. But it won't constantly be profitable: most renewables have a massive advantage in that they can switch off from the grid nearly instantly. So renewables are far, far better at reacting to negative power pricing conditions then thermal power plants which cannot spin down that quickly: so a coal power plant (really any thermal power plant) will usually have to pay fines when power prices go negative, whereas while solar might not like shutting down, it can do so immediately (and batteries can just hoover up all that power and claim the credits).

Grid stability is a different department, quite literally, to power generating investment which is a commercial enterprise chasing return. And solar was better, and batteries are catching up quick (partly because negative prices mean your solar investment won't be able to bank a solid 6 hours of profitable sunlight without them). The new thing is also batteries for wind - DC couple grid batteries at wind plants, turning them into much more dispatchable generating assets.

Coal isn't cheap. Specifically coal powerplants are not and it's got nothing to do with emissions. One of the pinch points in the Australian power grid has actually been that a bunch of coal plants are aging out and no private enterprise wants to even bother financing their replacement because it's a money loser compared to renewables build out.

Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/austr...

There is a world where scale and experience means it's about the same though, is the thing.

And memory is already expensive. It's downright hard to even get it though - you frequently would prefer not what's cheapest, but whatever is in largest scale production.