cjensen

Just for factual background, engaging data has a new infographic about California energy production that is useful [1]

Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.

[1] https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/

Subversion does not require a server :-)

You can ask Subversion to create a repository anywhere you like in the filesystem.

Subversion. It was made by CVS maintainers and a lot of care and thought was put into how it works and how the commands work and what the names of the commands are. Subversion is limited in being an older model of version control where there is exactly one single source of truth.

In my mind Git solves a different problem that Linus Torvalds was facing: many people working in parallel with only some of the ideas pushed upstream, but many people wanting to make changes and easily being able to move forward to the latest changes from upstream.

My extremely opinionated view is that most people should use Subversion unless they have a very complicated team structure. And that means every solo dev working by themselves should not complicate their own lives by using Git unless they are really comfortable with it already.

The optimization mentioned in this article is to literally use memcpy for certain types. As you mention, the code is from 2005, so the options are memcpy (when applicable) or a full copy constructor. The article discusses some old-school techniques that Qt uses to determine memcpy may be used.

Why can they call it the "American Diabetes Association" is a pretty easy question. The First Amendment.

Part of the First is that the government cannot ban you from using a word unless there is a very good reason do so. "American" is a word that is not associated exclusively with the government, nor was it ever used that way historically. In fact, the word "American" predates the US Government.

Since the word does not now, nor has it ever, implied governmental affiliation, it would be illegal for the US Government to attempt to obtain a monopoly on the word by banning others from using it.

There are plenty of places that are installing nice streetlights. For example, in Berkeley when they underground utilities they install nice old-school lighting fixtures.

This is very much a "these things are true and terrible" essay when it should be "I'm seeing a lot of these things that I don't like." Don't assert as facts things that you do not know to be facts.

And like most things that try to invoke authority by mentioning Jobs or Apple, this essay is entirely wrong about the invocation. A style for the case of an extremely functional device should not detract from the device, but streetlights aren't "extremely" functional devices that do a lot of things.

Sometimes a person is in the right place at the right time and has an opportunity to become rich. It's important to resist the human urge to account success as a product of one's own intelligence.

The video of the owl is a great example of doing a terrible job without the average Joe noticing.

The real owl has fine light/dark concentric circles on its face. The app turned it into gray because it does not see any sign of the circles. The real owl has streaks of spots. The app turned them into solid streaks because it saw no sign of spots. There's more where this came from, but basically only looks good to someone who has no idea what the owl should look like.

My comment was in response to someone who was an order of magnitude off on price and time. Wasn't really meant as a review of the experience.

Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.

On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.

I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.

Your comment is entirely false.

It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].

Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.

[1] I looked up the price for June 11th.

Yes, that annoyed me. What they really mean is that they claim this rail line will be in operation before CA High-Speed Rail. I find that hard to believe, but I would be happy to be surprised.

Ok, but folks are perfectly willing to drive to Rancho Cucamonga if it means avoiding the 200-mile long traffic jam on I-15 on Sunday afternoon. A full transit system for everyone in LA would dwarf the cost of this rail line and it would take so long for people to return home they just would drive instead.

Doesn't matter because CarPlay and AA allow you to bring whatever apps you want to with you. If you listen to podcasts or books on your phone, you can continue them from the CarPlay/AA interface next time you drive.

CarPlay and Android Auto give you the choice of your own app and full integration with the rest of your listening life.

The tricks in the 80s were different than today's tricks.

(1) Single-pass compiler. No separate pass to convert to object or executable.

(2) Written in assembler (!). Helps that Pascal has fewer dark corners.

(3) No use of disk. A single file read or write would take 10-20s on a floppy. Instead, it's memory to memory.

Turbo Pascal was so fast in the 80s that if I saw a syntax error further down the page it was faster to hit "compile" and let the compiler move the cursor to the error than it was for me to move the cursor myself.

It was a very special compiler and they don't make them like that anymore.

This seems like a rather extraordinary claim given that linguists have not even come to a consensus about American languages other than that there are dozens of language families.

Seems odd to publish an extraordinary linguistic claim in the "Journal of Biological Anthropology." Is that a normal place for linguists to publish papers?

I don't know the literal answer to your question, but I think it's hard to compare these things in a simple way because they are different kinds of damage and occur to different kinds of species.

For example, wind energy in the Bay Area tends to cause damage to daytime soaring birds like eagles, vultures, and hawks. The small migratory birds that make up the bulk of the numerical losses from San Francisco's high-rises are almost entirely unaffected by wind energy.

Diesel, like the vast majority of trains in the US. Even if the US performed electrification of trains, this would be a low-priority to electrify because it's not a major shipping route.

I have no issue with experiments. But putting particulates into the air of a population center seems like a pointless risk and will generate needless controversy.

As others have mentioned, using SCCS and RCS leaves you constantly having to ask others to unlock certain files so you can have a turn editing them.

Getting groups to move to CVS was hard. Devs were terrified of conflict resolution if they edited the same file concurrently as another dev. Took patient explaining that it would only be an issue if both devs modified the same lines, and even then it would guide you through the experience.

But they did let me, a young engineer, convert them from SCCS to CVS, so yay!

I'm not sure how a longer article on an entirely different subject counts as a Layman's summary.

Allowing plug-in hybrids to continue to be sold simply ensures that people will buy plug-in hybrids that are never plugged in and simply carry around extra weight for no useful purpose. And when those cars are passed on to the used market, I wonder if anyone will ever bother to replace the batteries.

Personally, I'm looking to buy exclusively hybrids in the near future. But I'm a weird case because I keep vehicles for decades. I have a lot of bad feelings about this legislation.

Normally modern brakes do not contain asbestos. All major car manufacturers have not used it in decades. Why was it still being used at all?

Pad wear is the source of the pollution. If there is less wear there is less brake dust pollution.

That's incorrect. The immune response is to simple fragments of the covid virus -- which is literally how all traditional vaccines work. The only difference with mRNA vaccines is that instead of giving you a single shot of virus fragments, the new vaccines convince your own cells to product those fragments over a period of a day or two.

Your comment suggesting that the CDC is lying is both ridiculous and also confused about which government body approves vaccines.

Just to clarify a bit of confusion here ... Covid infections do not expose you to additional mRNA.

The mRNA is an instruction sequence used to trick a small number of your cells into producing small virus parts for a short amount of time. For example "produce a covid spike protein." It's harmless to the cells to produce a few useless proteins like this, and the resulting proteins train your immune system to recognize covid.

Engaging Data has a nice data display for this. It more clearly shows the capacities of the individual reservoirs [1]. They also have displays for the current snowpack [2] and rainfall [3]. After a very slow start, this year's precipitation is finally up to the median.

If you want to understand why California has so much trouble with water, pay special attention to the rainfall totals web page. It shows how many years got N inches of rainfall. Best year was more than 200% of median rainfall, and worst was 40% of median. And it is historically common to have many sub-median years in a row.

[1] https://engaging-data.com/ca-reservoir-dashboard/

[2] https://engaging-data.com/california-snowpack-levels/

[3] https://engaging-data.com/california-precipitation-levels/

In Nebraska, the towns aren't following the interstate. That's the Oregon Trail. Why does the Oregon Trail follow that path? It's the Platte River which provides convenient access to water while traveling.

So the river was there first, then the trail, then the railroads, then national highways, and then finally the interstates. The towns were mostly established at the same time as the railroad.

As any saltwater sailboat owner can tell you, stainless steel rusts. It just rusts slower than regular steel.

Crashes generally have multiple factors. For the moment, let's set aside the multiple driver errors (not just drunkenness) and focus on issues Tesla has control of which contributed to the death:

* FSD was wildly insufficient for this road and required constant driver input

* Despite being insufficient for the road, FSD could be enabled on the road

* Despite needing constant correction, the FSD stayed enabled

* FSD can be enabled at speeds and conditions where the driver would need to correct with very little notice

All of these are completely self-inflicted issues caused by Tesla management arrogantly insisting on having the FSD attempt much more than it is capable of. Compare this to Ford and GM where they carefully geofence their systems to highways where they are absolutely certain their driving aids will work.