clord

Replace parts. It’s surprisingly affordable. I got my top case, battery, and display changed through a combination of defect repairs and just paying out to go the extra mile for 500 bucks. Machine feels brand new. Still plenty fast. Everything I touch is shiny again.

All the other generators in that grid will drive the out-of-sync station like an electric motor at a faster or slower speed until it's synched up. In effect that's what's happening in the article. Unaccounted load is pulling other generators down, making the frequency unexpectedly low.

Perhaps they're not using just frequency to coordinate (solar/wind perhaps needs a sidechannel?), and someone on their grid in a politically unstable area is using power without reporting on the side-channel. Hence the frequency drops due to the unaccounted load.

Love doing projects like this, I like the project presented above, I think we'll try it with the next old hen to kick the bucket.

We find the hardest part of homeschooling so far is that a lot of the infrastructure for homeschooling is christian. There might be a market for a startup that caters to scientific-minded people who home-school. It seems to be a growing trend.

This is a really common way for software to become better.

The pattern of development:

  - Make A   
  - Make B better   
  - A now broken because it had dependencies on B   
  - (maybe) Realize a fundamental pattern that unifies A and B.
  - (maybe) Unify principles so that A and B become lemmas.

This is a very scientific way of working. The truth emerges as the byproduct of keeping all the plates spinning in your model. As long as you remain aware of all the plates, you'll eventually realize something deep. It's also the strongest argument I can think of in favour of rewriting a codebase plan-9 style. Once you have the truth in mind, bake your knowledge for big wins. Baked knowledge can form the foundation upon which you can climb higher.

But many developers don't keep all the plates spinning. If you don't have everything (or some subset) making sense in some unified theory, don't rewrite. Without a unified grand theory, then you can't make something better. This is why I write unit tests — doing so keeps your plates spinning. It's not about proving your language and libraries are doing what is expected (although that's valuable too in some languages without unified libraries) — it's about showing that everything is working together the way your grand theory intends. Unit tests should be written to reject some part of the null hypothesis.

It would still have to buy the services of the former owner (or someone equivalent). there are after-all things only a human can do, still, and presumably this corp would have to pay for those things.

I agree with you but what you describe is exactly what a flick is, except with more stuff thrown in.

It’s a CO2 emitter actually, since aluminum, glass and silicon all require high heat to make, and we presently do that with natural gas. It may offset its own production emissions by replacing dirtier methods of power but if we switch to all-solar they will be emitting CO2.

I think this is/was a theory on what caused the little ice age — people making charcoal.

Nice thing about wood power is that as long as you have a sustainable source of wood, you're 100% solar-powered and carbon neutral. That is to say, it's a source of energy that is (can be) non-fossil, nor derived from any fossil sources, and which recycles it's own CO2 emissions.

There are very few other alternatives that can claim the same. Perhaps Hydro? Solar panels don't offset their construction CO2 costs, and in fact almost can't even pay back their own construction energy costs if you factor in batteries plus materials, mining, and shipping.

When this happens to me I SSH into the machine and kill chrome or one of the electron apps. Sometimes it will unfreeze enough to close terminal sessions.

> - No exhaustible has been depleted yet

I don't think they predicted depletion for our current era in any of the models. The only model that even came close to that was the "Business As Usual" model, which predicts a peak of production around our present time. Looking at current production levels we do see a levelling off of oil production mostly due to declining output from major fields. [0] That said, certainly depletion is a very strong claim that no one has made.

> - the price mechanism combined with technological progress seems pretty able to set incentives straight. Look at what the oil price bubble of the '00s did for electric cars and batteries in the now.

First of all, switching to electric cars will amount to a shift in what the automobile fleet burns for fuel. Instead of gasoline and diesel, they burn whatever the power plant burns, and that's still predominantly petroleum-sourced. Additionally, current lithium supplies can not support massive expansion of the fleet. If Tesla builds all the gigafactories necessary to convert the fleet (let's assume 100 million EVs per year, which is approx current auto production; requiring 800,000 metric tons of lithium) and runs them for 17 years, they will deplete the known reserves of lithium (13.5 million tons of reserves[1] divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years). Speculative Estimates from[2]

Next, A lot of the material required for an EV still has to be sourced from petroleum resources. The metals need to be refined with high-heat processes. The wheels are rubber and sourced from natural gas or oil. Lots of plastics are involved. Mining and transporting the raw resources is still done with diesel machinery.

Finally, even if EV rollout is possible, we can't do it for all the people expected to be buying cars in the future. Even replacing the developed world's fleet is a major challenge, but doing it for the world looks insurmountable at this point. Given these real constraints, I'm willing to grant that price mechanism will not overcome these problems, except insofar that it can exclude most of the world from owning cars and other resource-consuming stuff.

> - The world has seen massively more population growth than they modelled, but not the accompanying food shortages they predicted.

The business-as-usual model did not properly account for how extensively we started turning petroleum into food. These days, there is a tremendous amount of embodied energy in most of the industrial food system.

> I'd argue the shortages of the '80s and '90s are over, although local situations obviously have tragic effects (Syria, Venezuela).

South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Venezuela. Also likely near-term famines in North Korea and Egypt. There are more active famines in 2017 than any recent time. Whether the number of affected people is similarly high is unknown at present.

> -Material goods production (plastics) is at an all time high.

I'm not sure why this is listed as a positive. Is that what you meant?

> -Many more humans alive at lower poverty levels than ever before and ever imagined by the Club of Rome

Some models they presented in the book had far more wealth, far lower poverty, and far higher populations than our present. In these models, pollution was also far higher than our present situation. The point was that resources inevitably get converted to pollution somehow. The models show that if we find a solution to our resource problems, we'll end up with more pollution.

[0]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-october-production-data/ [1]: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs... [2]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...

1. You've got some reading to do about how banks are going to deal with bank failures after the fiascos of 2008. start with: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bailin.asp

2. You're right, which is part of why we bailed on the situation while the real-estate market supported our exit and converting the assets into something real.

3. the time it buys you depends on it's value.

4. Zero mortgages right now actually. you're not a careful reader.

Many things wrong with this:

1. Is money really a precaution? Why is money in the bank guaranteed safety from a bad spell? Can't the government take everything but 100k if they need to?

2. Why isn't having food production on site considered guaranteed safety against a bad spell? Between our savings and the food production on site we could survive in place for a decade. When we lived in a place-in-the-city working two jobs with all of our assets in a (few) mortgages we were two or three paycheques (or a bad tenant) away from losing everything. The bank had a lien on all of our assets, even though we were nominally a 1%er.

3. What can money really fix in a bad-spell? I mean, can you buy skills? Can you buy relationships? Those things have to be made. Nevermind that if the bad spell is actually bad for more than just you, money might not have the same value as it does.

But I will grant that money does have a lot of benefits too, which is why:

4. I have money in the bank... I mean, why are they mutually exclusive for you?

We have hundreds of chickens most years now, and yea the neighbours can take care of them for a week or two. The biggest thing that keeps us from traveling in the summer is our "garden".

Not worried about it. First, we're not really "boutique". We don't dress anything up. It's all used machines and old bags. We charge more because that's our real cost plus a small profit...

I figure thing happening in food right now is not so much a trend. Food prices are artificially low by historical measures. As the subsidies granted by cheap oil-based fertilizers goes away and diesel-powered harvesting starts to be less cost-competitive, the prices will go back to historical norms. People want the industrial system to stop cutting the corners they have been (believe me they tell us) so we make profit from those who are ahead of the curve.

The way I look at it: normal food has been getting more expensive over the past 100 years and is now considered "boutique" by some. There has been a fad in cheap food that is starting to wind up as it is no longer possible to maintain. It's time to get in front of that before your food costs rise. More importantly it's time to start teaching kids how to do it too as they're going to really be in the post-climate-change world where viable solar-powered food is the most valuable thing to have a startup in.

We are lucky to have lots of family on the farm here with us, so it was actually a bit of an upgrade in terms of family connections. It's multi-generational. Leaving friends behind was the biggest adjustment. That and Toronto food/music are the biggest adjustments for us.

We did this. My wife has a masters in microbio, and I worked at IBM on their C++ and for Fortran compilers for about 8 years (yay std::atomics). I still do remote contract work to help pay for upgrades to the farm. Would be nice to get one of my side-projects finished and start pumping out some income streams, but it's not a big rush anymore. I have a point of sale system built with React and Haskell that integrates with big payment processors, etc. that I sell to local businesses. Maybe one day i'll productize it and sell it as a package, but honestly my bills are paid and I don't feel the need to make more money than I do right now. Why take on the stress?

Why'd I switch to rural life? Quality of life. When we had kids and got a glimpse of what life would be like with daycare, two people commuting, etc, we got scared and made a plan. It's been 5 or 6 years and still enjoying selling expensive pasture fed eggs etc. I like working from home and having no childcare expenses. Everyone is happy and healthy and we have time to raise our kids.

I remember the limp office parties when we reached GA on some new release, and we'd eat cheap cake. Then I think of how we practically dance and shout at the sky in joy when we all finish digging up all the potatoes. The comparison is stark. Modern life is a dystopic hellscape from this perspective.

The government should pay back-salary to anyone with a case dismissed in this manner. This would cause queue back-pressure that would focus the system on high-value targets at the front of the queue.

Of course they are. They’re living closer to what our species evolved for. Civilizational people are constantly having to check their preferred behavior for the greater good. Sure there are perks to having a civilization but there are costs, too.

Predictably bland and plentiful or unpredictably punctuated and exciting to find? What makes humans happy?

Have to consider the amount of heat moved, too. It's the same difference as between pressure and volume, or volts and amps. Perhaps it can't move a large volume of heat quickly, but can achieve a decent temperature difference given enough time?

Just finished reading the hobbit and lord of the rings to my 7 year old. I absolutely loved it, and he's a full blown Tolkien nut now. Previously we read through Harry Potter.

By the end I noticed I have really developed a voice. He has developed a richer vocabulary (dad what is "clemency") and is better at reading between the lines. Certainly enjoyable and educational for everyone. Looking forward to the next series we read and will miss this when he starts reading this stuff on his own. Was thinking of volenteeering at an old folks home.

> we've made incredible scientific progress over the last 650 years with Science and Industry tightly dependent on one another

To be fair it hasn't all been rainbows and butterflies. There have been a lot of really bad problems caused by this unholy union. I'm not even sure it's net-better. The level of environmental destruction we've caused, combined with the difficulty of doing anything about said damage, could negate all of the benefits we've achieved.

I completely agree they're not the same things, but you can sort of see the "linear type" notion of "one and only one use" in RAII. Every construction has exactly one use (destruction.) it's fairly easy to see that RAII is a very limited version of a linear type system.

In an affine type system, every variable is used at most once. But C++ instantiations for RAII are not destructed more than once. Each instantiation has exactly one destruction.

I really like the name "Linear Types" better than RAII. C++ ctor/dtor pairs are a sort of primitive linear type system that forces exactly one (implicit) use for each instance created.

Linear types nicely generalizes this so that we don't need RAII wrappers or whatever. Just produce values and pass them around, eventually to be consumed. It feels like this is a powerful language idea.

I actively try not to "manage" my life. If some part of life is too complicated to manage without a tool, that part of life has to go.

To keep track of any temporary complexity I use a hard-cover notebook that keeps track of the complexity until I find a way to eliminate it.

The goal is to build abstractions so that the details don't matter. Managing detail is a trap. Complexity and "managing" said complexity is a code smell.

You're describing exactly what makes them feel slow. All of that buffering is adding latency. Everything is buffering: the screen, the GPU, the OS, the window manager, the shell.

People notice the extra latency though. I sure do. I remember what it's like to have a CRT getting photons displayed nearly immediately after a keystroke. That's exactly what makes an old 286 feel snappier than a 2017 macbook pro while typing.

With bt, use is down but the plant itself is producing it! I think that's more likely to cause exposure.

At first I thought the coloured keyboard on most of their systems was useless, but I wonder if I could rig it up to switch colour based on vim mode. That might be fun. Is it controllable from software?

> Look at the history and origins of family names

Governments of the time forced (conspired to force?) people to pick a family name for identification and tax purposes and many simply picked their profession, location, or fathers name. Some families were multigenerational smiths for example but that had more to do with the the way people learned their trades.