eightails

> > There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.

> There is no such thing as 'empty land'.

Can't help but be reminded of this classic skit.

"The ship was towed outside the environment."

"...Into another environment."

"No no, it's been towed beyond the environment."

https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

Totally agree. Generally if I can't get the ball rolling remebering last nights dream before I'm really awake, I won't be able to get much detail at all.

> Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night

One of the things I've noticed in taking a dream journal over the past few years is that when I remember a night's dreams thoroughly, they're often split into a handful of distinct sections, with each one being an almost entirely self contained story and scene. I never made the connection until now but I wonder if each 'scene' is a specific REM cycle.

Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.

> Going for a long range makes their cars unnecessarily heavy. That makes them require more power and increases tire and road wear.

To be honest I don't think they are unnecessarily heavy for evs. Base model 3 is a bit over 1600 kg, while a base audi a4 weighs a bit over 1500 kg. Performance model 3 weighs about 1850 kg while and an audi rs4 weighs 1790 kg. Meanwhile the polestar 2, an ev comparable to a mid spec model 3, weighs almost 2200 kg.

Their energy efficiency numbers are similarly good and almost across the board better than competition evs.

Edit: I might just add that the weight argument has a bit more strength re the model s and x. Even if they're comparable to other evs, they are a decent bit heavier than comparable ICE cars. I think that's a result of the older platform -- I suspect a lot of work must have gone into model 3 to reduce weight.

> Sexual orientation has a known association with handedness

That sounds so strange I had to fact-check, and it appears you're right, there does seem to be a measurable association [0].

Perhaps even more interesting, that same article reports: '...the strongest handedness nding for both sexes was a marked tendency for participants who described themselves as ambidextrous also to describe themselves as bisexual'. How weird.

[0] https://search.proquest.com/docview/205935496

I think the point was that POW specifically is an inefficient method of verification. They weren't arguing against the notion of using energy to run a virtual currency, just that Bitcoin specifically is needlessly wasteful, so we should move to alternative cryptocurrencies. So actually I think they are arguing for 'switching to electric transport', to use your example.

Problem is that to many from the other side of the Atlantic "dissidents" look an awful lot like "terrorists".

Agreed. I also wonder if this kind of article is towards the edge of allowable content on HN regardless of title: it's a politically-charged current-affairs article that isn't particularly intellectually gratifying.

Sometimes good discussion comes from these kinds of articles -- but I feel that's somewhat uncommon.

Not particularly ground-breaking, but still a good reminder that brute-forcing is becoming more and more accessible.

Password managers are rapidly becoming essential

> Prodigies which happen to be good in a field related to what their parents are good at. Often the wording used indicates a memory-like reason. For example, finding the rules of chess "familiar."

I think this could be equally well explained through 'nurture' rather than 'nature'. If a child's parents are skilled at chess and play it often, the child is going to be exposed to it at a much earlier age and for more often than a child of non-chess-players, making it more 'familiar' and 'intuitive'.

To be honest I'm not super familiar with the research in this area but my sense was that there's some amount of experimental evidence for both genetic and environmental factors playing a part together, rather than just one or the other. It's very interesting though -- might have to go do some reading.

Last year I built a nas system around the Asrock j4105 itx board, using a flashed dell perc h200 as an hba, in a fractal node 304.

I had looked at arm options, including the kobol 64 and boards from hardkernel, but decided that paying a bit more for x86 would make things a lot easier.

It's working well so far: low power draw and near silent, allows for proper zfs on linux support, hardware accelerating transcoding for Jellyfin streams, and at a bit over half the cost of a 6 bay x86 Synology.

> I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future

They're already popping up in the development stage [0]. 12 km/hr peak solar charging sounds really quite good, and I like the overall design. The company was founded by students who won the World Solar Challenge [1] in 2015, it's pretty neat to see them taking that experience and running with it.

[0] https://lightyear.one/lightyear-one

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Solar_Challenge

How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion. This was the first object of its kind and we had very limited observations of it. From what I've read, none of the hypotheses regarding the measured acceleration (e.g. outgassing vs manufactured solar sail) can really be backed up in any substantial way. So it seems disengenuous to get into vitriolic arguments about it.

We just have to keep watching, more thoroughly and with better equipment.

I think it can be read either way. In some sections of narration the Culture is described as a true symbiosis, but elsewhere it's admitted and implied that the minds usually end up with more power than humans, and in multiple culture novels humans do get manipulated and used by drones/minds to various extents - e.g. Player of Games.

It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.

I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.

To list a few benefits:

- e2e encryption

- many extra chat features (reactions, stickers, replies, polls, etc). It might seem unnecessary but imo they do genuinely increase functionality and ease of communication

- scalable to large groups (maybe sms is as well, I've never tried more than 3-4 people)

- don't need a phone, can message from a computer instead

- messages sync across multiple devices

- video calling for groups with some apps

I was somewhat curious too, and from a brief search found a 2004 paper that calculated roughly 1 standard drink/day for women and 2 for men as the limit before you start increasing risk of adverse effects. I haven't looked at the full text though.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00917...

The black-nosed cars made from 2014-2016 had autopilot 1.0 (lanekeeping + radar cruise)

Sure the Pine devices aren't particularly powerful. But they're not priced as powerful high-end devices. The Pinebook Pro is $199 -- what other thin, metal chassis ultrabook with reasonable display, input devices etc can you get for that price new? This watch is $25, no-one expects it to have monster specs. An older, proven low-power chipset arguably makes things easier for a device to tinker with anyway.

That said, I too would love to see higher specced devices from Pine. An update to the Pinebook with a fancy new ARM chip and 16GB ram would be tempting indeed.

> The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death... It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily fully agree with that specific argument but I can certainly understand where you're coming from. It's one of those head vs heart things: the cold hard logic that all other things being equal, a life followed by death is equivalent to any other, vs the vague moral sense that life should have purpose, and the discomfort when that purpose is 'to be foodstuff'.

That said, I wasn't really arguing for meat consumption generally, I was more just pointing out -- nitpicking might be another word -- a flaw in OPs justification.

I'm in the process of reducing my meat consumption considerably (to 'a couple of times a week') and restricting it to be local and free range. Maybe in a year I'll be full vego, who knows.

Interesting point you raise about a willing blindness of some carnivores. I'm not sure I've really encountered the level of denial that you mention myself, possibly because of the semi-rural area I grew up in, but I don't doubt that it exists. Humans are highly skilled at avoiding the uncomfortable and maintaining delusions.

I agree with a lot of the points you made, though:

> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.

Ultimately every animal is going to die. If the moral hangup for you is the certainty of death, then wouldn't you consider any form of reproduction immoral? 'However good and rewarding their life may be, children are still going to die eventually, ergo noone should reproduce'.

Unless it's the act of killing with the intention to consume that's the issue?

Yeah could be worth bringing that up during next service. I haven't really had an issue with the two-stage indicators, once I got used to the concept.

> Making electric cars isn't too hard (see Tesla)

I don't know, I think Tesla is a good example of how difficult it is to penetrate the car market as a new company. It took them nearly 20 years to get where they are today, and it's not like that was 20 years of smooth sailing. From what I've read they came close to going under multiple times. Aren't they the first major new US car company to start up and not go under since the early 20th century?

The situation for Apple is certainly different, given their size and the massive leaps in terms of EV tech compared to when Tesla started out, but let's not trivialise the complexity of the task and the inherent financial expenditure and risk.

It's working fine for me on FF 85

I enjoy both Quanta and Aeon. They get linked on HN somewhat often, and for good reason - they manage to balance being detailed and informative on technical subject matter while still being interesting and readable.

The New Yorker and The Economist have already been mentioned but are worth mentioning again.

Le Monde Diplomatique has some great material. Though I'm not quite willing to subscribe, maybe a third of their articles are available for free.

Could we? I assumed the whole point was to use a crater as a ready-made, almost-parabolic dish, meaning that only the receiver and suspension wires would have to be sent over -- vastly reducing the required payload vs constructing an entire 1km diameter dish in space.

Most browsers these days give you a list of your history when you hold down the back button. Useful for sites that do this or to get out of redirect loops.

But I agree, the sites behaviour is annoying and far from ideal.

Hell, since we're talking wall-art here, just embrace the separated look and call it a triptych.

I was just thinking how cool it would be to have a colour e-ink display showing something like the current New Yorker cover. They do exist [0] but are likely significantly more expensive again than monochrome, and the 32" panel listed on the site is only 720p.

[0] https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html

I have nothing against honey - I enjoy it as much as anyone else.

My point was more that this honey specifically costs far more than normal honey (or even other boutique honeys with a unique flavour) seemingly just because it has the marketing cachet of being 'anti-microbial', which as far as I can tell doesn't seem to be actually beneficial in any way.

I don't really understand the point of advertising the 'anti-microbial' properties. Antiseptic creams are far less expensive if you're applying it to wounds. Ingesting something for its anti-microbial properties seems a bit strange when there is plenty of research suggesting that having a healthy gut microbiome is beneficial[0]. People eat certain kinds of yoghurt for the very purpose of encouraging gut microbe activity.

Is this purely to advertise to the homeopathic crowd or am I missing something here?

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12967-017-1175-y