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filmoron Should you wash your solar panels?

You don't get "classed as an energy company", you just have to pay taxes on the money you make from selling the energy. This starts at 30 kWp (up to that size, the income is tax free), which is very likely more than what you could put on a private home.

filmoron Counting Fast in Erlang with:counters and:atomics

Already existed when it was first merged: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/fefb5d039e87ff7137e78b3...

Atomics were introduced a while before `counters`, maybe you remember a custom implementation on top of that?

filmoron Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Gentoo doesn't "exist" because it is necessary to have an alternative to systemd. Gentoo is simply about choice and works with both openrc and systemd. It supported other inits to some degree as well im the past.

filmoron Text-based web browsers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

It is a simpler web and requires a separate browser or a plugin. It's difficult to find resources on it nowadays because of Google Gemini...

filmoron Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

Not its forum, there was an unofficial wiki that disappeared due to issues with the hoster in 2008. There is an official wiki nowadays.

filmoron Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

The RE5 is operated by National Express. You have not been kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn.

The connection in question is probably https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494....

According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel should have worked, though.

filmoron Parrot – type-safe SQL in Gleam, supports SQlite, PostgreSQL and MySQL

Static typing. Elixir already has strong typing (no implicit conversions).

filmoron Gentoo AI Policy

I haven't. The Nix language makes no sense to me and there is still nothing akin to useflags. I don't want to override a bunch of packages just to make my system not pull in (e.g.) UI libraries.

filmoron Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable

If you have a FP3, did it never fall down, throwing its battery out? I had that happen a few times to me in the past and I always wished for a tiny bit more "grip" on the battery. I would guess that I'm not the only one.

filmoron Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% Rust

Rust can absolutely link to Rust libraries dynamically. There is no stable ABI, so it has to be the same compiler version, but it will still be dynamically linked.

filmoron A Pokémon battle simulation engine

It is written in zig.

filmoron Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

"mit" is followed by dative in German. In Latin, ablative and dative are very close and which is very close, a lot of forms are indistinguishable.

That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)

filmoron Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record

Both of them can be trivially downregulated.

filmoron Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check

How is that efficiency calculated, respectively?

filmoron Neutrinos' maximum possible mass shrinks further

Others have explained it already, but just to make this clear: The mass is not expressed in volts but in "electron volts" that is a different unit in the same sense as "watt hours" is a measure of energy and not time.

filmoron BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets

That unintuitive setup is a common child safety measure. It's not part of the socket design, the construction is usually an inlay.

filmoron Germany's 'Deutschlandticket' helps environment – study

You only need some official document (ID card, passport, whatever) that matches the name and birthday. If you are a tourist, you must have a passport or ID card close by anyhow.

filmoron Germany's 'Deutschlandticket' helps environment – study

I just stayed with the app that I used for my old monthly ticket (mobil.nrw) and it allows paying with Paypal.

filmoron Zasper: A Modern and Efficient Alternative to JupyterLab, Built in Go

It currently hard-codes launching ipykernel, right?

filmoron Show HN: Keypub.sh – OAuth for the terminal using SSH keys

- TOFU: Trust on first use (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use)

- SSHFP: SSH FingerPrint record in the domain name system (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFP_record)

- MITM: Man in the middle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack)

filmoron Cybertruck's Many Recalls

There is a whole section in James May's review where he is confirming with a steel ruler that the surfaces are slightly convex :-)

https://youtu.be/CQzYhMDNLPA?t=216

filmoron Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

Depends on the prpvider as well. Vodafone seems to have (had?) zero qualms about passing my old landline number to multiple shady call centers after taking over Unitymedia. The number was not known to anyone but my parents and I opted out of erverything I could find, still for some time got weekly calls. I haven't had that woth Telekom so far.

Spam calls (and even more so: SMS) have gotten much more frequent on my mobile number in the last 2 years. But in this case, it's a number that has been in active use for the last decade and has by now probably been in multiple data leaks... :/

filmoron Perhaps Rust Needs "Defer"

That is exactly what what the parent post proposed.

filmoron Crossing the USA by Train

The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection.

The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.

filmoron Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir

The panic is converted to an Erlang error exception. You have to explicitly ignore it to make unit tests pass in spite of it.

I am still interested in the situation you observed.

filmoron Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir

Rustler wasn't properly forward compatible (only with regard to the build process, a compiled library will work just fine on any newer OTP) until 0.29. They are using 0.22, upgrading Rustler will be enough to get rid of this issue for all future OTP versions.

filmoron Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir

How so? The whole point of unwinding is to gracefully clear up on panics, how did it peak for you?

It's also not like there is much of a choice here. Unwinding across FFI boundaries (e.g. out of the NIF call) is undefined behaviour, so the only other option is aborting on panics.

filmoron Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir

This won't work on Windows as the BEAM uses a slightly different NIF initialisation method there.

filmoron HPy – A better C API for Python

As others have said, this has been supported since the limited/stable APIs were introduced. What this adds is a way of implementing a Python extension that can be loaded in (not just compiled for, which is already an improvement!) different Python implementations, namely CPython, Pypy and GraalVM.