fooblitzky

I've heard of one car-free mother that moved seven kids around by bike on a daily basis.

If memory serves, she got a shout-out in this book: https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/item/show/2862141030

I believe they are referring to the Tk GUI toolkit, which is intended for use from Tcl and really nice to work with. It is full featured and has plenty of widgets and layout controllers. You can find out all about Tk here: https://tkdocs.com/

It is really fast and easy to create GUIs using Tcl/Tk, e.g. here is a Tcl script to create a paint-like program in less than 50 lines: https://pastebin.com/6qibnQcJ

The main downside is that the look and feel is not native, and a bit dated. There are some efforts to update the look, but it's not as slick as Gtk etc.

"Under the hood, Aquameta is a "datafied" web stack, built entirely in PostgreSQL. The structure of a typical web framework is represented in Aquameta as big database schema with 6 postgreSQL schemas containing ~60 tables, ~50 views and ~90 stored procedures. Apps developed in Aquameta are represented entirely as relational data, and all development, at an atomic level, is some form of data manipulation."

This is triggering painful flashbacks to SharePoint development.

Maybe this? https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_ql_prod_mt_dbms

It seems if you use '=' it leads to dangerous programming bugs[1], whereas ':=' somehow prevents those bugs?

[1] https://effbot.org/pyfaq/why-can-t-i-use-an-assignment-in-an...

Seeing the explosion in e-bike popularity, maybe they should have focused on those instead. In addition to being a smaller, cheaper product with higher margins, you have a much larger market to sell to (not many countries have roads like the USA, or the electricity generation, and something like only the top 30 countries have people that can even afford to buy a car).

The AWS Oil & Gas offering is explicitly about helping "energy companies" find and extract more oil, faster.

From their page: "Accelerate and optimize exploration, drilling, and production".

That's not just keeping the lights on, that's actually accelerating the rate of oil extraction at exactly the time when we need to be ramping down.

I think the point was the NBA needs to take a stance on HK itself, in support of democracy.

"We support free speech" is a cop-out, because China is happy for you to support free speech, as long as you don't say anything they don't like. It would be a stronger stance to say, "Actually, we think Morey was right", especially if it's going to cost them money to do so.

The one that gets me is Warren Aakervik - he retired long ago, but still comes into the office of Ballard Oil for the sole purpose of delaying the Missing Link. It's a poor legacy to work so hard for, in a city packed with inspiring examples (e.g. Myrtle Edwards).

https://www.kuow.org/stories/bike-trail-critics-see-opportun...

"[Ryan Vancil] argued that the SEPA delays on Mandatory Housing Affordability, the Burke Gilman Trail, and Fort Lawton were due more to his office’s unusually high caseload."

- Yes, that explains the 20 year delay on the BGT Missing Link. Just high caseload folks. Not continuous lawsuits invoking SEPA from a handful of selfish business owners.

Self-driving and electric cars won't solve traffic congestion. 112 sq ft/person is not efficient for transit.

You are still describing a situation where a client connects directly to a server.

At Google, those client connections are probably kept open at a load balancer. The load balancer has its own connections to servers on the other side, and those will be as short-lived as possible, so that the server is available to service the next request the lb sends its way.

If you start talking about server-side push technologies, you are keeping a long-lived connection open from the server, through the load balancer, to the client. That will affect the dynamics of the load balancing - it's not as simple as round-robin or random distribution that short-lived requests allow. Consider, for example, a server that becomes overloaded. With short-lived requests you can just add more hosts to the LB pool. With long-lived requests you might need to start thinking about migrating connections, or forcefully terminating some connections if the server hits some kind of load threshold, as well as adding hosts.

It's not impossible, it just makes it more complicated and less reliable, which is not what you want for something that just updates a score. As others have pointed out, it's probably just fetching a static file that gets updated periodically.

The article considers efficiency from the client side, but it doesn't really consider scaling effects on the server side. Simple polling requests coming in are easy to load-balance, either randomly or by a round-robin scheme. It's resilient, because if one request fails, the next will likely succeed and the user won't even notice.

On the other hand, the complexity of trying to manage millions of open web socket connections filled with state would make things difficult. You would have an uneven distribution of load across servers, the challenge of knowing which connections to close in the lb, and probably the best way to keep the user experience smooth would be to have the client assume failure rather than delay, and aggressively disconnect and establish a new web socket anyway.

I agree that thinking humanity will be wiped out in 15 years is over the top.

I think though, that anyone that has fully grasped the IPCC reports, has to go through a grieving process that begins with despair.

Climate change is unlikely to kill me (unless through secondary effects like war), or even my daughter. But it's probably going to make my life more challenging towards the end, even more so for my daughter, and if she has any children they will probably be starting to face the real challenges (note: first world countries, for the global south, those timelines will be accelerated).

The despair though, is rooted in knowing that the natural world of my youth is gone forever (on human timescales). My daughter will never experience the same number of insects, fish, and birds I saw as a child[1]. Diversity is lost as millions of species are already going extinct. Coral reefs will be lifeless ghost towns. I can never share that world with her or my future grandchildren. Because the damage we have already done will take thousands of years to repair, that world only exists in my memories now.

On the other side of despair is acceptance and personal action. I do what I can, but I realize I'm only one among billions, and I have to accept that I can't fix a global problem, no matter how bad I think the impact is.

For anyone interested in further reading, I recommend the book _Being the Change_, by Peter Kalmus (https://smile.amazon.com/Being-Change-Spark-Climate-Revoluti...)

[1] She'll never even touch dirt, drink water, or breathe air that doesn't contain thousands of microplastic particles.

You are 100% correct, this is known as the carbon-fee-and-dividend[1] scheme, and it has a number of advantages for all sides:

* It does not further harm poor people - as everyone receives an equal dividend, it makes a bigger impact the less you have. * It provides a long-term, predictable carbon cost. Business can plan many years in advance and not be caught by surprise. * It's effective at reducing emissions (not the exact scheme, but see Australia under the most recent Labor government, before the repeal of a carbon price).

I'd encourage everyone interested to get in touch with the Citizens' Climate Lobby and pitch in.

[1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/

Yes, you are right, I was off by a factor of 1000, must have typed '000' one too many times. Sorry.

Also, yes, the TWh was a per year amount.

Is it really safer than solar?

"The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation." - this is an example of wishful thinking. We don't know how we would solve the problems, we are just assuming someone will figure out a way. That assumption is probably influenced by survivorship bias. There's a bunch of technologies where the problems weren't solved, but we don't hear about them much.

The mean time to build a reactor is about 7.5 years[1], so if you wanted to transition all remaining fossil-fueled electricity generation in 12 years, currently with 120,000 TWh of fossil fuel consumption[2], assuming 1GW of generation per nuclear power plant, you would need to start building approximately 14 thousand (edit: originally read millions, corrected as pointed out in comments) nuclear power plants today.

[1] http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

That would probably also have the effect of reflecting some of the energy leaving Earth back down onto it, essentially increasing the greenhouse effect.

Also, assuming you need to reflect 2% of the incoming light, and using 8ft diameter balloons, you would need approximately 2,744,628,480,000 balloons.

I think your last statement is absolutely on point. If we as a species had addressed climate change when it was first raised as an important issue in the 1970's, it would not have required nearly the same level of upheaval that addressing it today will need. The later we leave it, the worse the upheaval becomes.

Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures).

The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.

You'd think in 2019 that they could think of another use besides managing a shopping list for the woman.

Renewables would be ahead on cost down to USD 9-10/barrel:

https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes...

Excellent. I hope the technology also works for truck drivers.

That Venus may once have had an Earth-like climate, until it hit a "runaway greenhouse gas state", is a scary thought considering our current challenges on Earth (and melting permafrost and methane bubbles). Sometimes people say "we might pollute enough to kill all humans, but nature will continue just fine without us." - Unless we do enough damage to trigger a runaway state and turn Earth into another Venus.

How can you meet Paris commitments early when you are working on helping oil & gas companies extract fossil fuels from the ground even faster?

https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/

Where does AWS Oil & Gas fit into the picture?

https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/

Hopefully more people will start riding e-bikes, which are much more efficient. 10 miles ~ 200Wh.

Currently both Amazon and FedEx both use independent contractors (sorry, entrepreneurs) - and your experience will vary widely with the contractors operating in your area. We always groan when FedEx is doing the delivery, because in our area that usually means two or three days of 'missed deliveries'.

My credit union (First Tech) does wires. It goes through another bank, but they allow me to initiate it from my account etc, so there's no practical difference.

The author is very cavalier about open source licenses - they seem to be implying you can just use open source code whenever you want, even for closed-source, proprietary applications. Whether or not that is true depends on the licenses involved.

Solar would work on existing ship designs like container ships.

Moving through the water is very efficient - if you go slowly enough. If ships travel slower than the hull displacement speed, they could travel on electric motors and solar power today.

The challenge is convincing global markets that slow shipping is worthwhile, when everything is moving in the opposite direction (faster and faster).