jgamman

ironically the only thing that made me stay away from the service.

if he'd added a paragraph that said he'd put some $$ in escrow and some code/instructions with his will/lawyer the site will continue to run with a contractor while the business is auctioned off to one of it's users (or some such) I'd be much happier. as it stands - one guy in his underwear with a service that may or may not exist next year.

uummm 'we' already do. NZ for one has a carbon credit for forestry.

if people paid the price of a coffee for good software, post-docs could attach themselves to a research group and fund themselves by maintaining quality software products - freelance scientist FTW.

the problem here is that lots of people want _other_ people to work for free. if you're not being paid, it's a hobby and you don't owe anyone anything. if the science system relies on free labour and refuses to support it, that's a very different conversation and the results are predictable.

hate me if you want but i think we should call these milli-grids if they are 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger than a micro-grid...

i admit there will be some marketing issues.

I disagree. The other thing unions create are standard working conditions. Some supervisors/departments are terrible - even within the same dept/uni.

Grad school isn't about the money but it is all about the supervisor/student relationship. The power imbalance is extreme and sits with the supervisor - a 6 year PhD is not something most people want, they want to graduate and earn some $$, but another year can generate a couple extra papers for the supervisor...

they have a 'democracy sausage' - i think it also may be compulsory to eat one.

slightly off topic but IIRC the only time Adam Smith mentioned 'an invisible hand' in his Wealth of Nations book was to explain why English companies _wouldn't_ do this. Nothing to do with a market reaching equilibrium etc.

It was very much a cultural assumption that doing something like that 'just wasn't cricket' and no true Englishman would offshore their company!...

wiki: The only use of "invisible hand" found in The Wealth of Nations is in Book IV, Chapter II, "Of Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be produced at Home."

i love the fact that they posted their jupyter notebooks on github ie, https://github.com/jdechalendar/why100renewable-suppl/blob/m...

but there's nothing there to _read_ other than code - it may as well have been a txt file. i'm not trying to be mean to the author, i'm just pointing out that notebooks are a good fit for a style of literate programming and if you aren't into writing the narrative, then why use a notebook?

can't speak for the people who flagged it but for me personally - someone who made their living for many years denying climate change has now flipped to a new narrative of 'risk'. i just assume that he's shilling for the status quo in a new way i haven't got the energy to figure out - probably some sort of predatory delay or hawking a financial con.

as the client, i would always split the project into 2 parts - a functional spec and a technical spec. my job was to interpret and write the func spec as a kind of pseudo-code version of what i thought could be built. then i would commission a fixed price job of interpreting the func spec and re-writing it as a technical spec ie, click a button and take the user to a summary of xyz turns into a bit of SQL. the tech spec must be written so that any programmer could use it to understand what needed to be done. then I'd ask for a fixed price quote to deliver on the assumption that i could get multiple quotes if needed.

the benefit is that my coder who wrote the tech spec should be very comfortable with what is needed and i get to sell a lower risk $$ to my managers.

big fan of lists/checkboxes. my default is to just use a spreadsheet and use traffic light colours. let's me move them around a bit and group as per the article - it'd drive me nuts to re-write everything all the time. also, there's room for comments, who/what/when etc.

for large projects (my large maybe 100-150 items on the list) my status report is just a ctrl-down scroll until everything fits on screen and take a screen shot of green, red and orange/clear - real easy to see if you're on track or not.

Gryd and CoCalc

and a more jupyter-centric agree/reply by Tony Hirst:

https://blog.ouseful.info/2017/11/15/programming-meh-lets-te...

oh for a one armed accountant...

it's a market - the operator will order dispatch to meet demand. they add up all the offers cheapest to most expensive and figure out who the last unit dispatched will be. if your price offer is over theirs you don't get to inject into the grid and don't get paid. That's why prices tend to $0 if you _have_ to dispatch. Those at the margin run at a loss for a while and then make it up later.

i think you're confusing a haystack with a compressed straw bale - IIRC the fire resistance of a compressed straw bale is excellent. it singes on the outside but it's v difficult to burn through.

i don't see anyone saying the problem with OS is "developers have to eat" - i mean honestly, when did the concept of "a fair days pay for a fair days work" become anathema? Even wildly successful OS packages don't generate enough $$ for the developer to just work on it full time - i mean it's cents per user kind of levels would generate enough for a handful of full-time developers (sagemath is the one i'm thinking of specifically but all sorts of critical plumbing seems to be in the same boat).

I get in the old days that builders/users were the same people and sharing OS code made sense but those days are long gone.

you don't have a problem with licences - you have a problem with an economy that expects a major _critical_ chunk of it to work for free. well it aint me, it aint me - i aint no fortunate one, no...

actual how-about-ism detected in the wild. more of a debating trick than a comment.

this will take off if and when the market lets it ie, banks need to have mortgages that have >2 people, standardised contracts and housing _designed_ for co-living. it's a big difference between sharing a nuclear-family-designed house with friends and sharing something that has alone-space and communal-space.

personally, i think co-housing will take off. It's pretty standard in Norway for instance IIRC.

I don't know - pricing options using Black-Scholes uses assumptions (i think normal bell curves) that aren't exactly true and LTCM for instance went under showing that. i think the big difference between economics and physics is that maths is used in finance as 'credibility' and the mortals just assume it's correct because the wizards say it is and crank the dial up to 11 (sub-prime affected a lot of normal people). In physics, the wizards are just talking to other wizards and the mortals don't even enter the discussion (honestly, LHC is cool and all but other than a couple thousand physicists, no-one would notice if it stopped working).

Netflix at $10 a month seems like a bargain. Binge watching dragons' edge isn't great but at least you know it's _just_ dragon's edge...

fuGoogle.

change 'gardening' to 'nurturing' and you might get a sense of the fulfillment (contentedness?) of being able to enjoy your creation that took planning, effort and time. exponential if you get to enjoy your children enjoying it too. it may be small but leaving _your_ patch of dirt a better place than you found it can be a personally enriching pasttime. then again, i don't understand people that create gardens so they can be photographed for lifestyle magazines so there's that...

some people have kids in their 20s (gasp!)

>>Google exists so you can learn new things and develop foundational knowledge

I know this is a shorthand heuristic but Google helps you _find_ other people that can help you learn new things and develop foundational knowledge.

The map is NOT the terrain.

sheesh - wandered around the site and found angela.txt, an ascii nude (which i now know was/is a thing and wish i didn't). and people wonder why other people think on-line culture is a cesspool.

this always seemed like the right kind of trade-off - the sponsored links are generated from the search terms, not the 'personalised' search_terms+surveilled_data blob. if this is _all_ that Google the search engine did, I probably wouldn't have switched.

"A sodium metal anode is placed in an organic electrolyte" - no - you need metallic sodium. this takes energy. you get some of that energy back as electricity and 'stored' in the hydrogen by letting it turn back into an ion and forming some carbonate.

>2 sentences? i don't even bother finishing the entire comment either.

aahhh, the ol' lump of labour fallacy fallacy

crazy powerful tools have different communities that use them. if you describe jupyter as a mash-up of word and excel, every non-IT pro that works at BigCo will have a pretty good idea of what it is and why it's a good idea for them.

alternately, think about who you are writing code _for_. If it's for yourself or other people, mixing code, graphics and text is a really good idea. If you are writing code for computers you will prefer other workflows. Complaining that a workflow that is useful for one community doesn't work for your community is pointless - try going 1 or 2 levels up in your abstractions.