jka

Is there a corresponding graph for solar electricity production, out of interest?

GNU's complexity[1] tool calculates something like what you're talking about for procedures in C programs, and calls the result a "complexity score", although I don't think it accounts for variable names, nor magic integers.

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/software/complexity/manual/complexity.ht...

Thank you. I read the links you shared, and also about an escalator incident[1] involving football fans. These are certainly not events that seem to happen often elsewhere. I'll try to follow news there more closely in future.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Rome_escalator_accident

I've learned a little -- but not a lot -- about Rome's civic problems, and would like to understand more. What are the mayor's policies/actions that have caused most problems? Some of the difficulties may have been inherited, as I understand it.

(also: since founded? that's a while :))

> Your friends probably talked about things they watched, and you couldn't join in.

Is that a situation you have worried about during your own life? It seems unusual for you to push that apparent observation onto someone else.

(you may have a point that some parents can be overly-protective; I'm just not sure that you chose the most effective way to communicate that)

That may be true, although it doesn't really address the parent commentor's line of argument: in environments where few (if any) people are allowed to have guns, concealed carry isn't necessary, and gun crime is rare.

A command-line tool that displays the changelog and diff between current-local and latest-upstream versions of all dependencies would be useful.

In other words: "pip list --outdated" but with a changelog and code diff for each dependency.

This would be brilliant!

One (lengthy) nitpick based on a word you used:

> estimation

From that, my guess is that you're implying that because of the spaghetti-pile of bundled JavaScript, CSS and HTML that we have nowadays that it's not possible to use predictable, well-defined standards to make this information available to users.

And you're probably right, it's a mess!

But I would suggest that we try hard to figure out better ways to make the technology simple again, and move towards those, rather than building a complex guess-the-technologies layer on top.

Ideas towards that:

- Move (standardized) package metadata into JavaScript modules themselves so that the data can be inspected and surfaced at runtime (status: I'm not aware of this being standardized, but it may be)

- Improve the ability and mechanisms available to import JavaScript modules (status: this is happening gradually)

- Remove the requirement for applications to perform any bundling at all (status: there's recognized frustration and maintenance burden regarding bundling, but I haven't yet seen no-bundling solutions arising)

- Reduce the need for minimization of content served over-the-wire on the web (status: debatable -- it's probably still required for now, because particularly JavaScript, even after compression, can be fairly large and may still be served in low-bandwidth environments)

A key benefit of this "re-simplify the web" approach would be that as well as enabling the explorative, hands-on approach you suggest, it should also make the learning curve easier for the resulting newcomers.

Also some relevant coverage by the San Francisco Examiner: https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/urban-alchemy-a-rapid-rise-...

Naive question: what's the advantage of this compared to using 'npm init wasm-app'[1], importing your Rust WASM module from JavaScript, and iterating from there?

[1] - https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/book/game-of-life/hello-worl...

Do you mean something like a "causal loop diagram" as mentioned in this article? https://www.transentis.com/understanding-the-beer-game/en/

(albeit at a larger scale and with more products and filter-by-country)

It was a fairly random find. I was looking at their list of supported car models[1] out of curiosity, and wondered whether "comma body" was a typo. Evidently not!

[1] - https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/6965e03c0a1167beec...

...and potentially a more comprehensive answer: RobotShop has a good list of platforms at varying price points (mostly under $5k) and in various form factors: https://www.robotshop.com/en/robot-kits.html

I'm not sure whether it's quite in that category yet - or whether this quote demonstrates that it's an elaborate joke/troll related to Silicon Valley (the TV series), but progress on Comma Body[1] may be worth following.

"One day we dream that 3 comma bodies will get into an openpilot car, drive to Phoenix, open a donut shop, run said donut shop, and bring the profits back once a week. The potential of AI.

But today, it balances, rolls around, and looks beautiful."

[1] - https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/

It's good to see that the article includes a "best ways to help" section:

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/#best...

Perhaps I'm sorta nitpicking or being overly annoying by pointing this out, but use of a Yubikey wouldn't necessarily help if a malicious process modified the code to be submitted. They'd be signed-but-corrupted commits.

The best safety net I'm aware of is that source code and/or diffs in plaintext (not binaries) are distributed, and that recipients inspect them.

It's reasonable to distribute binaries in addition, although recipients take on risk by using those. That risk can be mitigated in the presence of source code and reproducible builds.

Despite my unbounded sense of optimism about everything in life, something makes me think there might be more situations like this ahead (it's a sign that software is being written and distributed more widely, which is good - and a sign that running tons of arbitrary code on all our machines and internetworking them all might lead to difficult-to-answer questions around compromise).

So to harness that optimism again: it's a challenge and an opportunity to build the correct collaboration and analytical tools to audit codebases quickly and effectively in a distributed environment.

It's a good question to ask, although in the case of this project, there don't seem to be any merged code reviews with large line diffs?

One of the largest risks of project-owner compromise to everyday users and businesses would, I think, be from widely used software where automated updates occur.

That leads to an argument for updates being performed manually after inspection of the changes involved.

Counter-arguments could include:

- Users will not care to see what has changed in an update

- Security updates are important to roll out immediately

Responses to those could include:

- Automated update rollout to the majority of users could be conditional on a smaller, inspective subset community of users manually examining and approving the update first (not too dissimilar to a Quality Assurance process). In the context of project owner compromise like the example in the article, this should catch the issue and prevent rollout to users. If an update is approved "with concerns", then the review community is likely to share those concerns with a wider audience, leading to awareness and hopefully resolution.

- Security updates could be rolled out more quickly -- but with a requirement for sign-off by multiple security-focused engineers and product specialists. That could help to reduce exploit exposure time for users while providing for adequate review of changes (security fixes can, in themselves, be challenging to review and confirm).

Also potentially relevant to this topic: how would a community that uses proprietary software develop confidence in an update before choosing to apply it locally?

One of my favourite small details about PostGIS is the way that the documentation includes visual representations of what various query operators achieve. Here are some examples for ST_Buffer:

https://postgis.net/docs/ST_Buffer.html#idm15238

What are the climate and population density like where you live?

I'm guessing here, but I think the author's intent was to share knowledge that's generally applicable in other software engineering environments, rather than learnings that might be specific to Google (those could be both curiosity-building and/or also frustrating for other people to read, if they don't have access to the same systems).

Similarly, it'd likely be possible to learn many of the same findings at other companies -- Google (and the author) have been fortunate to encounter lots of tricky scaling and human issues in technology, and to evaluate potential strategies to deal with those, and it's good to see that knowledge shared.

(the name might not be ideal - but the project seems to follow on thematically from prior work by OKFN and datakick, and perhaps others)

To help verify whether the requests involved were legitimately from bingbot, you can check the guidance here: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...

That was my first thought, too: there was less driving during lockdowns, so perhaps this is a rebound effect?

But it's not: U.S. miles-driven did reduce in 2020, but road deaths increased during that year.

The article links to a previous 2021 article[1] about this.

"Thanks to the pandemic, Americans drove 13 percent fewer miles in 2020 than they did the year before. But the move to telework and lockdowns has not made our roads any safer. In fact, our roads got a lot more dangerous last year, according to preliminary data collected by the National Safety Council. The council estimates that 42,060 people were killed in crashes, an 8 percent increase from 2019. The rise looks even more shocking when normalized—it rose from 1.2 to 1.49 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, a 24 percent increase."

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/03/traffic-deaths-rose-8-p...

Replying with quotes slightly unordered:

> Advertising classically associated with celebrities.

Yep, that seems true - it makes sense that many audiences would like to emulate and be like the celebrities they admire, and many celebrities would like to earn a living and/or build an audience.

Some of Twitter's early community-building strategies[1] provided neatly for both sides of that environment.

> Advertisers don't like brands next to controversies, sure. But ultimately they will go where users are.

To some degree, yep they will - for brand exposure. But for measurable, return-on-investment style advertising -- the kind that will retain your marketing job when your company accountants begin asking questions -- I think it's less about the audience size and more about relevance.

(slightly off-topic: unfortunately, well-targeted online advertising is more-or-less invisible to anyone except the publisher and recipient at the point-in-time when copy is displayed, and can be anywhere on a spectrum from genuinely valuable to manipulative. I think search is the answer here: put the relevant advertising into a search engine operated and transparent to an independent operator, and allow people to dip into that -- using their own chosen search criteria -- when they want something. but I digress)

> It probably isn't a good strategy to concentrate on advertisers and their wishes for content.

Sure, agreed - however in the context of Twitter's post-takeover strategy, future revenue sources are relevant.

Both revenue and user metrics are claimed to have fairly dramatic potential for increase - so is there an implication that free speech is going to help to achieve that? And/or will paying to maintain business accounts on Twitter be measurably worthwhile -- or, similarly, measurably not worthwhile? And what will happen to advertising revenue?

There may be an answer (and, ideally supporting information) that fits the claims, but I don't see it currently.

>> free-speech advocates

> Absolutely nothing wrong with that and most social media platforms were successful because this was a main focus.

That seems unclear to me. I think most platform entrants develop successfully if they identify and correctly-time launch of a technology or medium that makes it {easier/cheaper} for people to communicate to each other, and not because they claim to provide an uncensored environment.

Examples could include the practical realization that data access is cheaper and more universal than {SMS/telephony} in many places (consumer-side) or that the infrastructure to provide internet-based messaging can be provisioned far more cheaply as computing and network hardware scales up (provider-side)[2].

However I would agree that most new platforms will do their best to appear private and unfiltered to new users -- they don't want to distract from the ability for people to communicate with each other, which is intended to feel fresh, authentic and intimate.

[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/twitter-beyond-14...

[2] - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/

(this post title could be seen as slightly sensationalist - but then, perhaps so could the entire Project Veritas campaign)

There's an interesting tidbit in this video which I think accurately reveals the top-level monetization strategy that proponents of "Twitter free speech edition" have in mind.

Essentially the thinking is that the limited margins Twitter operates with are in fact partly/largely due to content restriction policies, and that by removing these restrictions, profitability will increase.

That's likely based on two intuition-based (rather than evidence-based) ideas: one, that there is a staffing cost involved in content restriction, and two, that social media competitors which are perceived as having lax-or-ineffective content policies appear to be more profitable.

Twitter themselves likely have the statistics to know for certain, but I'd guess that the staffing costs for content moderation aren't a major overall factor for the business. Their latest earnings report[1] -- in which I think "General and Administrative" probably includes such costs -- would seem to back that up.

Removing content moderation could conceivably "increase engagement" short term (due to fraught and problematic interactions on the platform) and maybe some of that could lead to increased advertising revenue. But advertisers don't like to see their brands associated with problematic environments -- note that as of May 2022, Truth Social has not secured any advertising partners[2][3] -- so it's unclear whether that would convert into revenue, and it would introduce community risk.

I also think that the reason other platforms may be more profitable in terms of revenue-per-user is not due to content moderation or the way that their users interact, but instead due to the granularity of information that the platforms hold about each user. The more they know, the more they can sell to advertisers. I don't like that business model personally, but I do believe that it's a more reasonable explanation for the revenue-per-user differential.

Overall my sense is that the situation seems like a way to create significant gravity to draw in far-right and free-speech advocates in an attempt to topple what has - for all its' faults - generally been a progressive institution.

Open question: perhaps Twitter themselves have already run data science experiments regarding community sustainability and advertising performance in the absence of content moderation? At a distance, in general, the company and board appear more prepared than the folks who are attempting to disrupt or wrestle control of the platform.

Disclaimer: I'm not a shareholder in Twitter nor any other social media platforms.

[1] - https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q1...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social#Revenue

[3] - https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/02/22/truth-social-what-do...

From the article:

"If electricity is delivered whenever it 'feels like' being delivered (when the wind is blowing somewhere or the sun is shining), it won't meet the demand-unless the consumer for that electricity has its own gigantic battery storage (which Griffith actually recommends that a household buy). But Griffith does tell us the real cost of solar energy-at least of rooftop solar. He says, 'Remember that the average US cost of grid-based electricity is 13.8c per kilowatt-hour. If rooftop solar achieves the price point it has in Australia of 6-7c per kilowatt-hour, and if batteries achieve a price point of around the same 6-7c per kilowatt-hour per storage cycle, then we will have arrived at that moment when our battery storage can beat the grid on cost.'"

I realize it's (massive) utility-scale, but Bhadla[1] has seen energy price bids at 3.2c per kWh.

Meanwhile, for residential electrical storage batteries, Spirit Energy quotes[2] an effective cost-per-cycle of around 13p (approximately 16c) in the UK.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

[2] - https://www.spiritenergy.co.uk/kb-battery-storage-for-solar-...

Source / see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...

Have you had a chance to try Penpot ( https://penpot.app/ )?