throwaway189262

You can turn off "location services" for local-only GPS fix but it's difficult and hounds you constantly.

After warranty ends I flash Lineage and run location spoofing.

Maybe we can finally lay self driving prophecies to rest. Self driven cars will never share the road with human drivers. There's no legal framework for liability. And AI is far from understanding human intentions and speech.

One day we'll have purpose built lanes for robots, maybe. Boring highway routes between big cities will be first.

I think tech wizards will take the easy road and automate planes and ships. There's too much crap and unpredictability on the ground. That's why all the automated military stuff flies or floats, or dives. Skittering along the ground is best left to meat control

The harder they push a feature, the more valuable the data they're stealing from you.

Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.

Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.

It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.

Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.

I loved Roku but they lost me when their latest model would only show regular 1080p on a 2K HDR-10 screen. And yes it supports HDCP and all that crap. Roku just never tested downscaling apparently.

EV's are great for big cities, but about half of US pop lives in rural areas. Outside major highways EV chargers don't exist in the sticks.

In rural places 50 mile trips are normal. It's not unusual to drive 90 miles each way in a day. And chances are you won't find an EV charger on either end.

And in rural areas you have single phase electric, slowing down charges. And in the same places, power goes out for days at a time most years.

If you think the US is ready to go EV-only you live in an urban bubble. In much of the US, EV's are still wildly impractical.

In the country you may need to go 500 miles with no electricity when power is out for a week. Only a fool would buy an EV in sparse areas where long outages happen (most of rural US)

Random ocean dumping is not cool, but oceanic subduction zones are perhaps the best way to deal with long lived nuclear waste.

Ruby is a dead language and even people attending the conferences know that. That's why people there are playing silly games instead. Most of them probably show up just to see their friends.

There's a huge contingent of Rubyists in denial about the death of Ruby, but all signs point towards it going the way of Perl.

On Tiobe and Github language surveys Ruby has had the biggest and longest drop in popularity of any language they track for years now.

Are you actually complaining that wind is bad because it ruins the view?

Windows, cars, and pet cats kill multitudes more birds than windmills

Hydro plants do use wind to bank energy. Either by shutting down and banking water when the wind is blowing, or even running the pumps in reverse.

I agree with you that energy storage is a big problem with wind. It is with solar too. But we can get near 50% wind and solar before it becomes a problem since much more energy is used during the day.

Dams also have a finite lifetime, something nobody really talks about. They silt up over 50-100 years until they're completely full. This is a bigger problem in places like China with turbid water but happens everywhere eventually. The sun will shine and wind will blown till long after we're gone but dam sites will be gone eventually.

This is actual supporting data from a reliable source and should be up top.

So it appears fossil fuels take ten times more energy to run over a lifetime. Less than I expected but still bad

But coal plants use an absurd amount of coal and everything they don't burn ends up as ash.

And have you been close to a big coal plant? They're massive. A coal plant probably used more land than 200 turbines and unlike turbines the land is unusable.

Coal plants use many times their mass in coal during their lifetime. If you're looking at total materials needed over the lifetime of the plant, I wouldn't be surprised if coal was 100X higher than 200 turbines.

Even 400 stories would be 600 kwh. Thats like 2 tesla battery packs. Way better than 6 but still not anything that can be realistically applied at scale.

There's not many deep mineshafts that aren't filled with water. And dewatering mines is insanely expensive. And 600 Kwh is nothing. Enough to power maybe 30 houses for a day.

My math is bad, but there's no math where this will ever work out profitably

I heard conjecture about it. Possibly more realistic is high pressure gas storage in salt domes. Or hydro power based on filling and draining deep mines.

There's realistic gravity based projects, but dropping ACME style anvils down mineshafts isn't one :)

Lol yeah

The turbines are all in fields, useless scrubland, cattle ranches, and the ocean. Humans don't hang out in these places anyways

It does far less damage than any other source of power. Unlike solar, it uses no space. Unlike fossil fuel and nuclear, it uses no continuous inputs.

Coal and gas plants use many times their weight in materials for a lifetime of operation. Nuclear probably does too because the massive waste involve in uranium refining.

What do you suggest as a greener power source than wind?

So? How much resources does it take to mine thousands of tons of coal a day, or billions of BTU of natural gas?

With solar and wind, you put it up and you're done. No more inputs. It chills in the field.

With coal and gas you're feeding shit tons of material into it every day. And you always need more, for the life of the plant.

It's bonkers you think the amount of steel and concrete that go into a turbine are anywhere close to comparing to the raw materials other power sources consume.

Turbines require steel and concrete. So does every other building above 5 floors

Big cities in places like India and China are an exception. In these places average salary can be 10X higher than rural areas of the same province. Because the big cities are much father along towards being developed country than outskirts. So housing here is expensive and has the same result.

There are people making $2000 a year living in heated somewhat comfortable homes. Homeless in the US make more than that just in welfare benefits but they live in tents on the streets

It's housing costs entertwined with mental problems and drug use.

In many countries you can afford a shack with US equivalent of $100 a month. In rich countries such shacks are illegal and all the regulation and land cost raises minimum rent far above that.

At least 2/3 of homeless are addicted or mentally ill. The fraction that isn't typically doesn't live on the streets for more than a few months.

In my experience you don't see many homeless in poorer countries because housing is cheap relatively speaking.

Construction material is a meaningless metric. If you compare coal or gas plants you need to consider the materials they consume and infrastructure needed for fuel transport. This is a big number, many times the material used for the plant itself.

The only meaningful comparison is material used vs solar. Once these things are built they use near zero resources. For everything else you have to keep mining shitloads of material forever.

How much coal do we have to mine for coal plants? How many gas wells and pipelines for gas plants? What about transport? How much does it take to mine and process all the uranium into fissile isotopes for nuclear?

With wind and solar you plop the thing in a field and get years, maybe decades of energy with no input.

I'm convinced that all these land use and building materials costs studies are just FUD funded by the fossil fuel industry.

This is an obvious scam if you do the math.

Assuming the full scale version delivers peak power for 11 seconds like the prototype, 2MW peak power would be 6 kilowatt hours of energy.

That's terrible. We're taking about dropping hundreds, maybe thousands of tons down a mine shaft to get the same amount of power as $700 of lithium batteries you could carry in a backpack. For instantaneous loads you're way better off using flywheels, which we've already had for decades.

Gravity is weak, literally. The only realistic use case for gravity generation is hydro power. And MAYBE reverse hydro power where we put giant gas bags underwater and they make energy floating up

> as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land use.

This is just false. Every wind turbine I've ever seen uses 50 square feet on a farm or cattle ranch.

Not once have I seen a wind farm where the land underneath isn't still used for it's previous purpose.

And at least in US we have enough farmland to power entire US with wind.

And that's not counting rapidly growing offshore wind power. Which uses no land at all

Not sure why downvoted. For nearly a century large multi family wood structures were banned in most countries due to fire risk. These huge apartment buildings are all 2X4's, not timber framing. They're incredibly flammable.

The only thing keeping them safe is fire sprinklers. There's been many infernos that burned the things to the ground when sprinklers failed.

What??? Germany had already surrendered, Japan was the only major Axis power left.

They used the bomb immediately after it was built. There was a single test, Trinity, then the next bomb went to Japan. How could they choose Japan years in advance when they used the bomb the second it came off the assembly line???

The US nuked Japan because a land invasion was projected to kill millions on both sides. Because Japan is mountainous and its people were prepared to fight till the bitter end, which was proven by the number of kamikaze attacks.

The US wanted the war to end quickly without losing a lot of their troops. The Japanese Emperor had to be convinced the war was unwinnable. The Atom bomb was the easiest way to do that. The US also avoided bombing Kyoto to preserve Japanese cultural heritage. If they wanted to to do maximum damage, they could have done worse.

It should be remembered that it was Japan that attacked the United States, which was at the time a neutral power. They, like Germany, brought the war and destruction upon themselves.

Somehow you twist a war that was started by Japan into "The US is racist". As an American, I find that incredibly offensive.

Please. I work in tech too and get the same crazy salary everyone else does. You really wondering if someone on HN is a secret poor person because they're willing to admit they're overpaid?

I grew up broke and understand how fortunate I am. I'm completely fine with paying a few percent more marginal tax rate. I have thousands of disposable income a month like most of us here. I doubt I would even notice.

In US at least, the population skews substantially left. Younger folks in the US lean quite left but don't vote.

While Republicans and Democrats are represented fairly evenly in elections, in population surveys that include non-voters Democrats have a ~20% edge.

For example, if only people under 45 voted in the last election, Biden would have won over 400 electoral votes. Perhaps getting the most in history.

So the definition of left leaning varies depending on whether you include all voters or the whole population.

This accounts for some of the reason why conservatives dismay media, tech, science, media, and schools being "run by the left". They are. The working and school population is younger and also votes less, and is very liberal compared to party policy positions.

The parties pander to the average voter, and news orgs to the average American. That's why so many news orgs "lean left"

> They had the animals passively listen to sequences of four chords over and over again, in what Buschman dubbed “the worst concert ever.”

Hahahaha!

I don't understand how they released it like that. When my mom told me about kids getting stuck I immediately said "yeah under the back right?" And I've only seen Peloton in ads.

What a stupid design. They deserve to get sued into oblivion

What is the other thing they're doing? Nothing I've seen in their tax bills affects average americans

400k a year is still an obscene amount of money. Likely top 1% in the US and top 0.01% on the planet.

Billionaires don't pay income tax, that's why Dems are raising the corporate tax rate too. They're also looking at increasing estate tax and capital gains tax, and those almost exclusively effect the ultra rich

Actually, they didn't. Democrats have only had majority control of congress and the presidency for 5 of the last 40 years. The rest of the time, Republicans can block any bills they don't like.

And they really don't like huge corporations paying taxes.