The real estate would be more valuable than the panels, presumably. So it's not like they can just keep expanding forever. As for the vulnerabilities, this is not based on guessing. We've produced solar panels in the West even recently. They are not competitive with China on cost. They are actually fragile. We are facing geopolitical challenges.
>Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
It's not sufficient. We have had plenty of time to start making all of the critical things we import, and that never happened. In most cases, these things used to be made in the West in the first place. Just because you CAN make a thing doesn't mean it makes sense. The economics of solar would be totally different if you had to pay 5x more for solar panels to replace Chinese-subsidized slave-labor-backed imports.
There are other arguments to be made against mega-scale solar. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of solar because it is on a small scale one of the best ways for an individual to get a bit of electricity without reliance on fuel supplies. But it has a lot of disadvantages at scale which make it unsuitable for many regions. Hail, snow, dust, vandals, and strategic vulnerability all make it look precarious. The supply chain concern is that much worse.
I think there are different life strategies that humans use. Some people need to survive based on skill more than others. The most obvious cases of non-skill strategies are the ones where people make a living based on having a certain physical appearance, or else live off of inheritance.
This might be controversial but I think rich and powerful people are usually skilled. The skill might be pretty far removed from the technical, of course. But I think I can safely say that most people don't fail upward and don't preserve or grow wealth when it just falls into their laps. The skill of investing well is really kind of a planning and information-processing skill. Society generally benefits from successful management of wealth at that level, even if we on the bottom of the pyramid detest extreme wealth of those on top.
That is only marginally better in the scheme of things. They want to take farms for food out of commission in some places to replace with fragile and unreliable solar systems. Imagine installing this stuff on a large scale. If you plan to replace all the panels after 30 years and incur no losses from high winds, hail, vandals, etc., then you would need to overbuild the system by 20% at minimum. This is assuming modern panels are as durable as those old panels from the study too. 30 years ago, solar panels were built in the West and cost 10x as much as the ones we have now. So it seems reasonable to assume that brand new panels might not have the same characteristics, and be less durable. It would make a lot more sense to just put these panels on roofs and in parking lots where the real estate is already consumed, and the power can be a backup source instead of a grid-scale vulnerability.
The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense.
Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.
If two machines have different endianness, then there is no optimal byte order for either one. Therefore, this problem can't be solved in a one-size-fits-all optimal solution. People have tried to make code generators to take some of the pain out of encoding/decoding but that isn't effortless either.
Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
Technocracy sounds good in theory, but if you understand human nature and economics you'll realize that technocratic governance makes no sense. It's up to humans to decide what to do, with value judgements about what they want to give up in exchange for what they want. It is the role of technology to facilitate the implementation. We certainly hope to have leaders who are literate in science and tech, but science and tech are not a value system.
I had to look. Private and toll roads have a long history, and enlightenment thinkers did have varying opinions about whether private roads made sense or not. Generally, if labor is required to maintain a thing (whether water, roads, etc.), running it as a business can make a lot of sense. What you don't want is someone using monopoly power and/or regulatory capture to extract excessive profits for necessities like that.
It is practically so much harder that I think it qualifies. How many rejections or years of effort do you think one must endure before he can reasonably say it's nearly impossible?
I'm not going to get into how stats are on my side, the dismal outcomes on dating apps are a reflection on the state of the overall market, etc. But these are far worse than most people expect.
>My expectation is that confidence and grace is evenly distributed at birth, but is added to the physically attractive and denied to the unattractive almost immediately.
I don't think it would be evenly distributed, but it goes something like that. You can choose to behave confidently up to a point, but people reject such behavior from an ugly person. Ignoring this social feedback can get you into a lot of trouble.
>I've always found the physically-unattractive-but-socially-attractive especially interesting because they've succeeded, often along with a very cool peer group.
Some of these are brutal too. I've known some real busted dudes who got attractive girls to like or marry them somehow. I assume it's often money, connections, and/or encountering the right person who is a sucker for your particular characteristics. Imagine being the ugly brother or nephew of a solid 10 (guy or girl), or being a multi-millionaire. You'd easily get many times more opportunities in all areas of life.
Assuming you have to start on one of the branches being merged, "current" is a good name for the one you started on. "Other" is good enough for the other one. By the way I found out that octopus merges never succeed in case of conflicts. I'm not even sure if prerecorded resolutions work in that case. You're supposed to do a series of normal merges instead if you have conflicts.
In my opinion, a lot of ugly people start off by trying to be nice, then gradually become more bitter and cynical the more they have to take shit from other people. At least I feel like that has happened to me, and I'm not even so ugly (imho). The amount of gaslighting I've put up with from everyone over the years has really been infuriating and has led me to a lot of misery in my life, and also turned me away from the things that might have actually made a difference.
>For a while he tried to explain it all by his weight loss alone, but over time he realized it was an overall change in everything about the way he carried himself and presented himself to the world.
All of what you're saying is just looks. Clothes, posture, etc. all matter and we all know some exceptions to the rule, but people make clothes look good and not so much the other way around.
>Now that GLP-1s are everywhere I do know a few people who slimmed down rapidly without changing anything else and expected things like their dating life to completely change but have been disappointed that little has changed socially for them.
Not everyone looks better if they slim down. And if you do it the wrong way, or don't update your clothes to not be baggy, or just plain have excessive expectations, it's going to be disappointing. Losing weight just gets you to the baseline of where you might not make people want to look away or find reasons to not like you. If you're short, then you'll still be short after losing weight. If you're ugly in the face, you'll still be ugly, if not more ugly. I know you're talking about men because even overweight women have lots of options. Dating is also nearly impossible for average men now. You shouldn't assume that weight doesn't make a huge difference based on a few examples of guys who can't get dates. Think of it more like not being fat is to make others not immediately blow you off for that one reason.
>Maybe "local/alien" might be a less pompous vocabulary to convey the same idea.
That is more alien and just as contrived. If you merge branches that you made, they're both local and "ours". You just have to remember that "ours" is the branch you are on, and "theirs" is the other one. I have no idea what happens in an octopus merge but anyway, the option exists to show commit titles along with markers to help you keep it straight.
If that is true about the California case, it is basically a fluke. Lobbyists don't have total control of the legislation after all. It sounds almost benign when posed that way, but it is the wrong solution either way. The better solution is to tell people to install filtering software to block content that they don't want. Then you don't have to worry about compliance of individual sites, personal information, or any of it. This filtering strategy also makes sense for privacy and handling the subjective nature of what is age-appropriate or offensive.
No, it's bipartisan and even fucking international. I think there is a very obvious conspiracy to get this done, but maybe it's a big coincidence that governments and politicians everywhere suck now.
I was talking about the party. This shit is and always has been pushed from both parties. Even democrat states like California and Colorado are on board. See also, the OS age verification legislation.
It's not about gutting moderation. They want you to dox yourself to get online. It's a pro-censorship authoritarian-friendly move. I don't believe the narrative that Meta is behind it all either. If they are, they are probably serving someone else.
It will probably accomplish nothing for other reasons. There are secret laws in this country which violate the constitution. I don't think the average person appreciates privacy as much as they should. But saying they are complicit in the making of this mess is going way too far. There are not so many choices in tech as you think. The most private ones require high technical expertise, and involve risks other than those presented by corporate tech. For example, you may have to trust a small number of unpaid individuals (who may even be anonymous) to deliver software.
>So a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content. If someone tells you your code is wrong, your emotional response to that is your problem to manage, not theirs to preemptively defuse.
Our emotions are ultimately our own problem, but you are sorely mistaken if you think the emotions of others can't cause you major problems. There is some merit to keeping social chatter to a minimum in important communication channels, and not being personal. But if you're just gonna try to steam roll everyone else with your opinion, and insult them and their work directly under the pretense of being "objective" then you are going to have a hard time. It usually doesn't even work if you are in a management position, because subordinates will tend to undermine such a manager (if they even stay).
To be fair, if you can firewall the whole thing and have a read-only data layer, this could work for some tasks. This could get tricky when it comes to accessing web resources, but the data layer could handle it presumably. The data layer too will need to be sandboxed, I guess, in case it were to download malware.
#1 is already possible and always has been. I never heard of a case of anyone actually trying it. #2 is too nitpicky and unnecessarily costly for LLMs. It would be better to just ask it to generate a spec and tests based on the original, them create a separate implementation based on that. A person can do that today free and clear. If LLMs will be able to do this, we will just need to cope. Perhaps the future is in validating software instead of writing it.
Soulless multinationals often want to share costs with other soulless multinationals, just like individuals do. So I think there will always be publicly shared code. The real question is whether this code will be worth much if it can be implemented so quickly by a machine.
Imagine getting so much aid from the US and Europe only to start making ultimatums. If they dare to do such a thing, they should be the next ones to find out.
What is history-textbook gall is denying your benefactor a modicum of assistance. We have given them more than enough aid to get whatever help we asked for (which was probably negligible anyway).