Data: don't collect it; don't store it; don't keep it!
442 karma · joined January 16, 2009
Even when I go coldest turkey, I’ve found that actually important news will find me, often in a way that makes it easier to judge for myself whether it’s good or bad.
1) AC literally saves lives. Continuing to reject it in hot countries is kind of evil.
2) AC is efficient. Each kWh of heat sucked out of buildings uses a fraction of a kWh of electricity.
3) AC's electricity use is strongly correlated with when the sun is shining brightest. It is the greenest (man-made) energy use I can imagine!
And, most importantly:
4) AC nowadays is almost always installed so it can work in reverse, as a "heat pump". So countries that currently heat their buildings with natural gas or other fossils, would actually _reduce_ their total carbon burden by installing AC everywhere! Because they can use these instead of burning fossils in winter! Doubly so in countries avec lots of nuclear generation, but even if they don't, burning natural gas or even coal to make electricity to drive a heat pump emits less carbon than burning the same natural gas to heat a house! (Citation needed!)
I have a pet conspiracy theory that the anti-AC lobby in Europe is funded by Big Fossil. It seems silly, even to me, but it's not totally illogical: widespread AC installation in mainland Europe will inexorably reduce dependency on oil and gas for heating, first by burning less of it to make electricity to drive a heat pump rather than by burning it directly, and second by making it _possible_ to substitute renewables for it.
I should submit this to HN, in fact. It doesn't seem to have ever been submitted.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
I wonder if the same thing might apply here.
PS. The interviewer was Tyler Cowen, and [the transcript](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/margaret-atwood/) says:
ATWOOD: I think things will stay kind of the way they are. But think about this very carefully, as people did when it was a distinct possibility. You have Quebec there. The people to the north of Quebec are not French-speaking Quebecers. They’re indigenous people. And they said — and that’s where the hydroelectric power comes from, by the way — they said, “If you separate from Canada, we’re going to separate from you on the same grounds. Different language, older culture, etc.”
And Quebec said, “Oh, no, you’re not.” And they said, “Oh, yes, we are. And by the way, we happen to have a treaty with Canada that says that if any foreign power invades us, they have to defend us.” So if Quebec separates, north of Quebec separates from Quebec, Quebec invades them, Canada invades. You see what I mean?
I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.
When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.
Yes, many things are slightly - a few percent - cheaper than many other stores, per unit weight/volume, but it’s not a a big difference. Some things are more expensive though, like meat and fish. It seems “cheap” only if you do most of your other grocery shopping in premium grocery stores (eg Whole Foods). I do most of my grocery shopping in Market Basket, and it’s about the same as Costco for most things I buy. And everything comes in normal sized portions!
Costco’s real benefit is that everything they sell is pretty good stuff, and nothing is outrageously overpriced. Eg They sell Goya beans, for more per can than supermarket brand beans, but less than Goya beans in supermarkets. Many things are like this. You can assume that the things Costco sells are The Good Brands, but you can get most things cheaper if you’re not brand sensitive.
There are many things for which buying in bulk is a false economy: I will *ever again buy Costco-sized containers of eg yogurt covered raisins, or praline covered almonds! I suspect that every trip to Costco used to raise my average body weight for the next year by half a pound. Especially if I went to Costco hungry! Never go to Costco hungry!
(Not digging at you, I feel the same way you do. I just think it’s weird and amazing!)
So very Canada. Sorry!
Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
Previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676
I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…
I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!
Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.
By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.
The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.
Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!
(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.
The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.
My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
Roll of very sticky Velcro tape To mount things under desk.
A “toaster” style sata adapter: I treat it like a tape drive, clunk in a “tape” (sata or spinning disk) to back up to.
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
I like to think of this not as giving an order to the codebase, but as casting a spell.
For example, a brand new Toyota sienna XLE is a little over fifty grand. Carvana have several 21-22 siennas XLE, 40-60k miles, most over forty grand. I do not understand this.