twice as fast as Tesla’s.

Also, BYD’s CEO presumably isn’t presently involved in trying to set his brand on fire.

They’re establishing communities here because reddit (where the community mostly started) can censor or ban their community at any moment. The fediverse offers a lot more protection from censorship.

And yet…no icon for us!

The inscription was added by Americans, wasn’t actually from the French. Though, yeah, Trump is probably pretty high on the list of Presidents that clash with it.

In both series I think the first book is the best

Yeah, the Hitchhiker’s Guide series starts out with dark humor, sure, but…it’s still irreverent and kind of done in a light-hearted way. But that series gets grimmer and grimmer the further one goes, and I just found myself not enjoying myself by the end of it. I don’t understand people who love the whole series. I just found it wearing to read towards the end.

That and the Dune series are my own top “love the first book, but the series goes downhill over the course of the series” series.

EDIT: Calvin and Hobbes did the same thing. I love a ton of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, but man, in his last few books-worth of material, Bill Watterson was not happy and his cartoons were just cynical and unhappy too.

Hmm.

I think maybe Illusion, by Paula Volsky, which I read many years back. She does books that basically take real-life revolutions and then do historical fantasy in a lowish-magic world version of them. Illusion was the French Revolution.

I haven’t read it in ages, but I decided that it was my favorite novel at some point, and never really had another come along that I think quite replaced it. I don’t know for sure if I’d rate it as highly now, but I remember being absolutely entranced with it. She’s got other books that do similar things for other revolutions, but that was my favorite.

George R. R. Martin’s fantasy stuff is also low-magic, and I like it. Think it might have been the last time I read any fantasy.

I’ve probably read Snow Crash, cyberpunk by Neal Stephenson, the most over the years. But while it has a lot that I like, it’s also got some pacing issues, albeit not as severe as some of his other novels — I think that stepping between action scenes and someone talking about ancient Sumerian linguistics that Stephenson researched is kind of jarring.

My fiction book reading has really fallen off over the years.

My favorite comic book…I don’t know about a single comic book. I guess the Sandman graphic novel series, by Neal Gaiman.

I’ve done much more nonfiction reading in recent years. For nonfiction…I don’t know. That seems so dependent on what it is that you want to find out about. I think I’d have a hard time ranking books by purely content-independent aspects. How do I compare a book on Native American primitive looms and weaving techniques to a book on Cold War-era submarine designs?

One thing I would keep in mind is that the Win64 API does change from release-to-release and that my guess is that if very few people using a software package are still using a version of Windows, application software developers may stop intentionally avoiding newer API calls and features, and will just have their new release require a newer version of Windows.

That may be okay for some use cases, like if you just want to keep an existing system working with existing software. But I think that it’s worth keeping in mind that you may increasingly not be able to use:

• New software packages.

• Newer releases of existing packages.

• Software packages that make use of cloud-based services that drop support.

• New hardware that requires software support.

They’re probably going to take into account the percentage of people using the thing in setting their compatibility targets for developers and their testing.

Windows 11 is the most secure Windows ever built, with comprehensive end-to-end security

Does “end-to-end security” actually mean anything in this context, or is it just intended to evoke “end-to-end encryption”?

Yeah, that’s probably a fair answer for some folks and systems. Depends on what your system is doing, your risk tolerance, and what money you’re willing to put into the thing.

If I didn’t have a backup system in place, say, that’d be much higher on my list than trying to ensure power isn’t cut off unexpectedly during power outages.

Some left-wing French legislator did. Had a post about on [email protected] or somewhere like that, saw it recently.

“Absolutely not. My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a press briefing Monday, likely referencing an American-French allyship during World War II that snuffed out Nazi Germany. “They should be grateful.”

Ehhh…maybe yes, maybe no. It’s not clear to me that the Allies lose, even if it’s just the UK and USSR as the major powers.

The US provided aid prior to, but didn’t enter the war directly until after Pearl Harbor (and in Nazi Germany’s case, the direct factor was the German declaration of war on the US a few days later). At that point:

• Nazi Germany’s attempt to reach the preconditions for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of the UK, had already failed, as it had lost the Battle of Britain, the air war over the UK. Forcing the UK into a surrender would then require winning the Battle of the Atlantic, successfully blockading the UK.

• Nazi Germany’s attempt to knock out the USSR at one go, Operation Barbarossa, had also failed immediately before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Time was not on Hitler’s side, as his advantage was earlier preparation. The Soviet Union had been hurt, yes, but wasn’t out of the fight. An additional problem for Nazi Germany was that Operation Barbarossa had caused the Soviet Union to stop permitting supplies to Germany through; prior to that, the Soviet Union had been a route to circumvent the Blockade of Germany.

Had the Allies won, it would have been a considerably-more-unpleasant-for-them fight than was the case in our own timeline, but it’s possible that the Axis had already bit off more than it could chew by mid-1941.

I’d think that a larger issue might be whether the Soviet Union winds up taking control of Western Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Union_(alliance)

The Western Union (WU), also referred to as the Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO),[1] was the European military alliance established between France, the United Kingdom (UK) and the three Benelux countries in September 1948 in order to implement the Treaty of Brussels signed in March the same year.[Note 1] Under this treaty the signatories, referred to as the five powers, agreed to collaborate in the defence field as well as in the political, economic and cultural fields.

When the division of Europe into two opposing camps became unavoidable, the threat of the Soviet Union became much more important than the threat of German rearmament.[8] Western Europe, therefore, sought a new mutual defence pact involving the United States, a powerful military force for such an alliance. The United States, concerned with containing the influence of the Soviet Union, was responsive.[9] Secret meetings began by the end of March 1949 between American, Canadian and British officials to initiate the negotiations that led to the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949 in Washington, D.C.[10]

The need to back up the commitments of the North Atlantic Treaty with appropriate political and military structures led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). On 20 December 1950 the Consultative Council of the Brussels Treaty Powers decided to merge the military organisation of the Western Union into NATO.

I agree that it’s less-critical than it was at one point. Any modern filesystem, including ext4 and btrfs, isn’t at risk of filesystem-level corruption, and a DBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL should handle it at an application level. That being said, there is still other software out there that may take issue with being interrupted. Doing an apt upgrade is not guaranteed to handle power loss cleanly, for example. And I’m not too sanguine about hardware not being bricked if I lose power during an fwupd updating the firmware on attached hardware. Maybe a given piece of hardware has a safe, atomic upgrade procedure…and maybe it doesn’t.

That does also mean, if there’s no power backup at all, that one won’t have the system available for the duration of the outage. That may be no big deal, or might be a real pain.

Yeah, I listed it as one possibility, maybe the best I can think of, but also why I’ve got some issues with that route, why it wouldn’t be my preferred route. Maybe it is the best generally available right now.

The “just use a UPS plus a second system” route makes a lot of sense with diesel generator systems, because there the hardware physically cannot come up to speed in time. A generator cannot start in 10ms, so you need a flywheel or battery or some other kind of energy-storage system in place to bridge the gap…but that shouldn’t be a fundamental constraint on those home large-battery backup systems. They don’t have to be equipped with an inverter able to come online in 10ms…but they could. In the generator scenario, it’s simply not an option.

I’d like to, if possible, have the computer have a “unified” view of all of the backing storage systems. In the generator case, the “time remaining” is a function of the fuel in the tank, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not uncommon for someone to be able to have some kind of secondary storage that couldn’t be measured; I remember reading about a New Orleans employee in Hurricane Katrina that stayed behind to keep the datacenter functioning mostly hauling drums of diesel up the stairs to the generator. But that’s not really a fundamental issue with those battery backup systems, not unless someone is planning on hauling more batteries in.

If one gets a UPS and then backs it with a battery backup system, then there are two sets of batteries — one often lead-acid, with a shorter lifespan — and multiple inverters and battery charge controllers in multiple layers in the system. That’s not the end of the world, a “throw some extra money at it” issue, but one is having to get redundant hardware.

One thing I’ve always found funny though is that if we have AI’s that can replace programmers then don’t we also, by definition, have AI’s that can create AI’s?

Well, first, I wouldn’t say that existing generative AIs can replace a programmer (or even do that great a job at assisting one, increasing productivity). I do think that there’s potentially an unexplored role for creating an LLM-based “grammar checker” for code, which may be a larger win in doing debugging work that would normally require a human.

But, okay, set that aside – let’s say that we imagine that we have an AI in 2025 that can serve as a drop-in replacement for a programmer, can translate plain English instructions into a computer program as well as a programmer could. That still doesn’t get us to the technological singularity, because that probably involves also doing a lot of research work. Like, you can find plenty of programmers who can write software…but so far, none of them have made a self-improving AGI. :-)

I’ll add one other point that might affect people running low-power servers, which I believe some people here are running for low-compute-load stuff like home automation: my past experience is that low-end, low power computers often have (inexpensive) power supplies that are especially intolerant of wall power issues. I have had multiple consumer broadband routers and switches that have gotten into a wonky, manual-reboot-requiring state after brownouts or power loss, even when other computers in the house continued to function without issue. I’d guess that those might be particularly-sensitive to a longer delay in changing over to a backup power source. I would guess that Raspberry Pi-class machines might have power supplies vulnerable to this. I suppose that for devices with standard barrel connectors and voltage levels, one could probably find a more-expensive power supply that can handle dirtier power.

If you run some form of backup power system that powers them, have you had issues with Raspberry Pis or consumer internet routers after power outages?

While laptop batteries may not have aged well, especially if they’re left discharged, one other nice perk is that laptops effectively have an integrated UPS.

The one time I went to Pride I was disappointed with how it was basically a bunch of corporate advertisements.

If you’re selling a product aimed at a gay crowd, aside from profile-driven, targeted online advertising, how many better venues are you going to have to promote your stuff?

Most Pride events that I think that I’ve seen images of are done in public areas in cities — kind of the point of them — and so whoever wants can do whatever.

thinks

I don’t think I’ve seen ads at Burning Man. Might be that they have restrictions on them.

kagis

Yup.

https://survival.burningman.org/rules-and-regulations/commerce-concessions/

Logos & branding

Black Rock City is a decommodified zone where branding is not welcome. Advertising? Hell no. Launching a product? Not in Black Rock City. Burning Man is not a place to promote your business, website, or product.

It’d be possible to go organize something like that in a controlled environment, I think. But if the point of a Pride parade is to increase visibility among the wider population, going to such a controlled environment seems like it’d be kind of counterproductive.

there will absolutely be gays and trans people.

True, homosexuality isn’t going away. However, while I would rate it as quite unlikely, I could imagine a world where sodomy laws returned, social norms changed, and homosexuality became a taboo again. There have been places and times in human history where the acceptability of homosexuality have varied quite a bit. I don’t think that social norms on homosexuality are really tightly linked to technology or something where there’s a clear “arrow” driving in one direction over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality

Societal attitudes towards same-sex relationships have varied over time and place. Attitudes to male homosexuality have varied from requiring males to engage in same-sex relationships to casual integration, through acceptance, to seeing the practice as a minor sin, repressing it through law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, and to proscribing it under penalty of death. In addition, it has varied as to whether any negative attitudes towards men who have sex with men have extended to all participants, as has been common in Abrahamic religions, or only to passive (penetrated) participants, as was common in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Female homosexuality has historically been given less acknowledgment, explicit acceptance, and opposition.

Homosexuality was generally accepted in many ancient and medieval eastern cultures such as those influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.[1][2] Homophobia in the eastern world is often discussed in the context of being an import from the western world,[3][4] with some contending that definitions of “progress” on homosexuality (e.g. LGBT rights) as being Western-centric.[5]

I mean, that’s a patchwork at any point in time, and one that hasn’t changed in a single direction over time.

Like, the Powerwall things? Yeah, sure, they’re in the same sort of class. I think — not gonna go looking through all of 'em — that the things I linked to above all are intended to have someone plug devices directly into them, and the Powerwalls get wired into the electrical panel, but same basic idea. They aren’t really devices where energy density matters all that much, because once you put the battery somewhere, it probably isn’t going to move much after that.

If people want to get one for the hell of it, I’m not going to stand in their way, but I really don’t think that this product plays well to the strength of sodium-ion batteries.

My understanding is that sodium-ion batteries are not as energy-dense, but are expected to be cheaper per-kilowatt-hour than lithium-based batteries.

But this is a small, very-expensive-relative-to-storage-capacity, portable battery.

I’d think that sodium-ion batteries would be more interesting for things like an alternative to this sort of thing — large-capacity, mostly-non-moved-around batteries used for home backup during power outages, stuff like that. Maybe grid buffering.

Don’t connect your Roku to the internet.

I thought that Roku was some kind of streaming service to a device. Doesn’t that need to be Internet-connected to function?

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku

Ah. Apparently that’s what they originally did, but they’ve also subsequently come out with smart TVs, which I assume can operate without an Internet connection.