azertyfun

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[–] azertyfun 1 points 2 months ago

I was thinking of other countries where the billing system has only variable fees. Which used to work when you didn't have many people who are dependent on the grid but have a (almost) net zero power bill.

[–] azertyfun 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yes power usage is constantly predicted by utilities. Production must match consumption exactly at every moment. This means weather forecasting is an essential part of managing a power grid, and doubly so with intermittent renewables.

I think the local overloading has something to do with transformers not being able to handle the massive local overproduction. It's not just power not being consumed, it's power being injected into the grid.

[–] azertyfun 0 points 2 months ago (7 children)

It's only fine because the panels do not do much of anything.

When large swaths of the population become even partially self-sufficient, it's an enormous issue for the electric grid. Again, not an issue over an occasional few hundred watts, but when whole neighborhoods cover their roofs in solar panels the following happens:

  • These (comparatively rich) people stop contributing to maintaining the grid. Half of electricity costs are distribution costs, so unless you have no net metering and a separate distribution line in your bill the rich are being subsidized by the poor to install solar capacity at home. Of course changing the billing system fixes that, but it also makes solar much less financially interesting and really pisses off people who already paid for solar and now won't be having a positive ROI for an additional decade.
  • The panels are not remotely operable so their aggregate power generation sometimes causes enormous stress on the rest of the grid, forcing old nuclear/gas/coal PP to spin up and down much more quickly and frequently than they were designed for.
  • Locally the voltage fluctuations may be very large. Nominal where I live is 230 V, but it's not unheard of for rich neighborhoods to be pushing 250 V on very sunny days. Then the inverters shut down automatically, but it's always whoever happens to have the most sensitive inverter who ends up not being paid on sunny days.

Anyways apartment solar is not really the issue here, it's the people with 10+ panels. But there are good reasons for solar to be heavily regulated.

[–] azertyfun 3 points 2 months ago

There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

[–] azertyfun 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wait until you learn about debhelper.

If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about "bloat" or "KISS".

DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I've had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

[–] azertyfun 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

To summarize:

  • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that's only around 1/3 total.
  • The reason the left proclaimed they "won" is they came "first" and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the "hard right" (welp)
  • That, in isolation (!), isn't antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can't work otherwise.
  • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I'm not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn't going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.
[–] azertyfun 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

[–] azertyfun 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn't invent slang. Also "skibbidy rizz" is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized "rizz", but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say "rizz" don't even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn't even linked to the internet particularly. It's just a contraction of "charisma", hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.

Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making "cool" cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike "cool" aren't cool anymore.

Your generation had "WMDs" but I'm sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase "Spanish flu" like we did "COVID". The more things change the more they stay the same.

And how can we forget "OK" whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave "Oll Korrect" (what's for sure is that "okay" came after "OK"). Now "OK" is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it's not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.

People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or "used to be less crazy" is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don't understand.

[–] azertyfun 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That's just recency bias.

The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.

Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.

And let's not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn't in Latin.

Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That's it.

[–] azertyfun 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

[–] azertyfun -2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That's... not a war crime is. I don't want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that's fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there's not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

[–] azertyfun -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

I'm as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that's like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it's not like there's a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks... How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

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