trailee

Signal is the best thing going on in tech these days. I’m very glad it’s being led by Meredith Whittaker.

Did you know you can get a cool badge on your profile pic if you’re a recurring donor? $5 a month is far less than the value I get from it, but that’s all it takes for a cool badge (and knowing that you’re doing something active against the awful state of big tech today).

That article describes exactly what I would not want to do - subject my expensive vehicle to additional discharge/recharge cycles thereby shortening its battery’s useful life prematurely.

Lithium batteries are pretty great (except for when they catch fire and are nearly impossible to extinguish), but their performance degrades slightly with every charging cycle. You may have noticed that after a year or two your phone no longer makes it through the day without extra charging, because its total capacity is reduced.

The same thing happens with EV batteries (translating into shorter driving range) but they’re much larger and more expensive to replace. Moreover, when replaced, the old batteries are still capable of useful work with lower capacity, so it’s excessively wasteful to dump them into the hazardous e-waste stream for whatever passes as recycling.

There are companies that are collecting those used EV batteries and using them for electric grid storage, which sounds like a great way to extend their lifecycle and to acquire useful equipment at bargain basement prices. That’s what I meant about only ever seeing it at grid-scale. It would be nice if somebody sold a controller for those to be repurposed for use as energy storage for a single home, at much lower equipment cost than a brand new home battery.

There will be many more used EV batteries available in the next several years as the first wave of widely adopted electric vehicles ages out, and the oversupply should drive down their costs further.

That said, being able to use a vehicle battery as an emergency backup during a storm event is a wonderful side benefit. It’s just no substitute for a full time home battery (that’s actually connected during the day when the panels are producing, instead of being parked at work away from your house).

If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.

Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.

I remember discovering MetaCrawler in the 90s (before Google was even founded) and it quickly became the go-to search engine because its aggregate results were superior to any of the other options at the time. I don’t think its source mix was tunable, but that sounds like appropriate progress for 30 years.

but translation certainly isn’t [done on device]

Google Translate has downloadable language packs and runs on device, including offline in foreign countries without roaming data. Including the live video OCR and replacement.

That’s not to say that what you experienced isn’t creepy, but it’s not necessarily cloud-driven.

That is certainly one of the conclusions in The Man Who Killed Google Search.

But you can no longer be sure you’re getting unsponsored human opinions there. It’s already been ruined by bots and management decisions. Seems totally fair for the original content generators to salt the earth on their way out.

There’s also the possibility of adding to the wonderful irony of making the AI more useful than the original by having content that’s no longer accessible through through the original. It doesn’t get more enshittified than that, even if Prashanth Chandrasekar is too out of touch to ever regret his decision.

It’s true that it’s mostly a symbolic act, but the rebellion matters, especially from old accounts. It’s also a nice way to mark the time after which I never participated in SO again. After my ban expires, I’ll deface my questions again. And again. Until they permaban me.

They seem to only be watching the questions right now. You’re automatically prevented from deleting an accepted answer, but if you answered your own question (maybe because SO was useless for certain niche questions a decade ago so you kept digging and found your own solution), you can unaccept your answer first and then delete it.

I got a 30 day ban for “defacing” a few of my 10+ year old questions after moderators promptly reverted the edits. But they seem to have missed where I unaccepted and deleted my answers, even as they hang out in an undeletable state (showing up red for me and hidden for others).

And comments, which are a key part to properly understanding a lot of almost-correct answers, don’t seem to be afforded revision history or to have deletes noticed by moderators.

So it seems like you can still delete a bunch of your content, just not the questions. Do with that what you will.