in my case: 3k at most for a replacement gas furnace, and heat pumps would require new wirings as well. Many things would need to break at once to make it worth considering when you have older homes
New homes with mandated PV and battery, that's another story.
Where I live every house has the wiring for AC anyway, so a heat pump only needs a different valve in the system you will always have (this is about $50 in parts, but they charge thousands extra for it)
I paid for it anyway - my furnace was 50 years old (probably 60% efficient when new), and I have no idea how bad the AC was. That said, for less money I added more insulation to my house and that has a better ROI. (unfortunately the design of the house doesn't allow for even more insulation even though I could save a lot more if it could be done)
Yeah, because you allegedly consented to them being able to update your ECUs via the mobile link in the cars when you bought the car.
As if I needed another reason to keep my 2014 skoda.
If i ever have to get a new car, i will disable telemetry, and i will buy it either without telemetry, or with the agreement that i do not consent to telemetry.
(read the fine print before getting a new car. the shit they can do that can go wrong and you have to pay for.. no wonder old cars cost as much as new ones.)
I assure you that “old cars costing as much as new ones” isn’t the result of the market force of people reading contractual fine print and/or freaking out about telemetry. Concentric circles of echo chambers over here.
The main reason is more tangible to people. It is more reliability and simplicity. For instance the Toyota Tundra used to have a V8 that was pretty bomb proof. But over the years, manufacturers put in more efficient but more prone to problems turbocharged smaller engines. The bearing clearances went down, thinner oil then can be used which is also more efficient. But the margin for error when you are putting what used to be a performance engine in a car is much smaller and there have been issues. As car prices have gone up, people value a time tested drivetrain. There have been a lot of problematic CVT transmissions too.
The Chinese government banned Tesla vehicles from entering (Chinese) military bases. This is due to the prolific number of cameras streaming live video to a hostile (to China) organization/government. One can find blogposts by analysts who show that the upload stream from Tesla vehicles includes cabin audio.
I’m not worried even a lick about what cars cost electronics or otherwise. My primary factor in selecting a vehicle is my physical safety; after that it’s electronic surveillance.
> I have never met anyone in real life that's concerned about telemetry on their car
You mean you've never had a conversation about it. You can't know if you've met somebody that has that concern unless you've broached the subject explicitly.
1. get a _real_, unabridged service manual. that takes some darkweb experience nowadays.
2. identify anything that looks like capable of housing a cell modem. that takes some understanding of contemporary car electronics
3. deny RF interface to units identified. that takes some understanding what RF = radio frequency interface is and also getting rid of fear of disassembling significant portions of your car.
That is the least of your troubles. SOS is the telemetry you wanted to get rid of in the first place.
And chances are you would have to get rid of 2/3 or more of oem electronics.
It'll end up a prototype vehicle or something, with custom ECU and stuff. On the bright side it will belong to you and not to the some mckinsey guys running those insurances and whatnot. It has been done too, although I personally prefer to just use vehicles that do not require this level of effort.
The other day there was a thread on unclouded tractors what I missed and I must tell I love my Universal 445 made in Romania in 1989. For all its quirks, it just gets the job done, no connectivity, no nothing, it's an unbreakable 3-cylinder diesel that just works.
It works depending on the manufacturer. Honda places the TPU in the dash behind the head unit. Use some spudgers and you can disconnect and remove the TPU. Takes 15 minutes at most.
dash cams are local and pointing at the road, not everywhere.
body cams are local and mostly used by law enforcement to guarantee they are not abusing their power.
glassholes are connected to the cloud. you may have the right to record on public space, i have the right to remain anonymous in the crowd and not be constatly targeted by an advertisement company.
Even if 1% of the corner cases are legit uses (blind people having the glasses describe the world around them is fantastic.) 99% of the people using them are assholes that deserve to be put in the ground and the glasses smashed.
you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.
> twenty years
When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.
I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.
I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.
But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
Not only this, but the benefit of SMR is based on the possibility that they can be mass-produced at low cost. Until that happens, the benefit doesn’t exist. Solar and batteries and wind have already passed that threshold, but cheap mass-produced SMRs don’t exist yet, even if someone can point to a couple of expensive, bespoke SMRs.
It doesn’t really matter if people on HN or Reddit are in favor of nuclear. At the end of the day, nuclear will get built if someone thinks the cost is worth it over the alternatives. The Internet fan club is mostly irrelevant.
That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
I am surprised that this is the case after reading how Orban was behaving on the matter of its oil and gas sources. I guess the big problem is that the economy and heating is still very fossil dependent ?
> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout)
There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal
Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.
Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.
Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.
Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.
Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.
> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.
This sounds like good advice so upvoted. I’m a big fan of Raymond Hill¹’s products so I am curious about how much benefit Adguard provides if uBlock Origin is already blocking online trackers, ads and other annoyances.
¹ In this case, the developer – not the musician. I really liked the user interface of uMatrix.
It’s really nice to have ad and tracker domains blocked systemwide though I think you need to be more careful and set your device up as supervised to have more robust blocking (real always-on VPN functionality vs. best effort?).
And even then when I read about defects in Apple software that means a firewall like Little Snitch isn’t perfect (macOS) I think an external device (mobile VPN router?) is going to be essential for some threat models.
I can see how system-wide blocking would be useful. I’m personally very conservative and wary about apps that I install on my iPhone (I don’t use any ad-supported apps) so the browser is the “attack surface” that I’m most concerned about.
I already use uBlock Origin and iCloud Private Relay (as advised in your original post). I also use Private Browser tabs and regularly remove all “Website Data” from Safari (minor inconvenience in that I have to re-login to sites that I have an account on).
I’ve just installed AdGuard on my iPhone to try it out but see that the DNS protection requires a Premium subscription (it now occurs to me that I could possibly install Wireguard to connect to my VPS where I’m already running my own DNS server). I’ve also `never looked into supervised mode; I always assumed it wasn’t relevant for personal devices.
I’m a Firefox user myself but there are some very valid arguments against it on Android as well. Firefox on Android is significantly more vulnerable to exploits, lacks internal sandboxing and doesn’t properly isolate tabs from each other.
That's not totally true. Orion supports Chrome/FF WebExtensions, for example. The engine does (practically, even in the EU) have to be WebKit, but that's not the same thing as a "Safari skin."
There is Reynard if you're motivated too (Gecko-based, but it's not ready for prime time yet, and to get good performance you'll have to resort to some workaround to get JIT enabled, as it does not rely on Apple's BrowserEngineKit; one of the goals of the project is giving to not up-to-date iOS devices access to a modern browser).
This is one of the reasons i never used LLMs for anything related to coding. And i never intend to do.
If i tell the thing to generate, will it generate the same thing, every time? will it change stuff that is working because the random number generator will conjure a slightly different answer?
i'd be ok with it if i was generating a picture of X, or some word salad about Y, but not for code. Never for code.
You'll learn to work around it, just like ML practitioners got used to imprecise math in regards to floats. But that LLMs are using imprecise math and doesn't have 100% reproducible output doesn't make them impossible to work with, just a bit harder.
But, if what you're doing right now works for you, do continue as-is if you so wish, I have no stake in if people use LLMs or not, just hope people make choices based on good information :)
> If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate
I can promise you it won't happen in a million years. More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work.. Or at least we have decades of data proving that is what realistically happen.
So the only way to reduce emissions is either using carbon neutral sources (gas is... not?) or forbidding people from using energy in the first place (and let's be honest, that will not happen.)
That is a tough sell in the current environment. It's a regressive tax, so opposed on both ends of the political spectrum. People on the far right don't believe in climate change, and people on the far left don't believe in market efficiency. With 20% of the world's oil flow crimped in the Strait of Hormuz for who knows how long, higher energy prices is the last thing people want to contemplate.
In the longer run, a carbon tax is the best option. The fossil fuel price shock is a strong signal to produce energy through other means. There are major engineering initiatives around developing cheaper and safer nuclear energy. and it's cheaper now to deploy a solar farm than a coal plant.
A carbon tax would raise money to pay off national debts and encourage consumers and producers to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish their needs while minimizing their carbon footprint. It's a tough sell today, but this is they way to go for a better quality of life tomorrow.
they are not providing me a vehichle that is as good and as convenient as my 12yo diesel station wagon. if 8 years ago - when i bought it - it cost 90% of my then income, the same model/trim now costs 110% of my current yearly income. Consider that in the meantime i've doubled my income.
For the same reason, the equivalent EV is completely out of the question, but i'd rather get an hybrid.
Even at current diesel prices i see no reason to get in debt to change a perfectly good car that has at least 100k to 150k km left to give.
Make simillar reasoning for switching heating from natural gas to heat pumps. Most houses in my area are not insulated for it, nor the climate is well suited, material and electricity cost too much to recoup the investment without heavy subsidies (and you pay for them indirectly anyway)
And in the end, judging by our energy mix, electricity would be generated by petrol and natural gas so what's the point. A bit more efficiency for my extreme inconvenience?
I'd rather have them build some nuke reactors, that will really make a difference.
>More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work..
But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.
> But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world?
Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
If you include all the emissions that prop up the highest per capita consumption patterns on the planet then you see the highest per capita emissions attached to the highest consumers.
>Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
That does increase US's emissions, but not enough to change the conclusion:
New homes with mandated PV and battery, that's another story.
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