Yeah, I was thinking of the same study. Looking at just the conversation on HN, lots of people are installing solar. Solar reduces the amount of energy used by that customer, but does not lower the cost of infrastructure to distribute power to that customer at all. And the cost of electricity is dominated by distribution and transmission, not generation. With an increased share of costs going to overhead infrastructure, the cost per watt goes up. Higher consumption increases the share of costs due to generation, and cost per watt goes down.
"Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise."
Which is why cheap batteries will be the camel that broke the straw's back. It's really hard to find numbers, but I like 20–30$/kwh by 2030. At those prices I can get a 4 day backup for an oversized (50kw) solar panel install for my house for 20k$. Why even hook up to the grid, at all?
I pay for Premium, and have for several years now. The Lite version is not what anyone wanted. I want no ads on YouTube, without also paying for YouTube Music (which I never use). If $8/month still gets me random ads on some videos, it’s no good. I’m sure their thought was people would turn the normal YouTube app into their music player, but I’m not so sure. Eliminating background play from Lite may solve that well enough. I’d be fine with that as a compromise. I watch a lot of music related content on YouTube that isn’t stuff I’d just listen to in a music app, that I think would get caught my the music filter. On the Apple TV, videos it thinks are music don’t show comments (even when there are comments on the website). I assume all those videos would get ads on the Lite subscription, and there are a lot of them.
I’ve tried cancelling my subscription, thinking it would make me watch less YouTube. I didn’t last 48 hours. The ads were too annoying and I signed back up.
YouTube music isn't really a different service rather than a different YouTube app. Under the hood YouTube music is just YouTube with a music player UI. Taking it away wouldn't really lower the cost much.
That's part of the problem with YouTube Music. I tried to use it, but having music playlists clutter up my video playlists is pretty terrible, among other things.
I find it hard to justify paying for 2 music streaming services, so I cancelled Apple Music, because I'm paying for YouTube Music through Premium. However, I don't like it, so I'm back to manually managing a local music library in Apple's Music app. This is probably a better long-term approach than renting access to a music library on a monthly basis.
Can I ask what you mean by "having music playlists clutter up my video playlists? I use YT music (along with my local music library) specifically because it uses YouTube content - which means that all sorts of live / niche / otherwise hard to find music is there. However, my YouTube music playlists are not visible on "regular YouTube".
I made playlists in YouTube Music, and when I went to save videos to playlists on YouTube, it would show everything. Without making some kind of naming convention with prefixes, it was hard to know what was from YouTube Music and what was from YouTube. I just had to remember, which gets harder as the number of playlists increased. This dissuaded me from using more than 1 or 2 playlists, which limited the overall value of the service.
That may be their internal justification, but due to their marketing, it feels like I’m forced to buy two things, when I only ever wanted one. This is why people have been asking for a YouTube Premium Lite, and what they delivered isn’t what anyone asking really wanted.
I understand what you’re saying, but the point still stands. YouTube has positioned this as a 2 for 1 value, that people don’t see value in. The optics are bad. It might be technically valid, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to consumer sentiment, especially when YouTube itself framed it this way.
I had YouTube Lite for a couple years. They sent me an email saying it was being discontinued in my country. I had always been watching with an Ad Blocker. The main difference now is that they refuse to accept the money I am willing to pay them.
Interstella 5555 is still one of my favorite movies. It's an anime movie where the entire soundtrack is the album Discovery. There are no vocals, the entire story is told by only the animation and music, and it works incredibly well.
Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem for the first time was an astonishing thing with that soundtrack..
Back then wasn’t really into DP, but that sold me entirely..
Freedom of speech, in the other hand, is part of a moral code that believes in inalienable rights, that humans implicitly have the right to express themselves. The government does not grant the right to freedom of speech, because we already have it. The first amendment says that the government must respect that right, but creating the right.
I was looking for a more direct measure of this, how often a model "leaked" private state into public state. In a game like this you probably want to sometimes share secrets, but if it happens constantly I would suspect the model struggles to differentiate.
I occasionally try to ask a model to tell a story and give it a hidden motivation of a character, and so far the results are almost always the model just straight out saying the secret.
Yup, that's the problem I run into. You give it some lore to draw on or describe a character or give them some knowledge, and it'll just blurt it out when it finds a place for it. It takes a lot of prompting to get it to stop, and I haven't found a consistent method that works across models (or even across sessions).
FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.
Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years previously.
I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID happened shortly after so that also throws a wrench into the comparisons.
The point is, it's hard to point to any particular decisions or changes I disliked and say "IBM did that"
I do miss having Jim Whitehurst around. Jim spent 90 minutes on the Wednesday afternoon of my New Hire Orientation week with my cohort helping to make sure all of us could login to email and chat, answering questions, telling a couple short stories. He literally helped build the Red Hat culture starting at New Hire. Kind of magical when the company is an 11K person global business and doing 5B in revenue.
Cormier and Hicks have their strengths. Hicks in particular seems to care about cultural shifts and also seems adept at identifying key times and places to invest in engineering efforts.
The folks we have imported from IBM are hiring folks that are attempting to make Red Hat more aggressive, efficient, innovative. Some bets are paying off. More are to be decided soon. These kinds of bets and changes haven’t been for everyone.
>The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes.
Longtime Red Hatter here. Most of any challenges I see at Red Hat around culture I attribute to this rapid growth. In some ways it's surprising how well so many relatively new hires seem to internalize the company's traditional values.
Yeah, when I left I think there were something like 7x the number of people than when I joined. You can't run those two companies the same way no matter who is in charge.
Very. Election officials, across states and across parties, have been faithfully discharging their duties, often under pressure to not do so. This is a responsibility of the states, and not the federal government. If you're concerned, then work as a poll officer on election day.
In Virginia, I get to participate an incredibly professional and structured process that makes it easy for everyone who can vote to vote and makes sure there are many checks that the process is being followed correctly.
Meanwhile the SAVE act is working it's way through congress. This bill has language that seems to prevent a lot of people from voting:
Women who changed thier last name to their husband's.
Naturalized citizens who come from places where the language requires non ascii characters.
Anyone without a passport.
Anyone from a place where the courthouse burned down taking thier original birth certificates with it... Copies don't count.
To name tens of millions. Maybe trump will interpret the law in a way that lets people vote, or maybe he'll decide that correct interpretation is to limit voting to people more likely to vote for his third term.
> Maybe trump will interpret the law in a way that lets people vote, or maybe he'll decide that correct interpretation is to limit voting to people more likely to vote for his third term.
Trump doesn't execute those laws, though. The states do, as they are in charge of running elections. Certainly Trump's DoJ could bring lawsuits against states that don't comply in the way Trump wants them to, but it's far from certain that the courts (even Trump's stacked SCOTUS) will agree with Trump's interpretations.
Federal laws and guidelines for voting must be followed by the states. I don't see this changing with this act. For example - the voting rights act of 1965 is a federal law that states must comply with for elections. This is what the constitution has to say about it for congress:
> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators
For president it just says states will send electors chosen by the state legislature. This has been the source of immense fuckery for decades... state legislatures often want to ignore the popular vote and just send their party's electors and it's unclear how the current court would sway if that actually happens (particularly if the state's constitution doesn't bind their legislature to send electors based on the popular vote). Further, federal laws like the voting rights act have often been held to apply to presidential election as well as congress.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This administration is already much more aggressive and corrupt than the previous go around. Trump has been abundantly clear that he does not like or respect democracy and he might very well have the power to end it now. Congress's authority is already being usurped in blatant ways and they are openly talking about not following court orders. If they completely toss the courts aside and survive the resulting backlash (very likely) our system of government as we know it is over.
The conditions for this are being set as we watch. Dictators always prize loyalty above competence, which is exactly what our current leader is doing.
I don't doubt that nearly everyone involved in managing our recent elections are conscientious and professional, but what are they going to do if a bunch of troops with guns show up to change the results?
On the other hand, the popular power of the GOP is currently concentrated around a single person, someone who is also the oldest person to ever start a presidential term, and who does not lead a particularly healthy lifestyle. There is every chance that "What will Trump do during the 2028 election?" will be a question resolved by time and nature.
There is no one waiting in the wings to take over popularly if this happens. Previous people who have at various times looked like they might, have fallen mightily from grace in the eyes of the party, such as DeSantis.
It all falls apart without Trump. And Trump is an old man, doing a stressful job.
The confusing thing about this is that Trump himself isn't the problem when it comes to actual policy. The Project 2025 stuff is not from Trump's head. He has nowhere near enough domain knowledge to build a policy document like that.
The current problem is that Trump is happy to implement the policies that all these hard-right lunatics have come up with. It's not like Trump writes those executive orders. He just agrees with them and signs them.
Certainly Trump is a problem. He's the one that has united the party around this horrifying agenda, and who is amenable to letting others like Musk dismantle the federal government. The question, after Trump is gone, is if there is anyone else that can motivate the party to vote for someone who will continue to do things The Trump Way (that is, let other, smarter people do things).
I don't know. Like you say, people like DeSantis seemed to have a shot for a bit, but they've fallen out of favor. But it's unclear if these people need another Trump, or if someone with even half of his weird... charisma... will do.
(All of this is of course the standard hypocrisy: Trump and his cronies run on the whole "drain the swamp", "eliminate the deep state" nonsense. But of course Trump just immediately installs a different unelected deep state to run things.)
> The question, after Trump is gone, is if there is anyone else that can motivate the party to vote for someone who will continue to do things The Trump Way (that is, let other, smarter people do things).
And I think the answer is no.
You're correct, that none of the policy being pushed through comes from Trump. It comes from various other people who are using Trump as a vehicle for their legislation.
But that doesn't really matter, because Trump didn't run on policy. He ran on force of personality.
I don't think anyone else will be able to strike quite the same balance Trump does, once he's gone. They'll either lean too hard into the policy stuff, which will backfire, or they'll lean too hard into the personality stuff, which leads to broadly unpopular people like Marjorie Taylor Green.
I think the only reason that Trump was/is as successful as he is, is that he has spent literal decades being in the news for something-or-other. By having headlines about him pop up every so often since the 1980s, he managed to engrain himself into the public consciousness in a way that let him then win the 2016 election, and everything since then.
Without that history, the immediate name recognition by everyone, I don't think the 2016 primary would have looked remotely like it did. And I don't think there's anyone else with that institutional name recognition waiting in the wings.
Surrendering work to the public domain is actually more complicated. It's easy to make the claim that a work is public domain, but the law may not allow you to actually relinquish all copyright claims. This also depends on which country you are in.
"Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise."