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Suburban homeowners can use electric blowers. They're good enough now and not silent but way quieter and non-emitting. If you get the mower and trimmer and chainsaw, etc in the same system, they all share batteries. It's SO NICE not having to repair, refuel, tune, and tolerate small engines.

These tools probably aren't ready for professional landscapers yet but they're almost there.


That seems like an enormous question. Is anyone working on it?

There's experimental/nightly support for things like: `push_within_capacity()` which is a more manual way (user-space code would have to handle the return code and then increase the capacity manually if required) of trying to handle that situation.

And of course the kernel - which doesn't even use Rust's Vec but has its own entire allocator library because it is the kernel - likewise provides

https://rust.docs.kernel.org/next/kernel/alloc/kvec/struct.V...

Vec::push_within_capacity is a nice API to confront the reality of running out of memory. "Clever" ideas that don't actually work are obviously ineffective once we see this API. We need to do something with this T, we can't just say "Somebody else should ensure I have room to store it" because it's too late now. Here's your T back, there was no more space.


As a customer or a vendor, being able to see any company's health like this must be wonderful if you're evaluating whether you want to enter a relationship with them. More of the world should do this.

Do you snapshot everything into a venv to insulate from upstream changes?

No, but I probably should.

To be frank, in using it for well over a decade I think something broke only once or twice. It's pretty stable and they give plenty of deprecation warnings.


That's all fine but Microsoft is also screenshotting everything, uploading it, then selling you services, pushing ads, mining and training on your data and who knows what else. So you pay both ways.

This statement is wild hyperbole and doesn’t represent the privacy landscape of a default Windows 11 install. Even Windows Recall, an optional opt-in beta product only available on specific hardware, very clearly and specifically in its legally binding privacy policy says that data never leaves your device and is never sent to Microsoft.

Windows is paid for by OEMs. It doesn’t cost much (and it’s free for some classes of devices) but Microsoft still gets paid for it.

Don’t forget they also get paid for a lot of Windows-adjacent services. 365 subscriptions, Bing users clicking on ads, and the whole business ecosystem of Azure, Entra ID, Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 365, etc.


And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.

This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.

I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...


> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai

Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.

If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.

What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…

Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?

Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?


> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.

Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.


It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government

I assumed gas plants are pretty good in terms of air quality?

Coal plants are bad.


In the case of Grok's turbines, no emissions controls means sick people. Plus all the CO2 pushing climate collapse faster which hurts every coming generation.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...


Gas plants are not bad… but imagine 400 MW of gas plants in a concentrated area. You’ll always have NOx and SOx by products whenever you’re burning gas.

It depends on if they treat the exhaust to remove nitrogen oxides. Not sure what the standard is for this kind of plant though.

Gas is certainly less of a problem than coal, but they still produce plenty of bad stuff: nitrogen oxides and bad VOCs like formaldehyde that are well studied to increase risk of asthma and some types of cancer. I certainly wouldn’t want to live close to one.

That's some advanced gatekeeping right there. Where other appliances might have a blink code or several digit error display (Miele) to look up in a manual, the phone method tires you to the manufacturer.

The support hotline will ask you to hold your phone towards the device. It is less error-prone (than a human) and contains more info than a blink code. I find it really clever.

Sure it's clever. But it also means you can't repair the appliance without the manufacturer's server to decode it for you.

Owner of an LG washer that failed here.

All the same diagnostics you can do at the machine, the phone home service allowed a remote engineer to diagnose as well. Things like drum rpm, tilt/knock sensors, uneven balance detection. Instead of paying a human $250 to come out and press buttons, they can do it remotely.

I understand in the pessimistic age of John Deere, all remote diagnostics are bad, but that is not the case here. I was able to do all of the diagnosis myself to determine it was a bad stator and then replace it myself.


How were you able to diagnose it yourself? Just through the error codes, or is there another interface available for non-technicians?

You enter diagnostic mode on the panel, there exists a service manual which describes the process

It doesn't require a server, it just requires knowing what the codes mean, same as blinking lights.

Decoding it without help would be difficult for the average consumer, but it's not an impossible task.


The CEO quiet part out loud was very clearly: "salaries".

This will scale back when AI replacement attempts slow down as expectations temper (Salesforce, Klarna, etc).


The weird thing is that the AI companies themselves are hiring like there's no tomorrow, doing talent aquisitions etc. Why would you do that if the purpose of your product is to reduce necessary workforce?

Why isn't that the first question that comes to mind for a journalist covering the latest acquisition? It's like an open secret that nobody really talks about.


To answer your questions (I don't think it's what you wanted, but people will scratch their heads after reading them):

On reality, they are hiring because they have a lot of (investment) money. They need a lot of hardware, but they also need people to manage the hardware.

On an alternative reality where their products do what they claim, they would also hire, because people working there would be able to replace lots of people working in other jobs, and so their workers would be way more valuable than the average one, and everybody would want to buy what they create.

Journalists don't care about it because whatever they choose to believe or being paid to "believe", it's the natural way things happen.


Just to clarify: Most AI companies don't own their hardware, with a select few exceptions. That's why a handful of hyperscaler stock has rallied recently on letters of intent on large orders from AI companies. Which technically is a handful of shell companies under complete control of their parent companies, which can then take on credit without it being visible on the parent company balance sheet.

But addressing the specific question: It is still a valid. If the product sold is a 10x developer force multiplier, you'd expect to see the company fully utilizing it. Productivity would be expected to increase, rapidly, as the product matures, and independently of any acquisitions made at the same time.


Everyone is trying to be the shovel sales person for AI, not the gold diggers buying shovels.

I'm not sure if even the LLM companies themselves are selling shovels yet. I think everyone is racing to find what the shovel of LLMs are.


It was collectively decided some time ago that this particular shovel is called nVIDIA.

And memory. What I'm surprised by is that memory production isn't being scaled up since it's basically a universal part of any computing device.

That was decided when crypto mining became too expensive, I guess.

It's always about cutting the OpEx spend. Companies are nothing more than giant piles of money seeking to grow themselves in any way possible.

On December 21, 2024, about 1830 eastern standard time (EST), multiple small unmanned aircraft (sUA), experienced a loss of control and rapid descent while performing at a sUA light show at Lake Eola, Orlando, Florida. The swarm of sUA, Uvify IFO, were operated by Sky Elements LLC, doing business as (dba) Sky Elements Drone Shows. A minor child was impacted in the face and chest by a sUA and was seriously injured. A postaccident inspection revealed that numerous sUA impacted the ground and sustained substantial damage. The sUA light show was operating under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 107 and a Certificate of Waiver and Authorization issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Sometimes English is not swell as a specification format.

> ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00

Does this mean I keep the indicated section or does it mean I throw it away?

And many other examples of English sucking at ambiguity when precision matters. Maybe this is a corollary of " naming things is hard ".


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