LOL

See also !buyfromeu@feddit.org.

The complete non-sequitur link really makes it. chef’s kiss

Damn, lol

I do understand being rigorous about questions, and technical forums were even worse a lot of the time, but SO’s methods led to the site becoming severely outdated. They really should have introduced a mechanism to mark old content as outdated. It should have been obvious like 10 years ago that solutions often stop working come next major version of the programming language, framework or operating system.

TBH asking questions on SO (and most similar platforms) fucking sucks, no surprise that users jump at the first opportunity at getting answers another way.

How does AI actually improve their financial position? Who pays them to use AI?

I probably would, if the organizational structure and its spending focus(es) weren’t so fucked up. They have been spending insane amounts of money on bullshit like AI instead of core browser features, and their leadership has extremely high wages for something that should be a non-profit open source organization. And it has been like this for years at this point.

Signal had a Linux app for years.

WhatsApp might not have a Linux app, but I don’t use it on my phone, either. Fuck Meta.

When I switched from Windows to Linux, I was already primarily using open source applications, so I wasn’t missing out on much.

I think there’s also an issue that many people got radicalized through internet rabbitholes and the like in recent years. I assume you need to already have some compatible views, but there’s a big difference between “a bit racist” and “full on nazi”. It’s a matter of which tendencies get reinforced and what biased information you’re being fed - many of those people who were a bit racist 15 years ago could have went the completely opposite direction if they had been fed different content.

To me, the most astounding part of this is that the state is ruled by the CDU, Germany’s big conservative party. It has often been said that the state’s CDU leader, Daniel Günther, is in the wrong party - Germany’s chancellor, who is also a CDU member, has completely opposite positions on many issues.

What was the source of that energy loss? Just the wiring or something?

I tested most of my devices with a wattmeter. Definitely not true for me. But I live in Germany and don’t even own a TV, it’s possible that it’s true for other types of devices or that the devices that are sold in my country just have higher standards than devices sold in the US.

Fair point.

Concentrated salt water might be a waste product, but the plant was built on purpose. How long does it need to operate before the costs amortisize? Even if we’re looking at greenhouse gases, most building materials aren’t exactly climate-friendly - concrete in particular is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases.

The people who designed built the plant probably calculated all this, but the article doesn’t go into it and with novel technologies like this, it’s generally not safe to just assume that a given plant makes any economical or environmental sense.

Far cry from “perpetual free energy scheme”, though.

It’s pretty common to produce table salt by dehydrating sea water. This saltwater electricity plant doesn’t produce salt, though, since the basis of their electricity generation process is diluting concentrated salt water.

If they’re mostly using electricity or even combustion to evaporate the water (as opposed to sunlight), there’s no chance that the concentrated saltwater creates more electricity than it costs - it’s only maybe useful if the saltwater is actually a waste product.

Doesn’t sound all that economical compared with other energy sources. It probably needs to be compared to longer-term energy storage solutions that don’t rely on geography like hot sand, the possibility to store the energy source (concentrated salt water) relatively cheaply is the most interesting part about it.