Same here. Even the small motors were expensive at the time. One winter my dad and I figured out how to make our own—rolled the casing out of packing tape, poured the end plug from (I think) Durham‘s rock-hard water putty, then filled with fuel made from a mixture of black powder, sugar, and salt peter. The next summer, getting to use up all the engines we’d stockpiled, was glorious.
I had (maybe still have somewhere?) a book I'd ordered online as a youth, on how to do exactly that. They were somewhat fiddly, in the sense of being slightly lower-impulse, with clay nozzles and a hollow fuel grain. Never quite got around to making any. I should look for that book though. In any case, it's likely harder than it used to be to get saltpeter, which they just carried in the pharmacy.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
I mean, in many countries, often either the government or a company closely allied to the government has been granted a legal monopoly on selling electrical energy, so buying electricity from other people is illegal.
One point of annecdata to backup your figures: I traded my 2018 Accord (7.5 years old, 97k miles) this past weekend, was offered $11k and negotiated them up to $15k. So, trade ins are definitely worth more than nothing.
Python type hints are hugely valuable both as a means of correctness checking, but also just as a means of documentation. It strikes me as incredibly shortsighted to say you can forget about types just because it’s a dynamic language. The types are absolutely still there and need thought about. They just aren’t defined or used in terms of allocation and management of memory.
Usually with OOP several builders are composed together to express the creation of some data. These builders have functions with types, which define the rules for the creation of the objects.
My point is that the CarBuilder is not a real type that relates to the business, but something that we had to create to encode some behaviour/rules.
Some function that validates that a dict is a valid car is much more explicit that lots of different builder classes in my opinion.
I’ve definitely had exactly that sort of looping work with Zed, as long as I tell it how to run the tests. Are you perhaps not using one of the “thinking” models?
That might be it. I use GitHub CoPilot through Zed as Zed does not accept the Claude subscription (that I'm using with OpenCode). I've primarily used Sonnet 3.7 in Zed, I'll try out the thinking model and see if that changes anything.
All this is going to do is drive AI companies to mask their user agent to appear as a standard browser, resulting in a worse end state than we’re in now. It’s an exercise in futility.
The blog post covers this. The announcement also drops relying on spoofable user agents for crawler identification and requires crawlers to voluntarily identify themselves via RFC 9421 cryptographic message signatures to get access: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/#payme...
There are likely incentives for AI companies to try to simulate human users as much as possible, but the value proposition here is that CF is so good at identifying and stopping those that signing a request becomes the path of least resistance.
Potentially for smaller players but I'd guess that the larger players (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) won't go down that line as it'd be pretty easy to spot at the volume they're crawling and a bad look for them when they inevitably get discovered.
Also, Cloudflare is in the position of being able to see a lot of traffic making it easier for them to spot that kind of masking activity.
In theory, this presents a form of competition that should drive the tolls down to an equilibrium level. Though, theory doesn’t always play out perfectly in practice.
This isn't the kind of problem that really ought to be solved through courts. It's obvious to anyone that this is a new kind of problem that no author of the current jurisprudence envisioned. We need new legislation to stop this kind of abuse of the commons.
I strongly agree with you, but I have no confidence in my country's current elected representatives to ever do anything good, so our hands are tied until we vote them out.
Yes. It's always weird to me that people expect laws written over centuries, using precedents from even more centuries, to be able cover scenarios their authors couldn't have possibly imagined.
Civil law countries seem better at keeping their laws up to date with new threats whereas a few common law ones (most notably the US) really insist on digging through what an 18th century slave owner would have thought about e.g. AI.
Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.
My rule of thumb is that if I get a nit, whitespace, or syntax preferences as a PR comment, that goes into the linter. Especially for systemic issues like e.g. not awaiting functions that return a promise, any kind of alphabetization, import styles, etc.
Yeah I find it pretty funny that so much of us (myself included) threw out strict documentation practices because “the code should be self documenting!”
Now I want as much of it as I can get.
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Luxury. My washer and dryer both display numbers the appear to be minutes remaining, but do not tick down with any discernible relation to time. They start around 55, then over the course of 90 minutes decrement down to 10 in random steps. Then it hangs at 10 for another 10-20 mins, then eventually goes to 0 and shuts off. Are these supposed to be minutes? Is there any reason for their disconnection from the passage of time? Who knows? The manual certainly doesn’t say.
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