You say this as if you don't need he MWP models to train the AI models? The accuracy of the AI Prediction depends entirely on the quality of the training dataset...
Pretty much all of the AI weather prediction models are trained on ECMWF ERA5, which is kinda like a numerical weather prediction model run to forecast at t=0. ERA5 is historical weather data, but it’s a “reanalysis” of it.
Indeed, you can imagine this as some sort of advanced physics-based interpolation of various measurements (land stations, satellite data, ...) to fill in every cell in a latitude-longitude grid. This is not only used for ERA5 (training data for the models), but also to determine the initial conditions for every grid cell which are used to roll out the forecast. So AI weather models depend greatly on the NWP/physics used in for reanalysis and initial conditions. That being said, there is also research being conducted in training models straight from the raw data (weather stations, satellite, ...), thus bypassing the "interpolation" step.
Yeah. I can’t remember names off the top of my head, but there are a few companies, and I think many researchers, working on AI “data assimilation” for this.
ECMWF has an experimental AIFS direct observational prediction model (AIFS-DOP) that has become competitive with their physics based IFS model on certain metrics just in the past year.
I'm interested in understanding wheater prediction models because accurate wind forecasts make a big difference to my personal life (sports).
Is there a good overview to learn about the current models, which all just seem like cryptic acronyms to me? in apps like Windy etc.
WRF, TRRM, IK-HRRR-3km, ECMWF-9km,...
I understand by now that small grid cells are better for local prediction and that thermic winds are mostly missing from them all.
Ask your favorite AI to give you a crash course, but to start the main models you need to know are the GFS and the ECMWF. In the US where available in high res, the HRRR is excellent, but doesn’t forecast very far out. The PWG/PWE 1km PredictWind models are also very good at picking up land based features and other more precise patterns. If you are in the US everything else is probably not super relevant.
Any advice will really depend on where you live and the dominant source of local error. These are all good options for the US and if the one main source of error is near surface winds around complex terrain then you can also look into WindNinja from the National Forrest Service.
Historical weather data is discrete. You need continuous state for weather modelling which is currently achieved through conventional reforecasts using those historical observations.
A more interesting question is...does differential equations based models like mamba/state space models perform better on this sort of physics problem than pure transformer LLMs?
Ahh. Yes, the delusional man who's psychiatric fibers were in tatters could have totally understood and digested that his actions that day were selfish. If only you had been there to say that to him.
Setting aside the shaming part of your comment, it's indeed absolutely horrific for the family and everyone close to him.
In every thread about housing people on HN post wildly outlandish claims about expenses that belie their totally out of touch perspectives. If you make 100K a month (the lower bound of what you just wrote). Let's say you put 25K into retirement. You eat out every meal so 4K food/living budget. That leaves 60K (I'll give you 10K slush fund for savings money or as a general keeping-up-with-the-jones' fund).
60K per month will pay a 4.5 million dollar mortgage. 4.5 million will buy you some of the nicest houses in the bay that aren't mansions. See:
You are either insane, or out of touch in a way that makes you insane. Of course, you can get a much cheaper very nice condo and "safely" squirrel away phenomenal amounts of cash savings. Expecting to own a high end house in a dense metro are on its own, is a pretty insane expectation.
Thanks for your comment. It makes a little sense that the average person might struggle with costs in the US, but it doesn't make sense that the highest earners do.
SF property tax on a $4.5M property: 1.18268325% for a total of about $53,220.75
Total: about $493K for an effective tax rate of about 41%, assuming this hypothetical SF resident is single and just purchased their $4.5M property this year.
No. There are many, many more taxes besides what your "effective" tax calculator reports. Every time it seems people have to come out of the woods to educate about "effective tax", but it's not really how it works, and it's how the system has poisoned people into thinking they are paying less tax than they are. Besides your tax return you have all these taxes:
* Self-employment taxes: Lower-income people are usually 1099, and are typically subject to additional 7.5% tax
* Sales taxes: Lower income people typically spend most of their dollars on sales-taxable items, so an additional 10%+ on post-tax amounts, which figures out to additional 15%-ish on pre-tax income
* Health insurance: Lower income people typically have to buy their own health insurance, something that should have been provided by the country but isn't, and is effectively a systematic tax on everyone
* Health deductibles: Insurance sold to lower income people doesn't even cover the first few thousand dollars a year, while higher income brackets pay close to zero deductibles. In many other countries "deductibles" isn't even a thing; they too are an effective systematic tax on lower income brackets fueled by the oligarchy of government and financial powers
* Car registration fees: Registration really only requires paperwork done once; recurring annual "registration" is a tax rebranded as a registration
* Property taxes: Even if you don't own, you pay them -- your landlord passes them through to you
The list goes on and on. Taxes are split up like this only because there would be an uprising if they lumped it all together, so they split it up and tax you in pieces and chunks (April 15 is only one chunk) so that you think you're paying less, psychologically.
But yeah, 50% is about the right number for that income.
> 60K per month will pay a 4.5 million dollar mortgage
A mortgage is NOT owning! So many people are poisoned by this propaganda promoted by American society and banks. They prey on the masses by infiltrating the public with this live-on-borrowed-money ideology.
Your 60K/month may end NEXT month and become 0/month if you are subject to the next round of Zuck's layoffs, or you end up stack ranked and PIPed at Amazon due to internal politics. One of these things happen and poof you're in the 0th percentile of income.
In the bay area, if you want a $4.5M home, you need to have $4.5M in cash or liquid assets. Period. Otherwise you're risking a foreclosure disaster if you accidentally say something wrong in a leadership update meeting, or if this AI heyday comes crashing down.
Borrowing money does not mean you own something, and is a very American way of doing things.
You’re playing with words here. Mortgages are considered ownership around the world.
It’s only fair I throw a creative wrench in your idea of ownership then: eminent domain. You can never own something if it can just be taken away even if you are compensated.
> Mortgages are considered ownership around the world.
Only because the people in power have successfully brainwashed everyone into thinking so. I don't care what brainwashed people consider it to be. I only consider it what it actually is.
From first principles, it is objectively not ownership, if the bank has rights on it.
Then don’t worry your pretty little fingers informing us of your uninformed opinion. You get what you give.
You also cowardly avoided my last remark, or just have no idea what that is. Eminent domain says that your government can decide to take something you think you own, thus proving you don’t own it no matter where you put your name on it or how you paid for it.
I don't believe in paying "towards" anything. Either you buy it or you don't, in full. Anything else is financially irresponsible, unless you have the collateral but are only preferring not to liqudate.
fair enough, but that's a different argument. and when it comes to a mortgage your alternative option is renting, and the worst case scenario that you can't pay rent or your mortgage is the same.
it's not like a car where you have the option to do without, you can't do without a place to live. i am pro renting, but unlike a car loan i don't see a mortgage less financially responsible because you can almost always just repay the mortgage by selling the house, in other words unlike any other loan mortgage is unlikely to put you into a debt that you can't repay because the house is your collateral. (unless the housing market crashes maybe)
And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...
I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/
I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)
I've been using Zen since almost the beginning of the project. I'm pretty happy with it! Great QOL features, and being Firefox, I have perfect ad block and syncs nicely with Firefox for Android.
I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.
Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
For what it is worth they have now added a global kill switch for AI features. Though I appreciate the local translation feature so I'm inclined to keep it on just for that.
Even before the AI stuff, Firefox was showing sponsored links on my new tab window by default. It's not enough to make me switch, but not a good first impression if I were new to it.
I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.
> I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly
The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems.
Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.
IMHO the only forks that actually add something meaningful are Floorp and Zen.
I personally stick with Firefox with some user.js tweaks. Projects like Celenity's Phoenix shows that most forks are not necessary and you need to trust another party.
Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.
Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others)
As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox.
Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
> Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%.
Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.
If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.
We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
That was with a lot of technical innovation against a static competitor. Firefox isn't in nearly as good of a position when it comes to either technology or resources now.
It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy.
The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.
It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.
It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
Apple did lose the desktop OS war. But that became less important on the desktop itself because of the browser ;) and also mobile, which is btw where the largest competitor to Chromium exists. It was still important though. Windows is huge leverage in all sorts of B2B areas like Azure.
How much does it actually matter that Firefox uses a different engine from Chromium? I would imagine you can just use a fork of Chromium that supports uBO or whatever else Google dislikes, and there are already browsers like that. Maybe cause Google could move Chrome to closed-source so the others gradually get outdated?
It was less related to the manifest issue specifically and more that I don’t think Mozilla is some great bastion of internet freedom, and chromium works better on many sites because developers design for it because it’s the most popular browser.
Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser.
Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities.
Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome.
Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too.
Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried).
Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort...
[edit] correction - I looked this up - I thought they used the chrome version, but they wrote their own sandboxing layer from scratch. On top of that they go beyond Chrome's measures with containers that isolate pretty much everything tracking-related if you use them.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-sit...
That's on the desktop. I don't know about the situation on Android, but my impression was the codebases are pretty similar these days.
Where did you get the idea there was no sandboxing?
Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK.
They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?
In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla. In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million, and again to over $6.9 million in 2022. In August 2020, the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues after laying off roughly 70 employees in January 2020. Baker stated this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.
Yes, the (significant) salary increases happened well after the servo team was cut.
In 2020 when that happened she was at 3 million at a revenue of 466 million or 0.6% of revenue.
They laid off 320 people that year. If she had taken a salary of $0 they could have paid them each <$10k with that salary.
I don't think the salary was appropriate, but like a lot of these CEO compensation things, it's not going to make a huge difference to the final problem. Which was people switching to Chrome which google was pushing aggressively everywhere. ... and I guess purists here abandoning them for... Chrome? Again, no idea what the point is here. Mozilla has flaws, so screw 'em?
ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
Vivaldi claims they don't collect data from "Direct Match"
No way to verify this claim is true but that's beside the point. It's another web browser sending traffic to it's own servers
Vivaldi is Chromium-based
This week an "I'm quitting" blog post from a former Mozilla employee was on the HN front page. He more or less recommended Vivaldi, i.e., Chromium
The problem of advertising is not solved by choice of browser vendor where _all_ the vendors are trying to make money from ad services, partnerships with Google, affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency, etc.
"Not as bad as Chrome" is a pathetically low bar to meet
These browsers take longer to compile than an operating system. Absurd complexity and vulnerability
The Vivaldi default settings are just as bad as any other so-called "modern" browser, i.e., they have to be changed
It's a fool's errand to compare these browsers to each other. They have far more similarities than differences. They all suck
Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.
Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team.
A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.
They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.
The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google.
Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.
Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.
1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.
2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.
>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed,
Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.
Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.
>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars
And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?
They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive."
That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases
People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"
If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla
If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows
Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google
By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive
But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"
Except they will not mention the money from Google part
Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"
This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads
I'll never understand the "I hate FF for taking google money. That's why I use chrome." When something is so egregious incongruous then it should be a red flag.
If you own a home you should genuinely spend time calculating and thinking about it. It's not near as far fetched as you think. You can benefit from the same technical advancements in engineering and manufacturing that have benefited every single industrial sector. It has never been easier. The number of plug and play components out there is unreal.
These days it's very much sun-legos. You decide what you can afford and what you think you need, and then you bolt the stuff together. Anyone who is willing to put time into it is capable.
I 100% believe you! We're planning on doing a custom build for our next home, and I'm going to budget for solar. Like you said, it's gotten so much easier these days and I think that we don't take advantage of this because it requires budgeting/saving and because paying a monthly bill can be so much easier in the short-term. But I'm 100% going to do this.
If you're building a place, consider how you could arrange some of your basement for effective food storage.
This family[0] appears to be 90% agriculturally self-sufficient: they occasionally eat out, but grow most of what they eat. They store a lot of food in their basement, critically, with a DIY ventilation system. If you're building a home from scratch, and you're independently minded, it's the ideal time to build in some food storage and ventilation access in your floor plan.
When I showed this video to a coworker who also eats mostly off her own land, she recommended beginning by experimenting with preserving store-bought produce before planting an ambitious garden that yields more food than you know how to store.
This perspective is always so myopic to me. I say this as someone who doesn't make much money who's in the middle of a massive solar install (DIY). I made some simulations and a spreadsheet to work out all of the scenarios and I figured out that with a loan I can come out at monthly financing costs nearly exactly my electrical bill every month. That's right, I can have a 12 kWh battery backed 18 kW whole-home installation at no additional monthly cost.
The way that these discussions get contorted online will never make sense to me. The same people who make comments about ROI and it not making financial sense also have new car-loans on vehicles that depreciate catastrophically and are worth nearly nothing in 10 years. After 10 years my solar install will have been paid off for three years, I will get free electricity, and I will have the following benefits along the way:
Additional home value/equity
Backup power in case of grid problems or catastrophe.
Free fuel for my used battery electric vehicle. (compared to ~$200 a month in gas)
As close to zero carbon footprint as you can have in our contemporary world
And that's all assuming electricity prices stay the same. That's not even talking about how hydrocarbons are a very finite resource. Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses. It's the best decision anyone with a home who has the climate can possibly make. If you value your independence and personal security you'd be crazy to not do it. What would you pay, if you have the kind of money most people on these forums do, to ensure your home operates independent of external inputs? Imagine a new great depression? Or other such event?
>"Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses."
That's the reality of life for most people outside of our little bubble of six figure earners. If it's a higher monthly price, it's a nonstarter.
>"Additional home value/equity"
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid. Fine if you find the right one willing to pay a premium, but how much more are they going to pay for an old system vs. installing their own?
I'm not a six figure earner, and have never been close. Your mentality is not everyone's mentality. And there are many people, my neighbors and friends, who are willing to pay more for energy security and independence who are not in a bubble of six figure earners.
For your equity comment, it reads like astroturfing. Every single report with real-world data shows that it's positive equity and that homes with installations sell for more than those without. It's not a "vibe" I have, it's a cold hard fact. There's a million things you maintain when you own a house, and free energy is literally the easiest thing to want to maintain. Compare that to siding, or septic, or anything else....
> Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid
My parents put up solar in 2005 when it was very expensive. The original panels, inverters, cables are all still there, nothing had to be replaced in the last 21 years. The only maintenance task is a recommended (not mandatory) yearly cleaning that is probably in the 300€ range and takes maybe 1h, but since 5 years they have 2x EVs and 2x Powerwalls and are self-sufficient for 80% of the year, so that cost is negligible. The area where they live also has enough rain that if they skip cleaning for 1 or 2 years, the average total output is still close to the max they can get.
What maintenance for solar panels? Please share your videos of oil changes on your solar panels.
As opposed to equipment for fossil fuel which (a) doesn't burn fuel (b) has no moving parts (c) doesn't have thousands of parts and therefore runs free of any maintenance forever?
I wonder where these kind of people come from and what kind of education they have? Even Pakistan seems far more technologically advanced, they've been rapidly deploying solar with no issues.
> Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid.
That's not at all true where I live (Seattle): the cost of a solar system goes almost straight over into home equity. Solar energy is a feature - a real selling point. No idea what maintenance liability you could have in mind; one can have panels cleaned once a year, for maximum output, but they still just work if you don't. Other than that there is literally nothing to maintain.
... Wait, which maintenance is this? You'll probably eventually have to replace the inverter (or, at least, solar panel warranties are normally considerably longer than inverter warranties), but that's probably about it.
(Theoretically you can get a minor efficiency improvement by cleaning them regularly, but it really is minor to the point of "arguably not worth doing at all" in most conditions.)
I’ve had my system in Canada for 2.5 years, flawless, not one second of maintenance.
Family in Australia have had systems for over 10 years with zero maintenance
Also electricity here is ore approved to increase by a minimum of 5% a year, so a solar install on a house is huge for equity. Most people here spend around $2k to $3k a year on heat. I spend $400.
A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.
Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.
I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.
My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case
I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.
I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.
The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.
I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).
Hardware was cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents itself again.
I do something like this! I’m based in NY but my dad’s in LA. I put together an rpi5 + 5xSATA hat with 3 10TB WD red drives using zraid1 (managed to pick these up over the holidays before prices started going up, $160 per drive!). 3D printed the case and got it running a diskless alpine image with tailscale and zrepl for ZFS snapshot replication. Just left it running in a corner at his place and told him not to touch it heh
Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one point in the past it was “unlimited” space for $15 a month. Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple of years.
Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool. I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and I ended up having to patch in a new fake “matching” snapshot. I had claude write up a post here, if you’ll excuse the completely AI generated “blog post”, it came up with a pretty good solution https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...
Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.
Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.
> I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.
Have been doing this for 25 years.
If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.
I get 3-2-1 backups with no "big cloud" dependency using
- My Mac
- My NAS (RAID1) using Syncthing
- Incremental borg backups to rsync.net (geo-redundant plan) with a cron job.
Graphene supports the 6a, which unlocked goes for ~$100 on ebay. I imagine you can swing that as a lawyer to play around.
I'll also echo the ideas from everyone else here. You can just use it as a normal Android phone the way you do any other and there's still big benefits. There's also really big benefits in terms of carrier privacy that aren't often talked about, like vpn routing and hotspot usage.
Have any descriptions or analysis of what is considered "properly" on the cutting edge? I'm very curious. Only part of my profession is coding. But it would be nice to get insight into how people who really try to learn with these tools work.
I would say the first starting point is to run your agent somewhere you're comfortable with giving it mostly unconstrained permissions (e.g. --dangerously-skip-permissions for Claude COde), but more importantly, setting up sub-agents to hand off most work to.
A key factor to me in whether you're "doing it right" is whether you're sitting there watching the agent work because you need to intervene all the time, or whether you go do other stuff and review the code when the agent think it's done.
To achieve that, you need a setup with skills and sub-agents to 1) let the model work semi-autonomously from planning stage until commit, 2) get as much out of the main context as possible.
E.g. at one client, the Claude Code plugin I've written for them will pull an issue from Jira, ask for clarification if needed, then augment the ticket with implementation details, write a detailed TODO list. Once that's done, the TODO items will be fed to a separate implementation agent to do the work, one by one - this keeps the top level agent free to orchestrate, with little entering its context, and so can keep the agent working for hours without stopping.
Once it's ready to commit, it invokes a code-review agent. Once the code-review agent is satisifed (possibly involving re-work), it goes through a commit checklist, and offers to push.
None of these agents are rocket-science. They're short and simple, because the point isn't for them to have lots of separate context, but mostly to tell them the task and move the step out of the main agents context.
I've worked on a lot more advanced setups too, but to me, table stakes beyond minimising permissions is is to have key workflows laid out in a skill + delegate each step to a separate sub-agent.
> how people who really try to learn with these tools work
This setup is potentially effective sure, but you're not learning in the sense that GP meant.
For GP: Personally I've reached the conclusion that it's better for my career to use agents effectively and operate at this new level of abstraction, with final code review by me and then my team as normal.
> This setup is potentially effective sure, but you're not learning in the sense that GP meant.
Then GP didn't mean anything useful. I've learned how to build those setups. I learn to build by orchestrating groups of agents, and I get to spend far more of my time focusing on architecture, rather than minutiae that are increasingly irrelevant.
I think about this all the time through the lens of "authority" on a topic. When we yielded our gathering spaces online to major social sites (read, Zuck et al) we then gave the content all the authority of what it means to dialogue in those places. Which is to say... not much.
This has impacted journalism, music, science, and so much more. It would take an eternity to hash out my perspective but I think that there's value in realizing that. And I think there's value of creating content from the authority of a personal website with cache. I think music is a great place for this to take off, since you don't need institutional backing. You just need good words and a deep connection to the community. In that way, I hope people do write and create good content through their own mediums/sites. And I hope we all join in reading and sharing those sites.
