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Germany has too many solar panels, and it's pushed energy prices into negative territory
  • My guess is that in a climate like Germany's, solar isn't consistent enough to provide the steady baseline power that coal plants can.

    One of the complexities of power infrastructure is that demand must be met instantaneously and exactly. Coal and solar typically occupy different roles in a grid's power sources. Coal plants are slow to start, but very consistent, so they provide baseline power. Solar is virtually instantaneous, but inconsistent, so it's better suited to handle the daily fluctuations.

    So, in a place like Germany, even in abundance, solar can't realistically replace coal until we have a good way of storing power to act as a buffer. Of course, nuclear is a fantastic replacement for coal, but we all know how Germany's politicians feel about it...

  • Android's new anti-theft features
  • This is pretty cool! Wondering about a couple of these features though: locking setup after a forced reset and locking stolen devices which are offline for extended periods. Do these features activate when I determine the phone is stolen? Or do they happen automatically? This might make used phone sales a major PITA if the seller doesn't properly reset it first.

  • Android 15 really doesn't want you to turn off Bluetooth - Android Authority
  • I'm curious, what about Bluetooth makes it insecure? Is it that vendors create insecure implementations, like Android, or is it a human issue like connecting to things by default? I recall the Bluetooth spec being unbelievably complex and verbose, which obviously increases risk and makes it harder to audit, but it doesn't get many updates, and I don't recall seeing many issues with the spec itself. I mean it's not like it's fixing a CVE every quarter like with netty packages.

  • Scientists find a simple way to destroy 'forever chemicals' — by beheading them
  • Depending on their impact, it is often worthwhile to seek alternatives that are less effective or convenient, but also less dangerous. We've had materials in the past which were also deemed "essential", and yet we moved away from them.

    A lot of miracle substances tend to be extremely dangerous. There's nothing quite like asbestos when it comes to fire and heat resistance, but we can still make firefighters' clothes, or fireproof buildings, or brakes, even if it means they're heavier or harder to manufacture. R134 and especially R12 make fantastic refrigerants for car AC systems, but we phased those out in favor of substances that are more complex and costly to implement because of the calamitous effect they had on the ozone layer. Carbon tet is an incredible solvent and great at extinguishing fires too. But we don't use that anymore either.

    You could be right, maybe there is truly no way around PFOAs, but I'm just calling out a pattern here. And maybe there's no workaround right now that doesn't cause more harm, but with enough research and investment, we can get there in the future.

  • rule
  • Ok hear me out. I've lived in the US and in Europe, and while Celsius makes sense for all sorts of things (cooking, car engines, PC temps...), I think Fahrenheit actually makes a surprising amount of sense for climate, indoor and outdoor.

    While Celsius 0-100 is linked to the states of water, Fahrenheit is loosely a 0-100 on "how is this for a human to experience". 0°F is sorta the limit of "dang that's really cold" and 100°F is "dang that's really hot." And that's the whole reason we look at the weather report.

    0-100°F also has more individual degrees than -18-38°C, and when a couple degrees can make a big difference for indoor comfort (or the heating bill), I appreciate more granularity.

  • Google rule
  • Yep. Making a new thing is how you get promoted. Maintaining or improving an old thing is nearly useless, even at companies with competent managers.

    This is the same reason why a lot of companies have awful security practices. From the managers' perspectives, they're burning valuable engineer time on something that doesn't produce any tangible benefits besides reducing the possibility of a lawsuit. And that lawsuit is probably cheaper to just pay up, rather than pay for all that engineer effort.

  • My Grocery shopping was exactly $40.00
  • Buying 10 items would definitely make this way more likely, because we have a base-10 counting system.

    To simplify the problem, if you look at the cents digit, $0.09×10 items = $0.90. If you look at both cents digits, they were mostly $0.99. $0.99×10 items = $9.90.

    All you'd need in either case there is something to cost $0.10 more to get a nice even number.

  • We lost four men on the last expedition...
  • I'm cool with it in that state. But my concern here is that while it starts out innocent, if demand increases, it's only a matter of time until they start mining it and chartering more ships to transport it. Especially in an economy like Greenland's.

    This same pattern has been followed a thousand times in the past. Lots of instances of abusing our natural resources start out innocently.

  • Average Lemmy Active Users by Month
  • First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.

    However, I'm considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it's even more cynical than reddit, and I'm losing interest in opening the app if it's just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.

    (Yes, I'm subbed to upliftingnews. That's the 1%.)

    Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?

  • How about Vivaldi Browser?
  • I jumped ship from Firefox to Vivaldi back in 2020 for the same reasons. Not only did Firefox give some huge pay raises to their execs, but they also laid off tons of people at the same time. By tons of people, I mean like 250 all at once, and they only had 750 people working there total in 2020. Huge shame that they're just pocketing all the money meant for something important, to keep browsers diverse.

    In my experience, Vivaldi has had superior customization and privacy settings, even to those in Firefox and Brave.

    And about the UI code being closed source, from what I can tell, it's all minified JavaScript. So while they don't have documented code on GitLab or anything, anyone can still parse through it and run security checks on it if they want. Not perfect, but at least it's there.

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