• 6 Posts
  • 167 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Right, but we have ways to require all automakers to build safe vehicles, commonly known as “safety regulations” that apply to both foreign and domestic companies. The same minimum requirements apply to a Toyota built in Woodstock or a VinFast built in Vietnam. That has nothing to do with tariffs, which are just a tax on consumers on foreign imports. This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business.




  • Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

    Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”













  • So basically the “conventional” generation methods use a Big Thing spinning at a specific speed to generate AC power. Solar and wind spit out DC which has to be converted to AC and also synchronize to the rest of the grid.

    Hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, methane, all use a big-ass turbine at exactly 60.00 Hz to supply the grid. This is fairly easy to sync, since a change to load or supply will slightly change the physical rotation of the generators. If the load increases, it will draw down the speed of the turbines as it pulls on it harder. When the load is more than the generators can supply, or changes too quickly, it can cause a breaker to flip to prevent damage to the equipment.

    With DC generators, the inverter connected to the grid works differently. It has to sense the frequency changes and react based on “external” factors. Right now there aren’t really widespread protocols to signal this type of grid conditions to solar/wind farms, so they have to be a bit more careful and preemptively disconnect to prevent damaging the inverters.

    So it’s an entirely solvable problem. It just requires the industry (and ERCOT) to be proactive…



  • It’s unlikely but not impossible. I’ve been using PM with a custom domain for about five years now, and never thought too hard about leaving.

    In an ideal world, a company like ProtonMail would be cooperatively owned by the workers and paying users, sort of like a credit union.

    Pragmatically, they’ve done fine stewardship of the service for the last decade or so they’ve been around. A big part of it is that their value proposition depends on stability and trust. But it could be better.



  • In my opinion it points to a more dangerous thing, “continuous delivery” software mindset seeping into safety critical systems.

    It’s fine, good even, that web developers can push updates to “prod” in minutes. But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU… it’s one thing for a website site to get a couple errors, but it’s a very bad thing if it makes your steering wheel stop working.

    Unfinished products make more money, and it’s high time a consumer protection law clamped down on this.