even old data retroactively

My impression is that retroactive opt-out data grifting represents the lion’s share of user data sales today, and that it’s a popular strategy because it works.

The formula: appraise the data and find your buyers in advance. THEN update the privacy policies to include the data you want to sell. That way, the moment new policies go into effect, all you have to do is hit the transfer button.

After that, it’s done. Users that find and flick your new opt-out toggle only stop you from selling their data to additional buyers, and that’s nbd since data brokers only pay top-dollar for exclusive access to stuff that’s not already on the market.

It’s why I consider the introduction of any opt-out privacy policy an explicit admission of data theft.

Ah! Yeah it’s been a while but I seem to recall seeing alkaline batteries in a some freezers or refrigerators sometimes when I was a kid, along with other curiosities like rolls of film. No one ever explained why.

IIRC freezing accelerates the chemical degradation of lithium ion (especially if you attempt to charge the battery at the same time) and tends to lower both the voltage and amperage of most battery chemistries, but it seems plausible that this might

1. temporarily defeat a cell protection circuit, allowing a charging procedure to initialize, or
2. delay a thermal failsafe cut-off of a damaged cell long enough to boot or charge a device

Regardless, for those tuning in at home, best to keep your batteries out of the freezer, especially lithium types, unless spicy pillows are what you’re after.

Hmm, you’re right. At a guess, this field might represent the maximal combined interest of both scientific and pedestrian readership within technology research, since on the one hand energy density and storage logistics is the key limitation for a ton of desirable applications, and on the other most consumers’ experience with batteries establish them as a major convenience factor in their day-to-day.

Edit: you’re*

How are energy and power “loose terms”? Energy might be difficult to fully explain rigorously, but it’s one of the fundamental elements of our universe. And power is just energy over time

Well, you yourself just provided the example, since your definition of energy and power are the inverse of the definitions used in the video.

It’s the fact that people use them differently or interchangeably that makes them “loose” IMHO.

He’s making a point about instantaneous versus overall energy use, which it sounds like you already understand. “Power” and “energy” are kind of loose terms IMO, which could confuse that conversation a bit.

But for anyone still scratching their head:

The typical energy consumer need only consider watts (w, kw) when accounting for circuit capacity. For example, if your hair dryer pulls 1600 watts, don’t use it on a 1500 watt outlet, or you will likely trip the circuit breaker.

Otherwise “watt-hours” (wh, kwh) is likely the metric you’re looking for when considering energy use. This is a certain amount of power drawn over a period of time, where 1 watt over 1000 hours and 1000 watts over 1 hour are both equal to 1 kilowatt-hour (kwh), which is the standard unit you likely see in your electric bill.

It’s why low but constant power draw can significantly impact energy use. For example, a typical laptop pulls fewer than 100 watts, lower than many appliances in your house, but if it draws that much power all the time, it might significantly impact your electric bill. Conversely, an electric kettle / coffee maker might pull as much as 1300 watts while in use, more than most appliances in your house, yet it probably represents a minuscule portion of your electric bill, since it only runs long enough to boil a small amount of water with each use.

Edit: include tea drinkers, add more concrete examples

My experience with compatibility checkers hasn’t been stellar. I’ll check this out.

This feels like a reference to a streamer video I’ve never seen

Bringing extra meshtastic nodes to a protest could be really helpful. Extra nodes would allow information to more easily find a clear path out of a hot zone to routers in safer locations, and it’d do so without using any telecom infrastructure. The encryption’s pretty good too.

Input sanitization typically handles this as a string that only allows characters supported by the data type specified by the table field in question. A permissive strategy might scrub the string of unexpected characters. A strict one might throw an error. The point, however, is to prevent the evaluation of inputs as anything other than their intended type, whether or not reserved characters are present.

I understand the terror of watching this unfold from the outside, if only because many people I love on the inside are facing these new horrors directly. Some wouldn’t even call it new, just a more explicit and sweeping abandonment of our crumbling democratic sociopolitical facade.

Things don’t work that way.

But they do. When it comes to collective action, especially when so many are effectively kept in the dark, revolutions progress slowly then all at once. For example the French Revolution didn’t attain critical mass with the general populace until the treasury was literally empty and the government couldn’t pay its bills. Even then it took many bloody years to stabilize into its modern liberal democratic form.

By comparison, the intent of this new regime, while obvious to anyone paying attention, has only been truly manifest for a few breathless weeks. Though it takes time for the light to break through all the disinformation bubbles and dawn on the general populace, it is finally happening.

I too want it to happen more quickly, and feel every bit of urgency you do, but the truth is it takes people like you and me working together to mobilize others, because this is just one expression of a global crisis, with global roots, that can only be solved with global collective action. Blaming the oppressed and deceived people of democracies that fall is understandable, since everyone thinks “that couldn’t happen here” while it certainly can and has been for years. It’s self-defeating, however, because we can only win this fight together.

I hear you, and I agree there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I can say with some confidence that the average American doesn’t want any of this in the slightest, even if the average American isn’t as politically engaged as they need to be to truly understand the global implications.

The truth is that the average American is mostly thinking about immediate problems in their own life, like how to pay both their rent and their phone bill and still afford gas to get to the grocery store where many staples are increasingly expensive.

Even something as important as voting or protesting can feel like a privilege for the well-off when it’s the choice between that and working a shift to pay bills, and of course voting has been made deliberately difficult in most states. Voter registration isn’t automatic, for example. Likewise Election Day isn’t a National Holiday, so many people have to take off work if they don’t plan ahead to register, apply to vote absentee and meet deadlines for ballot mail-in.

Basically I’m just trying to encourage you to remember your neighbors are normal people who actually do value being good neighbors. They are oppressed and deceived, however, and a small portion of them are straight up brainwashed by a cult.

I hope, trust, and believe that when the chips fall, people in this country will answer the call to fight the global oppressors for themselves and others, because deep down they know that we’re all in this together. First they must lift their heads and see, a difficult process which I think has finally begun.

And really, can one ever have too many rodents opining posthumously?

We’re definitely protesting. It may not make international news, but every day there are angry crowds outside government buildings or in the streets of our cities. The last I went to was this past Monday in NY and there were at least a few thousand of us. Personally I think we need more serious measures but protesting is a start.

This is correct. The popular misconception may arise from the marked difference between model use vs development. Inference is far less demanding than training with respect to time and energy efficiency.

And you can still train on most consumer GPUs, but for really deep networks like LLMs, well get ready to wait.

Why is this “win-11” pdf 70GB? Win eleven of what?

Eleven. This OS was released in the time before the war. There never was a Windows Twelve.

Yes, I only used mqtt because it’s a common low-level protocol in smart appliances that’s comparatively simple. A more accessible example might have been Smart TVs being half the price of dumb ones (if you can even find them now) since the principle is the same.

I agree that support is one of the main things cloud legitimately makes easier. Support personnel have more reliable case data, more robust central control, and so forth.

And I think you’ll agree many smart home folks already have/had hubs and bridges (servers) floating around that obfuscate most of that complexity without the need for always-on WAN access. Remote maintenance (patches, firmware updates, etc) don’t necessarily preclude a plug and play experience.

Whether this accounts for the cost and complexity differential consumers experience can be debated, but my point was simpler. Cloud-based products are artificially subsidized in at least two ways. The first is that they’re a loss leader facilitating platform lock-in, but the second is that rich usage data from intimate user contexts is quite valuable to the endless parade of marketing voyeurs.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m not talking about SaaS products. I’m talking about physical things on local networks that don’t need cloud access.

For example, a common wall switch may use mqtt internally, but inexplicably railroad all commands through the online Tuya platform. The device requires a beefier ESP chip as a result. It must be capable of ethernet and async workflows for client platform auth, token refresh, and so forth. It may even cease functioning when it can’t reach the servers.

By comparison, the strictly intranetwork equivalent has far simpler hardware that can run for months on a watch battery. And yet, the cloud-based product will basically always be cheaper, in spite of being more complex and requiring cloud infrastructure.

So, how come? Yes economies of scale might apply to the hardware manufacturing, but certainly not to the cloud requirement. No economy scales quite like 0.

Would be nice if grid tied inverters weren’t such a regulatory PITA. Micro-deployment solar, and more importantly distributed energy storage, makes so much sense and could solve a lot of grid-related problems.

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