willvarfar

5 ms·

31.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.
32.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
A heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it. The article describes how there will be a water battery. So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide p
33.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps. Apparently 95% of new heating installati
34.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
The amount of browser extension authors who have talked openly about being approached to sell their extension or insert malicious code is many, and presumably many others have taken the money and not told us about it. It seems likely there
35.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
1 = no privacy from relay 2 = risk of collusion between relays 3 = goldilocks default 4 = ... actually, you have more attack surface and you are more susceptible to fingerprinting because everybody else is using 3, so you're timings et
36.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Then the single relay knows both who you are (your IP) and where you are going. This offers no anonymity against the relay itself. 3 relays is the goldilocks number for speed vs privacy. Using less is not a tradeoff the usual user of Tor s
37.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
All the american action movies we watched in the 80s and 90s with Rambo and Schwarzenegger etc were all about violence? Most American movies seem to work guns into them somehow too.
38.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
The values in tuples cannot change. The values that keys point to in a frozen dict can? But yeah I'd be in favour of something that looked a lot like a named tuple but with mutable values and supporting [name] access too. And of cour
39.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Is there a global movement to tax business where the customer conducts it rather than where the company chooses to base itself?
40.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
When you say "Americans" do you mean people in the USA? Or the continents? Beyond the wealth inequality within countries, there is the wealth inequalities between countries which drives migration of people or jobs etc. Even the
41.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
your random number function might return the same number multiple times? So to choose k random but unique numbers you may have to call the random number function more than k times? Of course my intuition would be that you can do a random s
42.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Does it materially impact people's pensions? Globally, pension funds hold approximately $5–7 trillion directly in the top US tech stocks (the "Magnificent Seven" and adjacent AI infrastructure). Also in the last couple of yea
43.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
The (in)famous astronomer Tycho Brahe died from a bladder infection after politeness prevented him leaving the audience on such an occasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Illness,_death,_an...
44.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Are you saying that LLMs _do_ have a model of the human mind in their weights? Imagine you use an ARIMA model to forecast demand for your business or the economy or whatever. It's easy to say it doesn't have a 'world model&#
45.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same. Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?
46.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
When holidaying in Italy I had the luck to pick the day trip one day. Really glad I found Paestum (an ancient Greek city): it is every bit as captivating as Pompeii imo.
47.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
> I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect I recall there was a whistleblower Ri
48.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
A general quadtree implementation question that puzzled me when I was implementing it myself for hobby games was: do you store a rectangle in the smallest node that completely contains it? Most code that I saw that used quadtrees were treat
49.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
I would guess it is a tariff thing rather than NATO. Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?
50.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
The article says road deaths in USA are up 30% over last 15 years and links to https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-02/2... . That doc talks a lot about initiatives but what is the nor
51.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
I have had both frustration and joy working with AI. Just some anecdata: I have found it is far better at understanding - and, with prodding, determining the root causes of bugs - big sprawling codebases than it is at writing anything in e
52.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
OLAP and batch analytics is just getting so much more common. Thinking back 30 years ago, column stores were rare and SQL was all about OLTP CRUD. It still does all that, but it's also become mainstream as the data science and analyt
53.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
I think you can query and join polars dataframes if you call to_arrow() on them too.
54.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
Duckdb can see and manipulate dataframes too. Duckdb has it's own storage, but other table storage - e.g. the parquet files I mentioned or even csv files or even dataframes from pandas and polars - are first-class citizens. Duckdb le
55.
by willvarfar 10mo ago
My experience was that data science was doable but clunky and ugly with pandas. It got slightly better with polars. Only really slightly better. Then, for me at least, it jumped lightyears ahead with duckdb. These days I run some big que
56.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
Are there croquet machines yet? Googling is really confusing with lots of forum people saying there aren't any true ones, and lots of webshops claiming to sell them.
57.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
Trust takes a lifetime to build but just a moment to lose. The rest of of the world is not going to risk the deep dependency vassal state relationship that it had with the USA. Things don't reset like that.
58.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
taking an example from the article, the USA currently produces 0.2% of coffee it consumes domestically (Hawaii and Puerto Rico). Could coffee be grown in reasonable quantities inside the USA? I find some mention of very expensive high-end
59.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
I've been searching for a CAD language that supports iteration in a good way. I've been designing a self-build house and it occurs to me that, once I have the walls etc, filling in the details for the manufacture of those walls c
60.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
Often, at the medium and large sized companies its not 'risk aversion', its resume padding. Architects want to build big impressive systems that justify their position and managers want that too because success is judged by size o

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