A heat pump isn't more than â1500-â2000 for a good air-to-air one here in Norway.

I suspect people are being 'oversold'. That they think they need a full HVAC system, while they only need it in the main room - and the heat will seep through the rest of the house easily enough. Unless they have an asbolutely huge home. Then maybe they'll need two of them.

Installing vast amounts of ducting etc. is entirely unnecessary.

AI certainly have a LOT of substance, and the hype around it is awesome for the development of it. It means lots and lots of investment and new tech is being invented. It means things are getting cheaper and cheaper. It means things are getting more and more efficient.

It might not seem that way, as it requires more and more GPU power, more and more electricity etc .. but after deepseek was released, and other models will be released over the next year; affordable AI is here in that smaller companies can get by with one GPU - and play with it.

The thing that *does not* make sense to me is how there will be a large ROI for those who develop and research it. It will benefit the industry as a whole.

As an example, many smaller IT companies, not in AI, now have their own internal LLM running on their own servers. With the models that are available for free download. No need to pay for tokens. It's a one-time investment in a pretty good GPU, but then it's just "use it as much as you want". Employees are delighted to be playing around with LLMs - and the company gets "free" internal LLM.

Been using Ubuntu since 6.06. I'm growing tired of it. Snap is annoying me no end.

It might be time to give SuSE a spin again. Left SuSE for Ubuntu back in the day. Or maybe go back to Debian, although I'm still sore about the deprecation of security updates for 2.0 (slink) a very, very short time after potato came out.

When I search for things, I search for all web pages containing the words I search for. On the entire interwebs.

I *abhor* your way of searching. Of second guessing what I'm searching for.

I live in the EU.

Given that we've been moving to electric vehicles for over a decade, most of us have quite some experience with them already. I bought my first electric car in 2018, and got a second one for my wife last year.

They just work.

One interesting thing here is that China is the country building out renewables the fastest. By far. Their emissions kept increasing last year, but it'll be quite interesting to see the 2024 results. Even more interesting to see the 2025 results.

They are installing silly amounts of both wind and solar. They're now also looking into grid scale batteries. Their carbon footprint is going to change radically over the next few years - they'll be trending so fast downwards the world will go "wtf just happened?!"

See my main post on this:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2F...

It is not super slow at all. See wikipedia:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The growth is absolutely astounding. Both production rates and installation rates of solar panels are increasing at a rapid clip, and if the growth in yearly installed new capacity just keeps going for a year or two, and then keeps steady - we'll be in pretty good shape LONG before 2040.

Solar alone has far superceded what we expected the total installed base to be in 2040 back in 2016. A significant amount of the required energy production to replace fossil has *already been solved* by Solar - but - it's a gift that keeps on giving (in a good way). The "remaining" problem is largely grid scale storage (or maybe even "per house storage").

Both China and India is adding *astounding* amounts of Solar every year. They will probably end up polluting way less than expected towards 2040. Large part of Africa will probably invest in Solar directly, which will also solve big problems.

As the subject says, The Economist had an excellent review of Solar a few issues back:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fweek...

Most of it is paywalled, however, the gist is that Solar has been growing exponentially worldwide the last 10 years or so. Newly installed capacity is growing by about 50% year over year IIRC. We cannot expect this rapid growth to continue as fast as now for many years - but that has been said every year.

Ever year new projections have been released about where we'll be in 10 years. Every year it's taken less than a year to beat the 10 year projections (IIRC).

Greenpeace estimates of where we would be in 2030 in the "best case scenario", released in 2016 (I think?) was beaten last year.

In short: The growth of solar is absolutely exceeding all expectations by orders of magnitude. The challenge will be grid scale battery storage. Solar is on path to produce abundant electricity "in total", but there's an urgent need for battery storage for evening/nighttime/morning use.

> power but if it's Chicago-cold

Chicago seems warm and cozy compared to what we've experienced in Norway this January. :P

Here, we've had -25 - -30C (That's -4 - -22 F) for the last few weeks. Finally, today, it thawed to around 0C.

My Tesla has worked throughout.

And then there's me. I've got a 10 year old daughter, and she's had non-monitored internet access for more than a year already.

I don't intend to start monitoring it. This might change, if I for some reason think that I need to. I don't think it will. I've had pretty much non-monitored BBS'es and then Internet since I was 14. It was *nasty* out there back then. Today, it's a pretty well moderated landscape compared to the 90s.

Remember peacefire.org ? That was teens avoiding censorship and especially "Cyber Patrol" back then. :P

That would severely devalue Teslas for us Norwegians. We drive a *lot* in Sweden, and expect superchargers there too. :P

My hard drives..

120MB (1991)
250MB (1994)
850MB (1996)
10GB (1999ish)
200GB (2003ish)
1T (2005ish)
2T (2009ish)

I haven't really bought new harddrives in the last ~12 years, except for a new machine which got a "brand new" 1T drive, 6 years ago. I yearn for PB drives. By now, we should have multi-PB drives, but tech has slowed down due to waiting for a tech shift. Shingle drives were 'the shit' 13 years ago, but alas, the market thought they sucked. I'm waiting for some really big ones.

Sure, SSD's are great for low latency, but we need some Very Large, Very Long Term storage drives. I do hope Cera will solve that. These things might become the new 'Very Large CD' thingies. I do remember writing out CD after CD after CD around '99-'01' because my tiny 10GB drive couldn't store the hundreds of CD's I'd written out. These days, that is not a problem.

Uh, yes I have. The amount of new content for TV seems to be shrinking every day. Lots of series doesn't seem to have an announced date for next season. It'll be a very boring fall and winter, tv-wise.

It's a rather tiny amount, released over 30 years. It's entirely fine.

It only contains 1500Bq per liter. Health Canada puts the limit at Bqs from tritium at 7000Bq per liter for drinking water.