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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • FTA:

    The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

    So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

    The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

    Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

    I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.






  • loyalty is earned

    For me, it’s not even that. Loyalty is not owed, nor is it earned. It is nothing more than a description of behavior.

    Think of it this way: I always do my grocery shopping at Target instead of Walmart, even if I see that something is slightly cheaper at Walmart I’ll still most likely go to Target for it. Some might see that and say, “Look, he has loyalty to Target”, assuming that I shop at Target because I am loyal to that brand. But that’s backwards. Really it is that I can be described as ‘loyal’ because I consistently go to that brand. ‘Loyalty’ is a description of the behavior, not the cause of the behavior.

    it can be used against you

    Only if you have bought into the coercive bullshit that ‘loyalty’ is itself a reason to do something. Employee or customer loyalty is nothing more than an observation that people consistently support the company. That loyal behavior is seen because those people consistently have reasons to support the company. If you observe that people are loyally supporting your company, that is because they have reasons to do so (for example, you might be paying them to show up and do shit. Or maybe they think the shit they are doing is important or fun).

    People who want something from you for less than it is worth will try to convince you that loyalty is something you owe them or that they have earned from you because if you believe the lie that loyalty is a reason for action that makes it easier to get you to give them something for free.


  • IMO acting out of loyalty is never good. That is a backwards application of the concept intended to make you to act against your own interests.

    Some people like to flip the idea of loyalty around from a description of behavior to a reason for behavior as a method of manipulating other people.

    Like, if people see me consistently supporting my friends even when that is difficult they might think I’m ‘loyal’, but that’s backwards. I’m not supporting them because I am loyal, I support them because I like them and want them to succeed (and hopefully they’ll support me too). If someone wants loyalty from me, that’s an immediate red flag that tells me they either don’t understand why I do things, or they don’t care and just want me to do whatever they want.



  • Previously my server was just a Debian box where I had a ‘docker’ directory with a bunch of .sh files containing ‘docker run’ commands (and a couple of docker-compose files for services that that have closely related containers). That works really well, it’s easy to understand and manage. I had nginx running natively to expose stuff as necessary.

    Recently I decided to try TrueNAS Scale (I wanted more reliable storage for my media library, which is large enough to be annoying to replace when a simple drive fails), and I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s kind of a pain in the ass for running containers since the documentation is garbage. The web interface is kind of nice (other than constantly logging me out), but the learning curve for charts and exposing services has been tough, and it seems that ZFS is just a bad choice for Docker.

    I was attracted to the idea of being able to run my services on my NAS server as one appliance, but it’s feeling like TrueNAS Scale is way too complicated for home-scale (and way too primitive for commercial, not entirely sure what market they are aiming for) and I’m considering dumping it and setting up two servers, one for NAS and for running my containers and VMs.



  • all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth

    Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.



  • Does Singer explore how the limits of one’s knowledge about the impacts of their actions might play into the decisions?

    Like, I could send $5 to some overseas charity, but I don’t have a good way to know how that money is being used. Conversely, I could use it locally myself to reduce suffering in a way I can verify.

    It seems to me that morally I should prioritize actions I know will reduce suffering over actions that may reduce suffering but that I cannot verify. Verification is important because immoral actors exist, so I can’t just assume that moral actions that I delegate to other actors will be carried out. Since it’s easier to have good knowledge about local actions (in particular those I execute personally), this would tend to favor local actions.