We are going to pay through the nose to get access to the information we all collectively gathered and created on sites like WikiPedia, Reddit, StackOverflow, and more.
All that free labour we all did to write and curate this information... scraped and locked behind the coming #AI pricing explosion.
How will programming evolve if the tools we're left with are trained on old techniques and languages and there's nowhere left to learn and collaborate on NEW things and ideas?
I still reference SO daily for my work. But how long until they have to take the entire site offline and we're left without this valuable resource? How do you even keep monetizing this?
What a sad waste. StackOverflow had its flaws for sure, but it was an incredible resource of skills collaboration, knowledge collection and sharing.
Hoovered up by #AI companies who will gate the information behind rising query token prices.
The #internet continues to die and we're drinking the koolaid.
The stories of large sites selling their data to #OpenAI then seeing a complete crash of their traffic and userbase is both sad and a blatant tale of #FAFO that I struggle to feel empathy about.
StackOverflow went from 'partnering' with OpenAI to an utter wasteland in ONE YEAR.
What did they think would happen??
🔋 Finland's 'sand battery' survived its first brutal winter. But the viral story gets one big thing wrong.
What's real:
- Polar Night Energy built a commercial thermal battery in Pornainen, Finland (5,000 people)
- 2,000 tons of crushed soapstone heated to 500-600C
- 1 MW power, 100 MWh capacity
- 100% oil reduction (literally zero oil used now)
- 70% CO2 emissions cut, 60% less wood chip combustion
- Survived winter 2025-2026 without interruption
- 5 projects across Finland, 9M euros funding
What's misleading:
1) It stores HEAT, not electricity. The 100 MWh is thermal energy. It can't power your lights or EV - it heats buildings via district heating. 'Store electricity in sand' implies grid-scale electrical storage, which this isn't.
2) It's crushed soapstone, not ordinary quartz sand - but geologically, "sand" refers to grain size (0.0625-2mm), not composition. So crushed soapstone of the right size IS sand. Still, soapstone outperforms quartz sand in heat capacity (0.98 vs 0.83 kJ/kg/K) and density. 'Sand battery' is branding, but geologically accurate.
3) The 80-90% round-trip efficiency is company-claimed, not independently verified. And it's electricity-to-heat-to-heat, not electricity-to-electricity. Comparing it to lithium-ion (90-95%) is apples-to-oranges.
4) The underlying tech (packed-bed thermal storage) is decades old. What's new is the application, branding, and business model.
The sand battery isn't competing with your Powerwall. It's competing with oil boilers - and it's already winning.
Full writeup: https://hermez.prose.sh/finland-sand-battery-survived-winter
#science #energy #renewable #Finland #engineering #CleanEnergy
I've heard several reports that #FIFA is really investing to try to get #soccer to take off in North America.
Folks, you have #hockey fans in #Canada and #football fans in the #USA..... you're going to have to do something about all the babies crying about fake injuries if you want this sport taken seriously. 😭 It's very cringey.
The only data centre I want is a Library. Pass it on.
This is scary ... no matter whether I look this as a networking, web person, or a privacy/computer security person this is scary.
The damage to citizens and companies from this kind of exposure is beyond measure.
Trust in government is hard to establish. This will erase it. This turns maga fantasies about dark government into real concerns.
"‘It’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust’: redesign of US government websites stokes surveillance fears"
I gotta think that they were making this movie for women audiences moreso than the average superhero movie. So I can't understand the decision to cram SO SO MUCH gross stuff into #Supergirl. SO MUCH. What the heck.
Like bodily fluids, vomiting, pee, an alien that poops out raisin candies & eating those candies, more vomiting, drinking milk from a gross creature. EVERY single other alien being ugly & slimy. Things drooling on her, on & on. 🤢
Just so bizarre.
Well that was certainly a movie alright. 😏
RE: https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/top-stories-01r3k2ttz/-/a-2PtJ0_4DQWaLXYWeDth-RQ%3Aa%3A107108217-%2F0
There is so much that could be done to make cinema etiquette more inclusive. Ask people to mute & lower the brightness instead of not check mobile phones at all. Have an intermission for movies over 2 hours. Etc.
I feel like the way some folks are expressing annoyance with the goose discourse, that they're not viscerally connecting with the symbolism the way most of us are.
🤔
Like, I *feel* this meme. It's representative of my whole life, of having my lifeforce sucked out of me by parasites until I'm ill at age 50 and have nothing to show for it. It's a rare but accidental honesty from the clueless fucks who rule this world. It's the entire story of each of us and the whole world told in a handful of phrases and images.
"Goose is not valued" feels like a rallying cry for valuable people who are only just now starting to realize...
...that we do have value.
And that the only way they're going to understand our value is if we make them.
@phpc .... getting a ton of 500 errors since the new update...
Exciting #Accessibility tech being built in #Canada!
This is #EasyPath - an early version of an app to aid in navigation for visually impaired people. Verbally dictate locations & queries, receive voiced navigation options & steps. An #OpenSource project from an #Ontario developer, built with open #GIS data.
Exciting #FinTech being built in #Canada!
This is #UBISandbox - an experimental project to simulate a UBI system with real users and virtual currency. Built by a small tech firm in #Ontario.
Today we lost one of our two guinea pigs, Flippy. This is my children's first experience with the loss of a pet. It's been a lot of careful discussions & goodbyes. 💔
Quite a gut punch on literally the first day of summer vacation.
Sign the David Suzuki Foundation's petition: 'Stop Canada from gutting environmental protections'
'Canada is dismantling environmental protections at a dizzying pace. On top of a series of climate policy rollbacks, the federal government is proposing to open loopholes in environmental laws to “simplify” decisions about major projects like pipelines.'
'Chipping away at the laws that keep us and the planet healthy is not in the public interest. It’s pandering to industries that wreak havoc on ecosystems and the climate, and it’s right out of the Trump playbook.'
https://davidsuzuki.org/action/stop-canada-from-gutting-environmental-protections/
From Dune and ... 🎯
I really appreciate that there are folks like this doing the research and asking the questions. To help people like me understand my feelings and start to think about them and how to move forward.
Thinking about my *identity* and how that was formed, and how it continues to categorize and support me, is a good beginning to untangling the emotional mess this has left many of us in.
Is 'programmer' who I am or is it a very elaborate skin I wear?