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aquaticsunset commented on Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities   kevin.burke.dev/kevin/nor... · Posted by u/kevinburke
jcarrano · 7 months ago
If PG&E could be undercut by 25%, then why are there no private companies doing it? Either it is not as profitable as the author claims, or PG&E's monopoly is due to state regulations (I don't know enough about the specifics) and it would be quite contradictory to demand the state solve the problems it created.

Overall it reads like any other socialist argument for nationalizing (in this case "municipalizing") companies, which does not work both on theoretical grounds and based on historical experience. The claim "Walnut Creek could borrow from its utility in recessions, and loan money during booms" is laughable. We know how that ends: the city would finance its deficits with utility money until the company is bankrupt.

aquaticsunset · 7 months ago
Municipal utilities exist everywhere. I'm not sure why you're being all hypothetical about it. They work well and for many reasons discussed here, sound like a good fit for Walnut Creek.
aquaticsunset commented on Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the whole internet?   newyorker.com/news/annals... · Posted by u/mitchbob
xnx · 7 months ago
The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.
aquaticsunset · 7 months ago
I take this as "nobody, including the competitors, think TikTok will actually go away"
aquaticsunset commented on Is the world becoming uninsurable?   charleshughsmith.substack... · Posted by u/spking
consp · 7 months ago
Don't know about the us but here we have fire breaks everywhere in the form of low depth waterways (non navigable). They also act as backup water reserves when the mains runs dry. So by design only parts of the neighborhood will burn down.
aquaticsunset · 7 months ago
Yep, those exist across the western US too. I think many people are underestimating the scale and intensity of the winds California experienced. A single house on fire with relatively regular weather conditions isn't likely to spread to others - despite the "ha American houses dumb and wood" sentiment on this topic, there are building codes and fire safety is absolutely considered. But the Santa Ana winds are extremely dry and extremely powerful.

It's a hard engineering problem to solve, but an increasingly urgent one now that these major events are becoming more intense and frequent.

aquaticsunset commented on Is the world becoming uninsurable?   charleshughsmith.substack... · Posted by u/spking
diogocp · 7 months ago
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.

Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.

When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.

Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.

I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.

aquaticsunset · 7 months ago
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.

The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.

The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.

aquaticsunset commented on Sonos CEO steps down after app update debacle   reuters.com/business/reta... · Posted by u/saaaaaam
aquaticsunset · 7 months ago
I'm clearly in the minority, but the new app is leaps and bounds more usable and stable for me. The functionality gaps don't affect me - those features weren't things I used. And it's way, way more responsive and consistent than the old one.

Perhaps it's just my specific network situation. The old app was a constant headache of inconsistent state - music playing while it showed nothing playing, pressing commands (like skipping a track or pausing) but those commands never happening on the device. It also took a very long time to show my entire device list. Never quite worked with the Roam like it should have.

aquaticsunset commented on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15   lapcatsoftware.com/articl... · Posted by u/latexr
thomascountz · 8 months ago
Maybe the Datadog Flare works like this?
aquaticsunset · 8 months ago
The first time I used a flare with their support agents, it truly felt like magic. It's such a clever way to perform data collection for a specific, imperative need without doing a dragnet of constant use telemetry (as far as I'm aware)
aquaticsunset commented on Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps   nextcloud.com/... · Posted by u/tomrod
TheChaplain · a year ago
I've run Nextcloud for almost 3 years now via docker on a vps , it hosts my contacts, calendars and files. There is a apache reverse proxy in front of it, and a postgresql-database in the back.

Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new updated images.

Occasionally it whines about missing indices, but that is easily fixed using the occ command line tool. The clients real IP is forwarded by the proxy.

What I want to say is just that Nextcloud works fine.

aquaticsunset · a year ago
This has been my experience as well. The only major instability was due to the Ubuntu snap based runtime, which I migrated away from a few years ago.
aquaticsunset commented on How we migrated Gov.uk notify to AWS elastic container service   gds.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/1... · Posted by u/dmdmdmdm
politelemon · a year ago
Ecs isn't exactly tying, because ultimately it's still docker containers, so moving out wouldn't be a tricky prospect. A cloud agnostic solution though would likely mean k8s and bring with it much more complexity and overhead (and is also a form of lock in).
aquaticsunset · a year ago
I half agree with you. We just went through an ECS to EKS migration, and we're still incredibly dependent on AWS. The hard part isn't the container orchestration system or even containerizing your workload - it's all the other crap you need to develop and maintain around it. Your databases, networking stack, MQ brokers, secrets managers, and everything else are still stuck to whatever cloud provider you're using.

EKS really isn't much harder to build out than ECS - but it doesn't set you up to be much more cloud agnostic.

aquaticsunset commented on I mapped almost every USA traffic death in the 21st century   roadway.report... · Posted by u/Bencarneiro
RecycledEle · a year ago
There would be unintended consequences from car helmets.

Maybe they would interfere with looking over your shoulder.

aquaticsunset · a year ago
Maybe, but maybe not? Even if the data showed it was a huge life saving factor, I can't see helmet usage being enthusiastically adopted.
aquaticsunset commented on Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider   apnews.com/article/car-de... · Posted by u/achristmascarl
MangoCoffee · a year ago
why didn't Silicon Valley try to disrupt this market?
aquaticsunset · a year ago
It's complicated. The amount of industry knowledge needed is huge - not something someone with good software expertise can just leave on the fly.

It's also been, traditionally, a crazy business with dozens and dozens of vendors that a dealership can choose from. CDK and Reynolds might have pretty big market share, but a lot of that is because they integrate with zillions of tiny vendors.

Lastly, I just don't think there's been enough money in it to try. The industry as a whole is lucrative but you're not gonna get rich trying to dominate a single aspect of it. COVID represented a permanent shift in how software was viewed in the industry. Dealerships have to spend more on higher quality software, because they simply can't afford to stay in business without it.

The closest company I can think of that's trying to disrupt this is Tekion.

u/aquaticsunset

KarmaCake day323July 9, 2018View Original