Here is an interactive heat map of electricity prices across the country. It can be broken down at state, congressional, county, and ZIP Code levels
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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The 49 MB webpage
Website bloat is a real thing. You’d think it’d be images but it’s ad tracking and all the other garbage. Stubham Bose details what comprises a modern webpage.
To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text.
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Wired headphones making a comeback
After years of decline in sales, wired headphones are making a comeback.
Maybe I gave up too easily. Recently, a quiet movement has grown in the shadows based on a controversial truth: wired headphones are better than Bluetooth. Sales are through the roof in recent months. You can often get better sound for the money with a wired pair, but it’s not just audio snobs either. Wired headphones are a full-blown cultural trend – a resurgence some tie to a broader anti-tech backlash. Whether it’s practical, political or aesthetic, one thing is clear. Wired headphones are back.
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A different MacBook Neo review
This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
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Why are programmers seeing AI differently?
Anil Dash shares insights related to why programmers view AI definitely than, artists or other creatives. It boils down to cultural and historical elements of software programming – sharing code and reducing rework. And how they view labor.
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for more of the hackers with soul to seize this moment of flux and use these tools to build. The economics of creating code are changing, and it can’t just be the worst billionaires in the world who benefit. The latest count is 700,000 people laid off in the last few years in the tech industry. We’ll be at a million soon, at the rate things are accelerating. Each new layoff announcement is now in the thousands.
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Even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work
Capitalism is so pervasive even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work
A more recent period of chatting work with a new agency offered improved conditions and pay, though still less than $4 an hour.
She said she knew the work would involve explicit content – but even so “sexting” was unpleasant.
“It’s kind of icky when you think about it, because you’ll have to do sexting a lot of times, like, several times in an hour because, you know, you’ll be talking to several fans all at once”.
She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.
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Enshittification explained and personified
The Norwegian Consumer Council created a video that encapsulated our modern dystopia, explaining it and also personifying it–enshittification.
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A prototype of an offshore wind farm data center
With the world’s growing for data centers, and the growing resistance to having them in communities, companies are looking for other ways to not only build the data centers but power them. Enter the offshore wind farm data center.
Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.
Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.
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The kids are discovering iPods
Over the next two decades, Apple released more than 20 versions of the iPod, with some capable of storing tens of thousands of songs and others costing as little as $49. The company eventually pulled back on the device as it focused on the iPhone. As of 2022, the iPod’s final year, Apple had sold an estimated 450 million.
Apple declined to comment.
The resurgence of the iPod is a sign that “people want digital that’s not connected, but not necessarily analog,” said Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who helped create the iPod. If the choice is “1,000 songs in my pocket, or unlimited songs in my pocket and 1,000 notifications every hour,” people don’t want the latter, he added.
“Apple should just bring them back — not the same way,” Mr. Fadell said. “I would do it differently. I would make it modern for the modern age.”
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The practicalities of having a robot in your house
“We basically created an algorithm for emotional intelligence,” he said.
“How does it work?” a woman in the group asked.
Skuler explained that one of his first realizations was that, unlike most other A.I. models, the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.
“But that opened up a whole new can of worms,” Skuler said. “How do you decide the right moment to engage someone without being annoying? How do you start talking in a way that makes them likely to respond?”
Math. A lot more math.