A modern F150 doesn't have "max utility". It's for site foremen and driving to Walmart.

Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".

Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.

At least it's better than sending peasants into the mountains and building solar panels on the flat field that has been growing crops for thousands of years.

Bring back those big beautiful chimeys, burning their beautiful coal and blanketing us in the warm glorious embrace of soot and fly ash.

In this particular case I believe the mountain is largely karst (limestone) and the panels substantially reduced erosion -- particularly of soil -- leading to an increase in fauna that thrive in the shade.

As others have said, it's hardly waste, it's an installation with a 30-year lifespan.

Still much better and lower impact than whatever the fuck we'd been doing for the past 200 years

Yes let us wait for an optimal aesthetic solution for another 50 years while we choke on our own fumes. Plenty of time to rearrange the deck chairs.

China already has one (if we're insisting on solar power generation) - 700,000 sq. mi of desert.

It's also not just aesthetic - flat terrain is just so much more practical.

> flat terrain is just so much more practical.

Outside of peak summer it's much more optimal to have a south facing slope actually.

Additionally, solar panels can become too hot and that reduces their efficiency. Also, deserts are famously known for dust. Since it rarely rains, you get a dust buildup, further compromising solar efficiency in deserts.

I'm not saying that deserts are a bad place for solar. What I'm trying to say is - it's often worse than people think and it requires special infrastructure.

I love how they’re just building and building, adding more and more capacity and people here are arguing whether it’s in the right location. It’s laughable.

Not much money * quite a lot of people = not very much money

(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).

And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.

The EU has not yet set a precedent for allowing breakaway states into full membership, so it's far from a given that an independent Scotland would be able to rejoin the EU.

Scotland is of enormous strategic importance due to its location relative to Russia's naval ports. An independent Scotland with no other backing would have minimal resources to monitor and deter Russian naval activity.

The precedent is now the promise to allow Ukraine into the EU.

I note that if you're looking for a weakly defended EU country reachable from the North Atlantic and quietly relying on the UK defence umbrella without admitting it, Ireland is already there.

That is an interesting precedent. However, Ukraine is not a breakaway state from an existing EU member state (or a state which has been in the EU). There are numerous regions in the EU on a similar path, and none have yet succeeded (including Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008).

I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.

In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.

There's no margin on averting the Climate Catastrophe!

Thin in form factor only! Phones and tablets represent the cutting edge of what humanity can mass-manufacture, and prices and difficulties are only going up.

These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.

It's a one-way journey, unless we can adapt quickly enough to a drastic reduction in the general availability of compute power. IMO, our reliance on bloated tech is an existential risk, and reverting to some reasonable baseline needs addressing as urgently as any other current crisis.

I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.

>home computers are replaced by thin clients

Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.

I think in the mid-term, many of these AI companies are going to run out of cash.

Users are more and more going to be able to run models locally so it's a race to nowhere (all you need to have a very good model, is to have a Mac with 128 GB of memory, but at 16 GB you already have something usable but not so nice)

The big winners are going to be the memory makers

Not if the browser rendering is done in the cloud. All you're looking at is a screen on a server somewhere, not actually the one on your phone.

RDP is the future? Makes sense. It's been a while since money was poured into networking.

Microsoft sells Windows 365 which is essentially cloud VMs with RDP to give to workers instead of employees running things locally.

Cloud gaming continues to grow. Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Plus, and a number of smaller companies sell remotely rendered gaming services for subscriptions.

That was Opera Mini's schtick. What's old is new again!

Nobody wants to run browsers in the cloud. Too expensive. We really are getting the worst of all worlds with this, where we have to do all the expensive computations and all our subscriptions do is flip a flag in some database somewhere so that we're allowed to run a few milliseconds/month of computation on their servers while we're providing vast CPU resources to the rendering, and if the company is even half clever, WASM execution that actually costs money.

Exceptions for services that actually cost some non-trivial money per consumer, but there's a lot of crap like an alarm clock or your smart watch's subscription for fitness tracking or other completely trivial bullshit charging $10/month out there.

Maybe it will incentivize the introduction of more reasonable browser technology. /s

I refuse to use VS Code on principle. It has captured a staggering percentage of software development, across many software disciplines. Somehow ARM/Keil has been persuaded to go all-in on VS Code and will deprecate their "legacy" IDE, which will cause trouble for any hold-out embedded firmware developers.

> It has captured a staggering percentage of software development

In hindsight it's obvious why: it was the only free editor that has a product mindset and a product team behind. Microsoft put heavy hitters on it, some of their best engineers, treated it as some companies treat their core products.

Other IDEs/editors are mostly open source with no real direction and resources, or are proprietary expensive software.

It's unfortunate but to compete with VS Code you need a lot.

I believe their legacy IDE was a fork of Eclipse.

Considering VS Code is a kind of a spiritual successor of Eclipse, especially as it was created by Eric Gamma, this even makes sense in a way.