Fully agree.
I went to school in Germany and many of our textbooks were free there.
Sometimes you would get a textbook that is already >= 10 years and out of shape but who cares?
Especially the basic knowledge does not change often.
Buying all these textbooks new every year feels like a scam to me as they are then only used for one year by the pupil.
Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price.
Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year.
Still, they were often seen as optional.
This seems quite strange to claim.
Basically every city in the developed world already has power plants on the outside and a lot of wires to get the electricity in
Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane.
At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle.
That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.
Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.
There are 30 year old still functioning panels in Australia.
Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected
The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average.
It exists and does degrade panels but the time horizon is pretty wide. Real world data shows something like 0.5% to 0.7% degregation per year on average.
At the start the degregation is higher and but it slows down with age.
So a 20 year old panel might be at around 80% in the worst case.
Often they are in much better shape.
This seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Marginally. Between 77F and 100F you only lose about 5%, so you still get 95% of the stated max efficiency. It’s basically negligible and not really relevant.
The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment.
I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied.
Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources.
You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
I was speaking to a Kuwaiti princeling a few years ago about solar and he just couldn’t get his head around zero marginal cost, the efficiency of assembly of the panels, and the economics that would drive the growth. We spoke for about half an hour and he kept bringing up that powerbrokers don’t care about the environment and I had to repeatedly point out that I hadn’t mentioned the environment once.
No I don't own them.
Some people here: https://www.mydealz.de/share-deal-from-app/2753917 mention as a downside that you have to connect to the manufacturer cloud to get the live production data from the interverter.
Otherwise it is truly "plug everything together and it works".
Crazy thing is, the cost of these systems has gone down even further since then.
You can get a 800w plug-in solar set with panels and an inverter for around 200€. Shipping might be 70€ or you can pick it up locally at the dealer.
Add another 50-100€ for attachment material and you are good.
So for 250 to 400€ you can get a system that will break even latest after four years, likely earlier.
Nothing will come close to Opus 4.6 here. You will be able to fit a destilled 20B to 30B model on your GPU.
Gpt-oss-20B is quite good in my testing locally on a Macbook Pro M2 Pro 32GB.
The bigger downside, when you compare it to Opus or any other hosted model, is the limited context. You might be able to achieve around 30k.
Hosted models often have 128k or more. Opus 4.6 has 200k as its standard and 1M in api beta mode.
There are local models with larger context, but the memory requirements explode pretty quickly so you need to lower parameter count or resort to heavy quantization. Some local inference platforms allow you to place the KV cache in system memory (while still otherwise using GPU). Then you can just use swap to allow for even very long contexts, but this slows inference down quite a bit. (The write load on KV cache is just appending a KV vector per inferred token, so it's quite compatible with swap. You won't be wearing out the underlying storage all that much.)
Regarding the $200 subscription.
For Claude Code with Opus (and also Sonnet) you need that, yes.
I had ChatGPT Codex GPT5.2 high reasoning running on my side project for multiple hours the last nights.
It created a server deployment for QA and PROD + client builds.
It waited for the builds to complete, got the logs from Github Actions and fixed problems.
Only after 4 days of this (around 2-4 hours) active coding I reached the weekly limit for the ChatGPT Plus Plan (23€).
Far better value so far.
To be fully honest, it fucked up one flyway script. I have to fix this now my self :D. Will write a note in the Agent.md to never alter existing scripts.
But the work otherwise was quite solid and now my server is properly deployed.
If I would switch between High reasoning for Planing and Middle reasoning for coding, I would get even more usage.
But seriously, I can't help but think that this proliferation of massive numbers of iterations on these models and productizations of the models is an indication that their owners have no idea what they are doing with any of it. They're making variations and throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.
Don't get me wrong, but somebody has to operate an exit node and somehow there needs to be a consensus on the protocol + routing.
If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself...
This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat.
Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
Agreed that nothing is fully trustless on Earth. The point isn’t eliminating operators, it’s avoiding single points of coercion and failure. One exit can be shut down but many exits and type of networks (includong more alternative infra like the Guifi.net’s meshnetworks in Spain for example) across jurisdictions raise the cost from “call a CEO” to sustained political pressure or directly a CEO that has control over an entire network and its also a billionaire CEO with a messiah complex, far-right leanings and tendency to drug abuse.
Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference.
Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
Got to say, I like the current Android versions.
In the early days I flashed my Motorola Defy every second month with some cool new ROM.
Always rooted and Xposed, always enabling something new.
Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need.
OneUI 8.0 and Android 16.
For work (app de) I also have a Pixel 7a, always with the newest Android Beta.
Also works well.
Even the entry level phones work OK to pretty good now.
My Samsung A16 5G (also for work) functions surprisingly well for 150€.
> Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need.
Maybe, but it is fully under Google and Samsung's control, and is choke full of spyware. You couldn't pay me to use a stock (Googled) Android phone for this reason alone.
Back when I used Android phones, tweaking was pretty important to me too. I still remember when I installed CyanogenMod on a Motorola XT1565, those were the days... Eventually, LineageOS, and then some new phones happened, not all of which were rootable, though I eventually ended up with a OnePlus 7 Pro which was pretty tweakable and even opened the possibility of bootloader re-locking, until a TWRP bug wiped my device and I pretty much stopped tweaking. Was never quite able to get EdXposed working right again...
How well is rooting supported on these newer Android versions/devices? If I install LineageOS on my device, for example, I can be reasonably sure that Magisk will work fine. But how well does it work on a stock, locked-down ROM?
Most devices doesn't have unlockable bootloaders now thus you can't even root them unless it was a popular device and a temporary /finicky hack was found.
Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price. Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year. Still, they were often seen as optional.
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