> I'm no mechanical engineer, but can't any motor be run with greater power if the fuel mixture settings are remapped?
In a word, no. You can probably squeeze a little more power out of a motor by remapping the control system but there's a limit. There's no amount of tuning that will make the 200hp motor in my Toyota develop 1,000hp.
Also this isn't really the point of right to repair. There's a lot more to this than farmers bypassing emission controls. The issue is when something breaks can you fix it before the window for planting or harvesting or fertilizing or whatever passes? John Deere wanted money for repairs but couldn't scale up the staff to actually deliver it on time and that scarcity made it prohibitively expensive. It also allows them to sell a new tractor by simply refusing to ever fix the perfectly good existing one.
When I worked in a custom harvest operation in the mid 2000s we were running 1970s John Deere combines. The nature of custom harvest is the customer hires you to harvest a field right now because it has to be dry enough to sell but there's rain coming and every day is another chance for it to all literally go up in smoke in a fire.
We bought a lot of John Deere parts from the local dealer but we also fabricated a lot of parts or modified them to do what we needed, especially when parts (understandably!) weren't available 30 years later. One example is modifying the suspension to handle 47 degree inclines. From the factory they could physically only do 12.5. Someone in Oregon built a conversion kit. It put a lot of extra stress on the machines so we had to do constant reinforcement and repair in the field. It would not have been economical to have a John Deere tech come out to the field and patch something up three times a week and they wouldn't have known how to fix a Hillco leveler anyway. This is what people mean when they say "right to repair". It includes the ability to modify for your purpose, and keep something going when support ends.
It doesn't really matter if you can justify the technological developments because they are inevitable. What matters is what society does with those advancements. So a utilitarian perspective might work, but we have to apply it to the social response to technology, not the development of technology.
The turbojet or maybe some material science that made the turbojet feasible is a technological advancement. It can provide benefits to socity in the form of clean(er than coal) power or affordable transportation. Using that technology to build private jets while maintaining a social class that uses them for harmful purposes is a social problem, not a technological one.
It's a similar argument for the machine gun or nuclear weapons. Arguably if you make a terrifying enough weapon people will refuse to fight wars. So from that perspective inventing the Maxim gun (technological) was moral but using it to fight WWI (social) wasn't.
A friend of mine that works in habitat restoration had an interesting take. Technological developments in logging outpaced conservation efforts and by the time we figured out what was happening we had done irreversible damage to ecosystems. The trees that were clearcut to make neighborhoods like Ballard in Seattle had truly enormous old growth trees that would take centuries to replace. Like so big you could live in the stumps.
Here's [1] an example from farther north but this was apparently common in what is modern day Seattle as well.
For a more modern example napkin math says you can go 1.2 miles in a modern Prius for 1 hour of H100 time.
The Prius gets 57mpg and gallon of gasoline is 33.7kWh for 57/33.7=0.597kWh per mile. An nVidia H100 consumes 0.7 kW. 0.7/0.597=1.18 miles in a modern Prius for an hour of H100 time. I'm not sure how much H100 time is consumed per token or kilotoken or whatever so I can't comment on the scale of ecological damage caused by AI and data centers in general. I suspect it's at least several orders of magnitude off from cars but it's definitely not nothing. This also ignores a ton of other factors like water use and vehicle emissions.
This came up on the Lunch Money livestream yesterday. The entire episode is worth a listen but here's the relevant sections:
Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."
Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."
Yes, Kagi was sufficiently confused as to what "Data blades" are that it actually thought I was looking for replacement woodworking blades. "DataBlade" finds the IBM Informix product.
I performed both searches on Kagi and didn't see anything about IBM. I do see results for "DataBlade" and "Data blade database" but I didn't try those specific variations after my first two attempts returned nothing of interest. That's too much effort to decipher a HN post.
Steam includes an excellent compatibility layer for Windows games on Linux. In my experience it’s a more stable Windows API than what Microsoft offers. They also have a generous return policy if the game doesn’t work.
> If you're fighting the executive branch, then legality goes out the window
No it doesn’t. It’s enshrined in the constitution. The entire point of the United States is to be able to change the system. I’m struggling to imagine a worse take than this.
This is an oversimplification. I am not in favor of shooting the police in the neck but I absolutely will not tolerate an hindering of peaceful first amendment expression even when it happens in proximity to violence. What are the police even protecting us from at that point?
Nobody doubts they are making money. It’s literally a nostalgia cash grab. The question is how much that money will cost WotC in reputational harm and loyal customers.
Specifically you need the TZDATA history of the local Postgres instance. Is the TZDATA version persisted at Postgres start time? Is it possible to query this information without recording it in the schema manually?
Why would queries on TIMESTAMP not produce human readable strings? Postgres has defaulted to a human readable mask for timestamp presentation for at least 25 years.
Yeah that's exactly what I am thinking. It could be a wrapper. But I think it would be better to take the (UTC) timestamp of the time of insertion instead of the TZDATA version itself. Then the Postgres instance can handle what version of TZDATA it had at that time.
In a word, no. You can probably squeeze a little more power out of a motor by remapping the control system but there's a limit. There's no amount of tuning that will make the 200hp motor in my Toyota develop 1,000hp.
Also this isn't really the point of right to repair. There's a lot more to this than farmers bypassing emission controls. The issue is when something breaks can you fix it before the window for planting or harvesting or fertilizing or whatever passes? John Deere wanted money for repairs but couldn't scale up the staff to actually deliver it on time and that scarcity made it prohibitively expensive. It also allows them to sell a new tractor by simply refusing to ever fix the perfectly good existing one.
When I worked in a custom harvest operation in the mid 2000s we were running 1970s John Deere combines. The nature of custom harvest is the customer hires you to harvest a field right now because it has to be dry enough to sell but there's rain coming and every day is another chance for it to all literally go up in smoke in a fire.
We bought a lot of John Deere parts from the local dealer but we also fabricated a lot of parts or modified them to do what we needed, especially when parts (understandably!) weren't available 30 years later. One example is modifying the suspension to handle 47 degree inclines. From the factory they could physically only do 12.5. Someone in Oregon built a conversion kit. It put a lot of extra stress on the machines so we had to do constant reinforcement and repair in the field. It would not have been economical to have a John Deere tech come out to the field and patch something up three times a week and they wouldn't have known how to fix a Hillco leveler anyway. This is what people mean when they say "right to repair". It includes the ability to modify for your purpose, and keep something going when support ends.