What is going on here? Why is everyone in this thread using 'pixels" to mean ppi? It seems unnecessarily confusing or even misleading. I mean blatantly a 6K monitor has more pixels than a 5K or 4K one, regardless of the pixel density.
Yes really. A pixel is a pixel. This dell monitor has pixels the size of boulders. Apple Pro Display XDR has 4.6m more pixels in a significantly smaller area creating a much denser display.
macOS can specify regions of the screen to be 1x. If I'm using Capture One or Lightroom, my photos are at normal resolution while the UI elements are "retina/2x".
You can configure macOS to scale everything more or less, just like you want it.
Same for Windows and Linux.
And you keep the crispness of the full pixel resolution for text and images.
Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one component generates code, more or less "intelligently", and others check it against the C, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and what-have-you specs, and the whole thing iterates until all the checking components are happy. The components can’t be completely separate, of course, they’d have to be more or less intermingled or convergence would be very slow (like when lcamtuf had his fuzzer generate a JPEG out of an empty file), but isn’t that basically what (large) neural networks are; tangled messes of interconnected functions that do things in ways too complicated for anyone to bother figuring out?
I don't want to defend the AI slop, but it's common for me to go on for a few weeks without being able to compile everything when doing something realy big. I can still compile individual modules and run their tests, but not the full application (which puts all modules together)... but it may take a lot of time until all modules can come together and actually run the app.
Eventually we reach some kind of local maximum for UI/UX. So much of these things are a function of the relative immaturity of the platforms. They're all also pretty low hanging fruit.
In some ways, this is happening at the moment with AI and LLMs. The tools available, how we prompt them, etc are all "UI/UX innovation" if you believe these things have a use.
If we have a huge platform shift in the future (LLMs, AR/VR, ???), we may start from zero and go through "inventing tabs" again until that platform becomes maximally optimised.
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.
Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...
My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.
My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.
So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.
To be fair Australia also has approximately infinitely more sun than most of Europe does. But true, we could be doing a lot better in the EU regardless
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.
My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.
I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.
I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).
It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.
All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.
EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.
What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?
Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.
That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.
£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.
If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).
I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.
But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.
I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.
I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.
Is there any truth to the climate sceptic claim that solar in the UK can’t generate useful power with our bad weather and cloud cover? I always said that it’s not like Germany has better weather but they have tons of solar. However it would be great to have an answer from the UK.
It definitely generates useful amounts of power, especially in the summer. The problem is that we still need gas plant, and the distribution infrastructure ready for the rest of the year when it isn't so effective.
Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.
They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.
It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.
We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.
I think this is the wrong framing. Nobody cares whether there's an LLM in their phone. What people do want is features like improved Siri (still, debatable beyond setting timers) or other improvements, that could potentially come from LLMs.... if they actually work. So far other providers (such as Amazon Alexa) have struggled to deliver a reliable voice assistant powered by LLMs.
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