I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don’t know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there’s maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you’ll see most posts have less than ten comments.

Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it’s kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.

The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they’ve essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.

In large part I think it’s because Lemmy’s discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it’s kind of on purpose it’s still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.

One of Lemmy’s key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there’s really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.

On a more personal note, I feel like I’m vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it’s dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I’m just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line “butter spread over too much bread” it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I’ve had a few so I’m rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.

Epoxy coated rebar is already a thing, so insulated rebar shouldn’t be that big of a deal - if epoxy isn’t enough already.

Sorry if I came out like I’m trying to discredit the idea, rather I was just trying to put more information out there - the linked article is fairly light on details.

Like, if your primary business is solar, and as a profitable side project you also produce food, what’s the actual issue there?

There isn’t one. But it’s somewhat concerning that it was more viable for the owner to become a power plant than to run their farm as a farm.

It’s a dodge since the farm mentioned is historic farmland. They aren’t allowed to stop farming and just put up solar.

When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.

In Kominek’s case, he literally bet the farm in order to finance the roughly $2 million solar arrays.

“We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank,” he says. “If this doesn’t work, we lose the farm.”

From: Original NPR story

If anything it seems like a clever way around zoning. Reading between the lines it seems they view the crops as kind of a bonus, not half the point like the original article makes it seem.

This seems to largely be a “retelling” of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.

The original story from NPR says that they’re able to drive their tractor between the panels. It’s interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that’s how they’re making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they’re required to do for historic reasons.

Do you have any more information on this? A quick search largely just shows results about how firefighters need to be careful since the panels can look bad but still be producing voltage and are a shock hazard.

Not an expert, but my gut reaction is not really. The panels themselves are largely glass, aluminum and silicon, with fairly small amounts of doping agents. There are electronics but since they’re outside they’re largely encased in something, wiring which would be plastic and copper or possibly aluminum, and then the structure itself which is going to be steel and concrete.

Solar panels are significantly more sturdy than one would think given they are essentially a giant piece of glass. They’re usually rated to 12mm hail or more, which would normally absolutely devastate a crop. They don’t really go bad either they just become less efficient over time. There’s no moving parts to wear, no liquids, and in some designs very little in the way of electronics to go bad.

Essentially, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be more harmful contamination from a diesel tractor driving around in the field or from a nearby coal power plant than from any kind of solar array as long as it didn’t have like, lead legs or something.

That being said, these kind of projects have been shown a lot but they’re unlikely to be used in most large scale farming - they usually interfere with any machines used to plant or harvest, and are only really well suited to a few crops. Parking lots are a much easier target for this type of solar project.

Is it possible to grab the first few hundred kb and grab a frame?

Otherwise I’d say a play button that indicates it’s from catbox and whatever metadata you can grab like file size or length.

From what I’ve seen this has been turned upside down by… well essentially automation, just not the kind everyone is afraid of.

Between better techniques and tools, a lot of construction is significantly faster than it used to be, to the point that a job that’s smaller has enough… I guess “opportunity” cost that it can be significantly less profitable.

Let’s say I’m a plumber. In the 80s, I would use copper pipe and have to solder all the connections - even a small job would take a long time - on the order of days. If I do a small house it takes way less time than a big house.

But now instead I would put in long lines of PEX with crimp on connectors. It’s like 4x as fast so it should be 4x cheaper right? Except now I have to drive to 4 different jobs to work all day, set up and tear down 4 times, deal with 4 different customers and invoices, etc. OR I can do 1 big house and make essentially the same money since I cut out all the extra work.

Add to that that most people are going to use more expensive finishes on larger houses that I basically just take a percentage of, and they might request something specialty and working on small affordable houses seems like a terrible business plan.

As someone who works with people in residential construction fairly often, this is the answer - and it’s why they don’t build new “starter” homes anymore. It’s very difficult to turn a profit on a single family home that would be considered affordable most places.

Basically, its very little extra effort and expense to build a luxury house compared to an inexpensive one, and your profit margin goes from very thin to decent.

Anecdotally in my area, most residential new construction is going to retirees who have a nest egg and the sale now very expensive house, or couples who sold an inherited house. Occasionally there are people who are remotely working or people building as an investment property, but they’re in the minority.

I would hope eventually it would pull the instance icon, which should help. Right now they all just use a generic one for whatever instance it is.

To be fair, I don’t think satire in any way is bad, or that it should be dumbed down - but there are often legitimate issues with the way it’s seen to the point of it becoming a meme.

Yes.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161208330904

Direct link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120

Not my field but takeaways from a quick glace are that they note that the more energy dense they make it the worse it is at being concrete, and that their 10kwh number needs 45m³ of concrete. That would be 15x15x0.2m or like 55ftx55ftx8in which isn’t crazy but it’s a pretty decent amount.

Except that nefarious is not a direct synonym for criminal. Nefarious has a subtext of specific underhanded malicious intent, whereas criminal doesn’t have the same intentional connotations.

If one were to read about a “Criminal website”, it might have instructions on how to make a bomb or something like that, whereas a “nefarious website” is likely to be read as looking normal but stealing your information.

By calling the sorting nefarious, OP has (likely) unintentionally implied that there is an underlying sinister reason for the issues, which is not likely to be the case.

I’d love some kind of per community bias adjustment even for subscribed communities. Like, I don’t really want to remove them cause memes are great, but because !memes@lemmy.world and 196 post so often my subscribed feed is pretty dominated by them no matter how I sort it.

For “All” some kind of adjustment based on subscribers makes sense, but I don’t even know if that’s possible given the way Lemmy works. Maybe a “show me less” button that moves the same bias adjustment just for communities you’re not subscribed to?

Again, large DC fast chargers are not for individual homes. Home 240v EVSEs run about 5-10kw and cost $500ish.

350kw chargers do exist and are not just marketing - they just aren’t being installed normal people’s houses. Here’s a DC fast charger for sale:

https://www.power-sonic.com/product/evdc-360na/

It uses 480v three phase at up to 440a to accomplish it. No one is going to get that in a residential setting. The unit itself probably costs on the order of $200k, and that wouldn’t include the construction of the site or any installation costs from the electrical company.

I don’t think the intention is for the average home to charge at these rates, but rather for charging stations to be faster. In large part even with 350kw DC fast charging stations (which already exist) the battery is the limiting factor, not the charger.

Essentially, yes these would kind of only be installed at electrical sub stations.

DC fast charging, which this almost certainly refers to, isn’t done at 240 it’s done at the pack voltage which is usually between 300 and 900v. Most cars use 400v, Hyundai and Kia use 800v. The Hummer EV (and other forthcoming big GM vehicles) uses a clever pack that operates at 400v but can switch from parallel to series and charge at 800v. The “good” chargers go up to 1000v 500a.

So to get that same roughly 170kw at 400v is 425a - so a lot of chargers already exist that could handle a 30kwh pack just fine.

At full tilt 1000v 500a a charger could deliver roughly 80kwh in 10 minutes, (assuming it didn’t limit itself because of the heat) which is a lot but it’s not getting you 700 miles of range.