Glad to hear it - but cost of renewable energy isn't the software or hardware locked behind vendors. Its installers, wholesalers and permitting. Pricing is set to about where homeowners will be willing to pay and installers will make a good profit. If only it was a 5 year payback - we'd see it everywhere in NA.

Not sure cost saving is the priority.

I got solar installed by the local power company and while it's well done and was a great deal regarding the price, the inverter stats are locked behind a really terrible app. At least there isn't a subscription cost but I wouldn't be surprised if they add one someday.

Would gladly pay more for fully open and serviceable replacement.

I get that - but also solar should be cheap. If we lower the cost of power we knock off a lot of the bad externalities of power production and allow people to be more inventive with their power use.

Agreed - a lot of the inverters do some real BS moves around data management clearly a way to extract more value in a subscription mode. Its mind numbingly frustrating.

Price isn't determined by the cost of supply but by the value provided to the buyer.

The stats are the least of your problem, the bigger ones are remote updates, planned obsolescence, hacking and bricking.

Yes, and?

This project isn't being marketd to people who call up a company to white-glove the whole-home installation end-to-end. This is for DIYers who have enough knowledge to tinker with self-designed solar projects but not the EE degree required to engineer some of the more specialized equipment themselves.

I'll give a good example: I use solar to power a ham radio station for a weekend in the summer. However, nearly ALL of the equipment you can buy for the production and storage of solar power emits some degree of radio-frequency interference, which is bad when your whole goal is to power a very sensitive radio.

When it comes to charge controllers in particular, there are exactly two companies that claim to make RFI-quiet MPPT controllers. One has mixed reviews (some people say they work great, some say they are not any better than anything else), and one is very good but also very expensive for what you get. So, more open design and community feedback from people like me might get the cost of a reliable RFI-free charge controller down to where it should be.

That's especially nasty when you're doing LF or VLF because the frequencies of the switches in those things are right in the middle of the bands that you are trying to receive.

marketing.

They might enjoy the skywalker ranch general store though!

New subscription model coming to plastics! Products last only 13 weeks.

I know - long lived plastics are bad. We need some kind of middle ground thats as cheap as the current plastics and doesn't last as long.

Its called paper, wood, glass, ceramics or metal depending how long you want it to be around for and what you are putting in it.

Only lasts 13 weeks in soil. It presumably lasts a whole lot longer when you don't bury it in the ground.

I agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith is made of casein and formaldehyde. It was popular 100 years ago and there are plenty of pieces still around. I searched formaldehyde in the article but I din't find it, I'm not sure if they hide it or they are using a very different method.

We go through a lot of single-use plastics.

Is Micro$$lop banned?

Clarifying question -- what do you mean Gollum was not yet a Hobbit? I don't think he ever was - but a river folk before the ring deprived him wasn't he? I never read first edition so I suspect there are some differences as you allude. (ring not being the ring).

Actually - in the creative process did he kick off the Hobbit then expand into the world building as an after thought and turn the one ring into this wild expansive creative endeavor? I always assumed it had been pre-built in his mind then spilled out in ink (As a sequence of events).

In the original version, there is minimal physical description of Gollum (it was dark after all) and the ring was simply a magic ring that granted invisibility. Gollum lost it and IIRC he just let Bilbo go. They whole idea of him being some hobbit-like creature corrupted by the One Ring was not present at all. It was one of a series of fairy-tale adventures no more important than the trolls turning to stone. Bilbo needed a way to sneak around Smaug, so he found a magic ring.

It's doubtless still possible to find that version, I read it in an old country library that had it on the shelf since the 1950s.

https://www.ttrpbc.com/discussion/532/the-hobbit-first-vs-se... has the changes.

This is fun.

> There are of course other very minor changes. For instance, Gandalf tells Bilbo to bring out the chicken and tomatoes in the unrevised edition vs. the chicken and pickles in the revised edition. But I'll skip over these inconsequential changes.

Bit of medievalism there (tomatoes being a Colombian Exchange thing).

He knew about the umbrella and kept it in. It’s more likely Tolkien was concerned with the date and whether fresh tomatoes would be available than medievalism.

And yet he went on to include potatoes in LotR.

There's something so fundamentally European about potatoes, despite being (comparatively) new there. And British in particular. They're stodgy, bland, filling, comforting, and really tasty in a dull way. They displaced things like turnips, which had too much flavor and a dispiriting watery texture.

He could so easily have written that passage for turnips, but it would have been less comforting. (It is often read as if the word "potato" was used to translate some extinct native-European root vegetable, but I find that doubtful.)

Thanks - sounds like it was some reworking after building out the original story line to make the rest of it work. I enjoy the storyline that doesn't have to be tied into the main arc (ie trolls or fairy-tale adventure component).

Gollum was retconned to be a hobbit after the illustrations were done.

Gollum was a river hobbit corrupted by the ring

I'm curious how they define AGI technically. Seems like you would want that to be a tight definition.

Didn't they already define it as "a system capable of generating at least $100 billion in profit"

It just needs to be anything that will force OpenAI to IPO.

But without the date it seems very sensational in that it implies it is happening in realtime.

I don't know you have paypal and stripe in the same sentence. Paypal is not a great service at all.

I mean you could do what i did and turn off autocorrect…