Instead NHTSA still allows automatic high beams, which blast you instead in the US... Or just regular old drivers that don't realize/care. Even as a pedestrian, I constantly see people driving through my neighborhood with high beams on... and these are side streets with a 20mph/30kph speed limit. Anecdotally at least people in Europe are a lot better about only turning high beams on outside of city limits
The third sentence got to what my objection was going to be. It's fun trying to make the thing do what you want it to do! That's why many of us like computers. It's the randomness that sucks and makes the process unsatisfying.
I've worked with folks like the ones he cites. I've been jealous of their ability to absorb new things, but then you realize they're absolutely allergic to any kind of maintenance or responsibilities beyond "build, build, build".
It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.
Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...
The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.
Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.
Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.
i use revolut in the eu and disposable cards work. its legal because kyc is only between you and your bank (revolut is a bank operating out of latvia), they are not required or allowed to give your personal info to anyone other than payment processors and police.
Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.
Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.
I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.
Every once in awhile my background wallpaper goes from "normal" to "blurry mess". It seems to correlate with low battery but not perfectly. I'm not quite sure what's going on.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This works better in greenfield deployments than in existing ones. We all know AI "hallucinates". This is reasonably easy to work around on new code where you can take any number of paths to get the right answer.
In existing deployments, being flat-out wrong has a greater cost. I've worked with AI in a ton of examples (working in existing codebases, troubleshooting system problems, etc) where it simply wasted my time, and it would have been better to solve the problem myself.
Sure, but typically desalination plants are located in a single physical place, so a discharge pipe dumping brine 24x7 is bad for all of the things around it, as the local concentration is extremely high.
The short version is brine is weird: it's surprisingly resistant to diffusing and tends to flow more like an immisicible fluid. So you have to put quite a lot of effort into getting it to actually disperse rather then just fall to the seafloor.
That's silly, you'd mechanically mix it with seawater rather than wait for it to diffuse. The concern would be the volume of desalinated water extracted from the local region versus the flux from ocean current. As long as that ratio is acceptable there won't be any long term problem.
Alternatively, in the absence of sensible regulations a cutthroat operator devoid of ethics constructs a plant that dumps concentrated brine in the immediate vicinity because that's the cheapest approach. Then reactionary elements raise talking points about environmental damage and pretend that it's a difficult problem to solve. Business as usual.
I wonder what the linear diffusion gradient would look like for that. Like the perforated garden hoses or whatever for soaking soil. Aquatic organisms grow so quick though very curious on the constraints for something like this.
I liked the idea of loading it up on a ship that sails out releasing as it goes out and back. Make it solar powered or even go old school with literal sails.
I thought they tend to pipe far out and discharge as far below the surface as possible, since there is a lot of surface life and it is less damaging this way.
Ships (with long submerged pipes) would be prone to weather events and generally less reliable than an installed pipe. Perforation would be prone to clogging from build up so a nonstarter I would expect. Adding flex tubing and a relocation robot would be a maintenance headache as well. Not sure there is an easy optimization.
Ships wouldn't need a long submerged pipe. It'd just need a small hole like a bilge drain or maybe a live well on a fishing boat. Just let the boat cruise around slowly draining back into the ocean.
As for surface life, I'm no oceanographer, but is that really the most vulnerable place? The surface is where fresh water rain meets the ocean, so that would dilute the salinity during storms. However, there's nothing to say that another pump couldn't be pulling from the ocean and mixing the brine into that so it's diluted before and not just pouring brine straight into the ocean
I think your sense of scale is off. 90% of sea life is on the surface. 0.029% of ocean water is replenished from rainfall annually. Desalination concentrates are absolutely toxic to life. The current daily volume of brine discharge would require more than half the tankers in the world to be filled and discharged every single day. They would of course not last long with such a routine.
Is that a total for all of the oceans? I understand that as a whole, rainfall is literally but a drop in the ocean. However, confined just to the local area where the rain is falling, the area’s salinity has to change. Just like adding the the desalinated brine is a minuscule amount compared to the whole ocean, it has large effect locally.
Regardless, it is totally possible to reintroduce the brine back to the ocean in a way to not be a shock to the local area. We have just chosen to make it harder on ourselves for some illogical reason.
In my opinion you are hand-waving away a difficult engineering problem and proposing a naive solution as if it would solve a problem that has already been partially solved, by rejecting all the work that has already been done on it. Don't dump on the surface, don't burn millions of tons of fuel a year to do it, study what has been done and improve on it instead.
I like this! Though I’m not sure the math works. That page says ideal efficiency for that system would be something like 0.75 kWh/m^3. Compared to 4000 to 5000 kWh/m^3 of diesel. Now we don’t need to be efficient since the point is to use up our “fuel” and we don’t need to cary cargo for this to make sense but with numbers like that, I don’t think our boat will be able to make enough power to move at all.
And it doesn't even need to be a rigid pipe. A flexible pipe made out of, say, waterproof fabric, could be cheaply made to extend miles while remaining open due to the pressure of the water pumped into it.
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