Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).
The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.
> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language)
Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?
Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!
And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.
I believe Firefox use separate processes per tab and most of them are over 100MB per page. And that's understandable when you know that each page is the equivalent of a game engine with it's own attached editor.
A desktop app may consume more, but it's heavily focused on one thing, so a photo editor don't need to bring in a whole sound subsystem and a live programming system.
> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it
This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.
The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!
Excuse my naivety, but isn't it good if the same results get proofed in slightly different ways? This is effectively a replication, but instead of just the appliance of the experiments, you also replicate the thought process by having a slightly different approach.
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.
Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.
Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
> The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.
There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.
I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.
For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?
My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.
Unless you're already an expert in the topic a literature search is literally step 1 since you have to check if your idea has already been done before.
That's where your supervisor comes in. In most cases, they should be an expert in the field, and guide you towards a useful and novel problem.
Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.
Wage theft is the largest form of theft by a wide margin. Everything from not paying people at all for contracted work, forcing people to work overtime without additional pay, structuring contracts/agreements in terms of bonuses that can never be attained with the insane performance requirements, to paying people late.
To be fair, in most states you don't even have to sue to recover back wages. You just file a report with the state labor board, who are empowered to bring legal action on your behalf.
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
Disagree. There's lots of products and goods that have become less fancy as a result of changes in labor/material cost as industrialization ran its course and the old way is considered the fancy way.
Wood furniture joined with glue and pegs rather than inserts and screws. Solid wood furniture at all. Leather and natural fibers gave way to plastics. Ornate castings gave way to simple stampings and simply castings (where things are still cast).
I guess if we expand it worldwide that makes sense, though in a discussion about 96GB of RAM it feels like an apples to oranges comparison to bring in the entirety of the world. That is including a whole lot of people who probably couldn't afford the RAM or a car even if they saved most of their income for a decade.
My guess. Total energy consumption in 2024 was x. Total energy consumption in 2025 was x + y. For example, solar PV was installed and led to increased electricity consumption. Or more oil was extracted and used to drive cars around more.
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
Isn't it still flawed? If a coal plant gets switched off, that needs to be replaced but this graph excludes it. Unless you do it properly rata, but then the graph is essentially showing all generating capacity that's been added?
The parent used the example of 2024s usage being X and 2025s being x+y.
So this shows us what y is.
But the precise mix that supplied X no longer exists, due to closures, so something must have back filled that x. So is that pro rata from these figures?
Yes I understand this isn't strictly capacity, but in practical terms, wind turbines and solar panels have been installed to allow this increase.
I'm still confused by this chart. Nuclear is shown to be a bit more than half the addition of wind power but if you look at the bar chart for electricity, it's suddenly only a small fraction. How does that fit together?
People in the year 1500 could pretty reliably tell you that a rock would fall down if you released it from a height. People would also tell you that if you threw it up and away, it would go up in an arc and fall down.
The innovation that Newtown and friends brought about was they made quantitative predictions about the rate at which the rock would fall down, or the arc it would follow - both to pretty high level of accuracy.
The point is that, of course, building more houses has a tendency to reduce rents. The question is whether reduction is -0.1% or -10% or there is an increase of +5% because some other factor was more dominant. It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction). Rather than "rock fall down if you drop it" model that everyone keeps quoting.
We don't need quantitative models if we want the rock to fall. It might be nice to have them, but one of the great things about market economies is that we don't micromanage according to overly complex estimates, and get better results.
Zoning and homeowners are holding on to the rock with a death grip, all while saying "the rock won't fall if we let go, that's fake science, it's far more nuanced you see" as they lie through their teeth to make big profits and immiserate those who don't own land.
The quantitative model will tell you whether building housing of type A of quantity B results in more of a decrease in rent than building housing of type C of quantity D. Then you choose the policy that results in the desired decrease in rent. Otherwise, you risk wasting time in pursuing a policy that only results in a 0.1% decrease.
You do have a strong point, in that homeowners are eager to approve plans that allow for ADUs but disallow anything slightly larger. Homeowners already have housing, don't often need more of it, and like having complete control so they approve plans that allow ADUS with the knowledge that it won't account for any significant new housing, and new housing is directly against homeowners' financial interests.
But in reality, the political choice of "let's build A, or B, or C" doesn't exist to maximize the effect of housing. People overly focus on highly regulating to a specific type of housing to prevent anything from getting built.
Let people decide for their own what type of housing they want, and all of a sudden we'd have enough of it. That's the biggest fear of landlords and homeowners.
Most rent payers aren't concerned with the exact function that will describe the shape of the curve for decline in cost of rent.
They are mostly interested in "rent go down", or at least "rent not go up".
That said, there are people who have studied this. You don't need Newtonian level math to calculate elasticity. Hell, we can look at how rents rise in a constrained market and make a pretty good guess what would happen if supply increases.
There are dozens of papers that have these numbers when you search the academic databases for "rent elasticity"
Lots of places in the world have legally mandated percentage by which rent can increase for a unit per year. It might be 2% or 3%, but it is a fixed number that is fought over politically before being decided. That is the function that you are claiming rent payers don't care about. But they do, as evidenced by elected officials enforcing the number they think will get them the most votes.
That’s completely distinct from increased supply driving down rents through market mechanisms. That process is completely independent of supply and demand in open markets.
People don’t give two shits about politically determined rent caps if rents are dropping through supply increases. I’ve lived in those places you describe and that mechanism creates market distortions that paradoxically drive rent way above the market clearing price for new entrants. In any case, none of those places place restrictions on lowering rent due to competitive pressure.
Notably, though, a significant fraction of people seem to believe that building more housing will cause rents to increase. So it seems like it is still important to point to data suggesting the opposite.
Housing is a unique market, because every single product in it is unique, and prices and rents can vary quite a bit.
In a city I used to live, the city decided to revitalize a section of downtown by bringing down some old small buildings and replacing them with high rises. The resultant effect was a bloom in shops and restaurants in the area. That meant that 1km^2 area became a lot more attractive, landlords jacked up rents, and existing tenants in the other buildings in the area had to move out for people who were willing to pay 2x the rent. Of course rents probably went down elsewhere in the city to compensate.
You will never get this sort of prediction from simply supply and demand. You need to build quantitative and holistic models that make predictions based on a range of factors. Then use those to make policy.
I don't think the predominant factor causing pollies to shy away from increasing housing supply is a lack of understanding that supply decreases prices, it's a lack of political will to decrease prices.
It's harder than you think to argue for a house price decrease when it's the singular asset that most older adults have most of their wealth tied up in.
In a city like San Francisco, relative to the status quo ante easier development is more likely to result in slower growth in home prices, not a reduction in home prices.
But that's not the reason most San Franciscans oppose development. The primary reasons are 1) they're convinced more development will raise prices, 2) they believe affordability must be mandated through price controls or subsidies (e.g. developers dedicating X% of units for below market prices), 3) they insist on bike shedding every development proposal to death, 4) they're convinced private development is inherently inequitable (only "luxury" housing is built).
Pretty much the only group of people in the city worried about housing stock increases reducing prices are developers trying to sell-off new units. But developers are repeat players, and they're generally not the ones lending support to development hurdles. Though, there is (was?) at least one long-time developer who specializes in building "affordable" housing--mostly at public expense, of course--who did aggressively lobby for development hurdles, but carefully crafted so he and only he could easily get around them.
> It's harder than you think to argue for a house price decrease when it's the singular asset that most older adults have most of their wealth tied up in.
The only thing they can exchange it for is another house or an alternate form of housing. Because you have to live somewhere.
But what I have seen is worries about social class and sharing space with new neighbors who act like they're from the next rung down on the ladder. Which isn't all that different from the usual objection to short-term rentals.
Yes, but many people use geographic arbitrage to exchange their house in a supply constrained area for a house elsewhere and enough money to never have to work again. Notably, the more you can work to restrict supply once you already are in the market, the sooner you can move to Costa Rica.
If I could lobby my government to restrict other people’s use of their property in a way that would give me enough money to create a generational wealth in exchange for moving somewhere with cheaper houses, I would be very tempted to be that asshole.
> It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction).
Policy makers are experts at completely ignoring objective facts, why would this be different?
The MNT Reform classic discussed here was designed 6 years ago, but there’s nothing preventing an updated motherboard with better port selection from being created.
The MNT Reform Next that’s scheduled to be fulfilled this year has a much more modern port layout:
Why not? It's only an adapter away if you have something thst needs to connect to a usb-c female host port. And if you need more ports, which seems likely, you can get a usb hub which has ports of your preference.
[1] https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/
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