When I was looking at a security system (and new WiFi mesh system), this is why I went with Ring and Eero. Amazon is many things, but they rarely shut down products AND they have a proven track record of iterating and making things better over time. Ring and Eero have proven to be resilient, work well, and be slowly improved.
> Amazon is many things, but they rarely shut down products...
They did kill Halo and the Fire Phone. I own a couple of Blink cameras, and they killed the free tier as well.
Also, it's hard to trust Amazon with my security system, when they recently admitted to hand camera data to law enforcement without owner's consent [0]
in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.
A wet bulb event, occuring over multiple hours, would be that signal. Piles of dead bodies from folks who either were misinformed or weren't able to move to safety would be quite the wake up call.
In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life. The real issue is what to do about it, how to do it and in what timeframe.
With these wet bulb events and the breathless death counts in the media people get the impression that heat waves are bigger killers than cold winters, when it's the opposite (and if you include indirect and long-term deaths by an order of magnitude).
There are also some serious and well connected organizations advancing plans that I can only see as attempted mass murder. If your plan projects no cargo ships by 2035 you will kill millions from the fragility of food supply chains alone.
If you want to reduce fertilizer use, fine. Better targeting and smarter application can reduce the consumption by at least 30%. But if you want to use no fertilizer you will kill billions.
Even the more grounded and non-murderous proposals have some serious question marks. Electrify almost all energy use by running 300% overproduction of renewables, to be stored in batteries and pump storage that isn't even planned yet while at the same time increasing electricity demand by 400%? Yea sure that will get done in 30 years, no problem.
The climate doomers always insist that the extinction event will be caused by climate change destroying food supply. But crops can be bred, new areas can be cultivated and ressource use reduced. The fact that 6 billion of us only exists thanks to chemical fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and amazing seed variants is not open to argument though.
A “wet bulb event” is not just a heatwave. A heatwave is a sustained period of high temperatures. You can protect yourself from a heatwave by staying indoors, using a fan, drinking water, etc.
A wet bulb event is a period of complete local inhabitability due to the temperature/humidity rising above the threshold where the human body can cool itself by sweating. These events are so far almost unheard of.
Anyone who is in the affected area during such an event would only survive if they had air conditioning and uninterrupted power. Anybody without AC would die, unless they found some non-evaporative way to cool themselves.
It’s the most terrifying natural disaster conceivable.
Couldn't you just eat ice to keep cool? Heat from blood transfers to the ice as it melts and warms in the stomach, then it leaves the body completely through urination.
Indeed, we even still colloquially quote/measure the cooling capacity of air conditioning in "tons".
A ton of cooling being defined as 12000 BTU/hr, or the rate implied by the latent heat of fusion of 1 ton of ice at 0°C being consumed via melting over 24 hours.
The really short answer: If the wet-bulb temperature in your basement is sufficiently low, then yes. Otherwise no.
Note that for a small poorly-ventilated basement, the humidity will rise from respiration, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature. For a well-ventilated basement, the air temperature will approach the outdoor temperature, thus increasing the wet-bulb temperature.
If you have a giant, well-shaded, pool of water, the water temperature will usually be below the peak air temperature (water has high thermal mass, so it will take a long time for it to come up to the ambient temperature, even at high humidity, where evaporation effects are negligible) so that's another non-AC method of staying cool.
In any event pools of water and basements don't scale to densely populated areas.
> In my experience the issue is not about taking it seriously, I've rarely met someone totally unconcerned in real life.
The Republican Party just held their first primary debate among the presidential candidates. They were asked about climate change and only one of them was willing to recognize it as a problem, and my understanding is that she directed action towards China and India. The candidate leading the pack, Trump, was not present, but has called Climate Change a Chinese hoax.
If you are not encountering people like this in real life, you are living in a bubble yourself.
Anecdote: None of my conservative-leaning acquaintances believe that Climate Change is even a top-20 problem, let alone something that requires urgent nationwide or worldwide action. I believe the filter bubble is real.
> in my opinion, a lot of folks won't take climate change seriously until it adversely affects their way of life in such a dramatic way that they cannot deny it any longer.
It won't. People you are talking about have access to air conditioning. They will not care about people dying in distant places, whom become an annoyance after a while. They will just wish people die silently without complaining.
More people die of cold than heat, a fact that never comes up in talks about climate change.
Obviously there's a limit, but based on the data about lives lost due to cold vs. warm temps, we should expect increased global temps to first save human lives since a lot more people freeze to death.
> A majority of the deaths were of working-class men in their twenties who performed manual labor.
Seems like in this case most of the mortality was due to young men who had no choice but to work in those conditions. This event, among many other work-related disasters of the time, probably helped spur the push for better working conditions during the Progressive Era.
If a thing that used to be a 1 in 100 year event starts happening every 10 years and all the science says it's because of man made climate change then yeah we can totally do things to make it go back to happening once every 100 years again.
Some people have fantasies about these heatwaves that just decimate all living things. It’s not that simple.
It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so. People aren’t idiots either. Despite imaginations of cultural hubris, people can tell when it’s deathly, disgustingly hot, and do not casually tank it until they die. And even if they did, they’re not idiots. If one person collapses, they’re not going to ignore them and continue to assume the heat is negligible. You don’t have to realize the nuances of your circumstances and the probability of death to understand that you are intolerably uncomfortable.
Yes of course heat waves are bad and can kill people. But wet bulb events are not a magic threshold that completely change the game.
True but you should also recognize the world has more than humans. most other species will not be able to survive such even. Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity. some will be discovered immediately & some will be found in retrospect.
Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
> Second thing is instead of counting how many dead I'd rather count how many man-years of lives reduced. I'd bet with every such event the average life expectancy goes down, especially for old, super young & sickly. so overall impact would be large number of man-years of lives removed from humanity.
I know you threw babies in here but it feels like I have to point out that the old and sickly dying have a negligible effect on man years lost.
> Also, IMO most of deaths will come from decimation of food crops brought on by climate change induced 'weather randomization'. our world currently is super optimized for supporting 8B people. any one of the optimizations in the chain fail and we wont be able to easily recover. when multiple fail realistically the world economy sill settle into a non-globalized setup. that will support far fewer people than exist today.
I don’t really agree that the world is as fragile as you propose. But I feel like need to clarify that I’m not arguing against the threat posed by climate change broadly.
> It’s not THAT hard to cool down even if you’re incapable of sweating to do so.
How would you recommend cooling down for hundreds of thousands of people at a time? I have to assume that those affected wouldn't have easy access to AC.
Parking yourself nude under a cold shower will keep you alive, assuming you don't run out of water.
There's no need for the bath. The shower will probably work better actually since it's constantly disposed down the drain after picking up some heat, and replenished with subterranean-temp fresh water running across your person.
I'm not sure a bucket would be enough to cool a person down if they have no other form of heat dissipation available to them - specifically I'm not sure feet alone could dissipate heat fast enough. If the water is too cold (around 70°F IIRC), your body would constrict the blood vessels to your hands and feet, limiting how much heat could be moved to those extremities from your core.
Hence mentioning a bath tub.
Some interesting reading to go along with this topic:
You’re going to need to set some practical constraints here.
Can you survive wet bulb temperatures given a bucket of water indefinitely? No. Can you survive working hard labor with the water bucket? No. Can you survive wet bulb events significantly higher than the threshold? No.
Can you survive several hours in a typical (current typical) wet bulb event? Yes, definitely. Bucket of water is fine.
> Can you survive several hours in a typical wet bulb event?
I'm going to vote maybe. At best, it'll be close.
Resting metabolic output is about half the active value I provided (per NASA's PDF). That means for a bucket of water that starts at 32°, you have 5 hours before the bucket is also 95° if you discount ambient heating from the air, circulatory constriction, and assuming no prior conditions.
Since you can't discount those (and are unlikely to find barely-not-frozen water for an entire city's population), survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
> survival for more than an hour or two is nowhere near guaranteed.
Does that pass your personal sniff test for reasonability? Have you ever soaked in a 104°F (40°C) hot tub for an hour or more? Was your survival in serious doubt?
Wet bulb temperatures in excess of 35°C need to persist for around 6 hours to represent a serious hyperthermia risk. This is not a "you will die inside of 1-2 hours" scenario.
Many of the places at the forefront of this threat also have water scarcity issues. There's also the problem of what to do with the water once it's heated up. You could pump it back into the ground to cool off, but eventually you're going to heat the ground itself and have an even worse problem.
Heat waves are dangerous. My point is that wet bulb events are not a magical inflection point.
The point to take away is that humidity matters in addition to raw temperatures. Not that there is a specific threshold at which things matter or didn’t matter.
I think that point was well understood, by falcolas, to whom I was replying. But your assumption that it is not that hard to cool down seems a bit strong to me.
In some countries electricity becomes unavailable quite regularly, so relying on A/C during a crisis like that might fail. And that is assuming that A/Cs are common (they are not, in large parts of the world).
Cooling yourself down by using water from a tap may also fail, if, in such a situation, everyone in a city tries to do that. You are assuming a very high level of infrastructure and no critical failures.
You don’t need much water. It doesn’t need to be that cool either. If you lack access to the water required to do this, which does not even need to be clean, then the lack of water is probably the bigger crisis.
Heatwaves and infrastructure failures can undoubtedly be serious threats. But the vast, vast majority of people survive wet bulb events when they encounter them.
So you are saying a small amount of water would be enough to cool you down when it is (for example) 35° C at 90% humidity? How would that work? Evaporative cooling is out, for the most part and a small amount of water would be heated up to 35° C in no time.
1 BTU is the amount of energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1°F. Take 5 gallons (~42 pounds) at say 70°F (21°C). Raising that 42 pounds of water by 25°F/14°C will take just over 1K BTU.
That's maybe 2 hours of cooling per person and it's not at all obvious that during such a heat event that you'll have access to a continued source of 70°F/21°C water. If you only have access to 82°F/28°C water, 5 gallons only lasts you an hour or less.
People will need to start thinking of the summer months in some places like the winter months in others: during certain periods you need shelter with working HVAC systems, and when you go outside you need suitable gear and emergency arrangements.
I live in the Chicago area, and in the winter working from my heated home and traveling between heated places in my heated car, it's sometimes possible to forget how uninhabitable it is outside! But you need to carry emergency jackets and other things in the car in case it breaks down and you lose your climate control. And I remember how scary it was when my furnace broke during a winter cold snap!
The one key difference is, in cold climates we heat our spaces and any heat that "leaks out" or is otherwise incidental is absorbed by the cold outside.
In the hot climates, we cool our spaces, but in the process we pump extra heat outside, making it warmer when it's already too warm.
But think about the solution. It's making A/C very accessible and reliable. That requires cheap energy with a high-uptime grid. There are many ways to solve this problem but adding difficult to meet constraints to energy companies that risk price and availability is not one of them.
The short term solution is making A/C very accessible and reliable. The long term solution is no longer putting huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is imperative to do both, no matter the (e: monetary) expense.
That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.
Basically, it's when the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35C. From the Wikipedia entry:
"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it"
Temperature and humidity are high enough that you can’t cool off naturally via sweat. I would suspect most people don’t realize that’s even a thing. I’m from Texas, and everyone thinks they’re heat adapted and tries to act macho. A lot of people would just stay outside and keep working, ignoring any warnings they received.
In part, I'm sure culture in this particular instance is partly to blame here.
That said, in more general terms, this is a relatively new concern for many people, even in Texas or Arizona, where these wet bulb events were rare. All told, I can understand how people really don't grok it because 10+ years ago, they could keep working in the heat taking relatively simple precautions.
However since 2021 web bulb events have been increasing in regularity and many models suggest that starting this year and going forward, these extreme heat events are going to become the norm, with increasing intensity, making this a permanent concern now. This makes a lot of simple previous precautions folks take less effective or even worthless.
I expect Texas to be the first state to experience a wet bulb event.
Its only a matter of time before we get a combination of extreme heat and a massive failure of their power grid.
Hundreds of deaths in a single day will lead to... nothing.
Same politicians will be voted in and the deaths will just be counted as the price of freedom
We had hundreds of deaths in the span of 2-3 days during the winter storm in 2021. It didn’t catalyze any political change then, so unfortunately I think you’re right about the effect the next time it happens.
I have been surprised by the resilience of the grid this summer. Thank god for solar.
A wet bulb event occurs when the combined temperature and humidity (the so called "wet bulb temperature") exceeds the limits of human physiology, causing humans to overheat and perish even in the absence of any activity beyond basal metabolism.
I'm not sure it'd look like the "bodies in the street" image GP likes to call up, but yes, a prolonged wet bulb event would result in mass casualties.
All that's needed is an intersection of high-humidity heat wave + densely populated area + extended power outage.
And/or too few buildings that have A/C or other places to escape the heat like swimming pools, metro tunnels or whatever.
Probably more likely to occur in less-developed areas like India or Africa. But regardless, could happen in many places. Just a few degrees might be the difference between 1000s or 100k+ deaths.
The wet-bulb temperature is the minimum temperature a wet body can reach via evaporation--effectively the minimum temperature you can reach via sweating. When the wet-bulb temperature reaches body temperature, you can only maintain body temperature via active A/C.
Even if you are the fittest, healthiest human being alive, standing in the shade in a thorough breeze, your core body temperature can only go up. Let it go up, and you get heatstroke and eventually death. And if you're not the fittest, healthiest being alive, or not standing in the shade? It's only going to go up faster, and heatstroke and death will beckon much sooner.
"Wet bulb events" are, in short, when "no A/C means outdoors = death"
Ambient temperature is always at or above the wet-bulb temperature, by definition. A wet-bulb temperature measures the temperature that can be achieved after energy loss due to evaporation of water, so as long as evaporation is possible (humidity < 100%), it is lower than the actual temperature.
I think this speaks well of Tesla's plan to be more than a car company, but an energy company. Once you have the technology around batteries and the mass production to back it up, it flows easily into motor vehicles and general energy storage. At that point, getting into solar becomes the next logical move. The only piece that becomes difficult is the Tesla Supercharger network which seems to add more complexity and upfront cost then most companies are willing to pay for.
As someone who just visited Italy for the first time in 10 years, I was surprised how polluted the air was (especially around the coast). While the air quality was marked as “OK”, it was quite hazy and you could actually see the smog in the air. Just something that really took me by surprise as when I think of polluted areas, the Amalfi coast is not an area that comes to mind
Having used ElasticSearch (and OpenSearch) in Golang with a pretty dynamic index, this article rings true in many aspects. The ElasticSearch Golang library is a glorified wrapper around an HTTP Client that adds only frustration to the experience. The documentation is lacking in a lot of aspects, but really I think to integrate with ElasticSearch “well”, you need to use a language that can match the dynamism that it offers, which usually means Ruby or Python. But then you can start to be bottle necked by the language you’re writing in. Anyways, I would say that ElasticSearch has its place, but you really have to understand how to use it and use a language that can support its dynamic nature.
I’ve had a weird bug with podman machine that moved me towards Colima: the vm will just randomly freeze and not come back to life until you restart it. Also podman machine doesn’t use the virtualization framework on MacOS, preventing the usage of virtiofs, which means volume mounts are super slow.
My 2 cents is that modern C++ (c++11 and greater) removes most of the memory safety problems that people historically have used as example for the language being dangerous or bad. I would actually predict that modern databases will probably continue to be built in C++ but using a modern version of the language, providing memory safety and high performance.
The easiest way is having lastpass export your vault of passwords as a CSV. Most other passwords managers (Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane, etc.) should be able to import that for you into their vaults.
I did this (moved from LastPass to 1Password) back when LastPass changed how they were doing their free vaults and with LastPass’s less than stellar track record on security. I will at least advocate for 1Password as their family vaults are amazing for sharing things securely with the wife and my parents.
Interested to see if they can successfully pivot to full SaaS. It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst and Github CodeSpaces (both of which are free with an additional easy to use paid model), Gitpod has been backed into a corner. I hope they do well, but the odds are stacked against them as the enterprise selling machines that are Amazon and Microsoft are incredibly difficult to fight as a startup. With Gitlab also apparently working on their version of CodeSpaces, it seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian).
> It seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian)
I agree. I used to work there and think they need to slash circa 40 employees to shrink down to more sustainable burn rate numbers - https://ghuntley.com/tea
> but the odds are stacked against them
In more ways then one https://ghuntley.com/fracture documents Microsoft's strategy with Visual Studio Code which means 6 out of 10 top programming languages integrations only work on GitHub Codepaces. If you want .NET, C++, C, Python or Jupyter then the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod.
GitHub Codespaces got one thing right - they chose IaaS as the brick of compute meaning they can do GPUs and run Kubernetes clusters. On Gitpod, you can't because Gitpod chose Kubernetes as the compute abstraction. Gitpod needs to ditch Kubernetes...
> the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod.
Can the user install them? How complicated these are? Is there some awareness about this in OSS communities? If yes, is there some kind of consensus? (Is it something like: okay, then each programming language project needs to provide its LSP, like Rust has rust-analyzer, Scala has Metals, etc..?)
Doing so is not legal. Here's the standard boiler plate license for the LSPs
> You may install and use any number of copies of the software only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications
The key here is VSCode (MIT) is NOT Microsoft Visual Studio (the product) and only the product can use the LSP's, tools such as GitHub Copilot or the Visual Studio Marketplace Ecosystem.
> Is there some awareness about this in OSS communities?
> is there some kind of consensus? (Is it something like: okay, then each programming language project needs to provide its LSP, like Rust has rust-analyzer, Scala has Metals, etc..?)
The consensus is that programming languages need to author their own LSP integrations and not allow Microsoft to build it. It's why rust-analyzer, go, metals are self-developed by their communities.
Again https://ghuntley.com/fracture recaps the problems w/VScode and how Microsoft is building a GitHub 365 vision through VSCode.
Hmm. We find that GH/MSFT customers come to us (especially Microsoft Azure DevOps customers which have been abandoned) and GH is categorically providing non-answers of "we are investigating offering on-prem" but they have done that for a long time now - ie. a classic sales tactic to keep MSFT aligned people hopeful vs saying no.
Microsoft has been retiring on-prem products as a business strategy for over 12 years now. Why would GitHub be the snowflake exception? Somewhere, in some CVP's mind GitHub ES is already EOL (look at GitHub.com/enterprise they are already muddling the meaning of "enterprise")
If you look at /.codespaces/bin or /workspaces/.codespaces/shared on GitHub Codespaces you'll understand how tightly coupled GitHub Codespaces is to Microsoft Azure thus on-prem isn't going to happen. The likely path they could do it would be like JetBrains Spaces does it "configure in our IAM/ARM key and we will provision Azure/AWS virtual machines" via GitHub Enterprise Server.
MS have a VS code server which is in private preview now. it's very much like a self-hosted Codespace if you squint and write a tiny bit of automation around it.
license forbids using it to host a service for others, but you can host it for yourself.
On the market landscape: the whole market around CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde) is in its infancy. Our largest competition is local development. We believe that unlike for other creative workflows the convenience threshold for development in the cloud has not (yet) been crossed. We are moving away from self hosted to execute faster on what we always wanted: from history-dependent cobbled local development environments to consistently reproducible, instant, ephemeral Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). You can think of CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde) as our product north star.
