This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lobbying for their removal, or leave the community.
Sure, you may no longer see the noise, but that means that newcomers to your community do and have to deal with it. When you have a giant blocklist, you are ignoring your duty to police your own community.
Then there is the issue of people blocking people who are simply more tolerant than they are. Hiding speech that is challenging to your personal views is a different kind of disaster.
Haha, it's funny. I just disagree with you on about every point. I don't think that all the people I find noise are annoying to others. Some of them have 5000+ karma so others find them useful. And I don't want to leave the community so I'm not going to do that.
The community has some loose norms and I'm fine with that being the baseline. I don't want to police the community to strict norms. In fact, I would prefer if society were looser and we lived like in Too Like The Lightning. I can't have that there but I can here so I'm happy for it. The technology affords it.
As for blocking people who are more tolerant than me - that seems fine. Tolerance is not some unalloyed good. There are people who are tolerant of spam and all that and I don't really care for it. They're welcome to it and I'm welcome to mine.
The virtual world affords us a glorious opportunity: we don't have to worry about occupying the same space, and we don't have to worry about broadcast media like voice over air, we can silence and amplify as we see fit. To not use that is to take a skeuomorphic approach to a new parallel world, I think.
I like that I don't need everyone to agree with me that someone belongs or doesn't belong. I can simply edit my user-agent to behave correctly for me and others can do so likewise. Free agents controlling their own experience of the world without impinging on others is great!
> I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort
I block people every single day. I've blocked so many people on Twitter that all I see is a very nice timeline with mostly stuff I like, some boring, but none of the culture wars garbage. Some days the timeline is completely empty, I suspect because Twitter can't cope with having blocked so many nodes in the social graph :D
> If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it.
When you start banning people outright from the entire community you risk ending up like any far left group, with schisms and civil wars between factions for absolutely tiny differences. The right approach is to have a very high bar for banning, and it's perfectly fine if people decide not to speak to one another.
Does anyone in these comments have any tips for would-be solar farmers or people who are generally interested in being part of building out the future of our grid? I'd like to get my hands dirty. I'm talking about getting into 5-10 MW projects, not solar on a roof.
Trying to cost this out (in a UK context), I found very few press releases give actual cost numbers. This was rather cute though: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sittingbourne/news/you-can-hear... "took over a 5MW site in Bobbing, near Sittingbourne, in December 2023 after raising £176,100 of investments through a crowdfunding campaign"
That is for taking it over from a previous operator, and seems extremely low. More recognizable £1.5k/kW numbers give about £7.5m for that. So unless you're independently wealthy then finance is going to be your #1 consideration. It might actually be easier to do community funding in the UK than the US, provided you structure your investors as creditors and not equity.
#2 consideration is going to be planning rules and the availability of special get-outs for renewables schemes.
#3 is going to be grid connection. In the UK you need permission from OFGEM for large systems. It is also potentially expensive if they make you pay to dig up the road and lay 5MW cabling.
I think the hardest part of building a solar farm is the permitting. Many municipalities are hostile to the idea of converting farmland into solar fields, even with agrovoltaics. There are special interest groups that may come in and try to derail your project by propagandizing the local community against it. "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
If I were doing this I'd be looking for a partner that is already in the business. The politics are a lot more complicated than the technology. It would be very easy to get screwed over if you don't know which palms to grease.
In many states, state law overrides local planning's ability to prevent siting renewables. Check if your state is one of these states if your project size requires it.
> "But what will we eat?" is a propaganda point that you will hear a lot even though it's totally bogus.
Indeed. The US farms almost 60 million acres for biofuels, the size of the state of Oregon. These arguments do not come from serious people imho. People are simply married to their rural identity and ag cosplay, despite it being wildly inefficient and subsidized by the federal government.
That's probably why it's best to stay small. If you've gotten permits for 10kw project in a backyard or on a Walmart roof, you'll probably have a leg up when you start playing at a scale that brings out the nimbys.
This depends; my UK 3.9kWh installation was permit-exempt, requiring only an MCS certified installer so I could be eligible for feed-in tariffs. The permit regime changes as the schemes get larger.
Is there a big overlap in experience building a 5MW project and a 10-20kw project? The former would involve, I imagine, more of a project manager, fund-raiser, and general contractor role for GP. The latter can be a DIY effort if they are handy and licensed. There's no way anyone is single-handedly installing the panels and inverters for a 5MW project in a reasonable timeframe.
Even the hardware, land acquisition, and permitting stories would be different, right?
I bookmarked this thread because i'm very interested too. If AI takes all teh corporate jobs then I'm going to be a photon farmer. you can get land down in Brewster County Texas for about $1,500/acre but would need to find a spot close to a grid access point. There's some decent reddit discussions on this sort of thing.
This is a tradeoff. There is value in being able to do upgrades to lines above ground. Underground is not automatically better. Like most things, it depends.
Take a look at the number of people who think vibe coding without reading the output is fine if it passes the tests who but are absolutely aghast at this.
The level of exposition required for a lot of edits you might want to make is what stops this from being a primary method of interaction. If I have to express >= AND <= AND NOT == OR ... then I may as well write the thing myself.
I agree that Claude does this stuff. I also think the Chinese menus of options it provides are weak in their imagination, which means that for thoroughly specified problem spaces with reference implementations you're in good shape, but if you want to come up with a novel system, experience is required, otherwise you will end up in design hell. I think the danger is in juniors thinking the Chinese menu of options provided are "good" options in the first place. Simply because they are coherent does not mean they are good, and the combinations of "a little of this, a little of that" game of tradeoffs during design is lost.
Sure, you may no longer see the noise, but that means that newcomers to your community do and have to deal with it. When you have a giant blocklist, you are ignoring your duty to police your own community.
Then there is the issue of people blocking people who are simply more tolerant than they are. Hiding speech that is challenging to your personal views is a different kind of disaster.
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