makes sense they’d update it right after I got mine

That’s how my life works too haha.

And also why I’m so hesitant to settle for a body style I dislike (seriously, crossovers: be a sedan, be an SUV, or be a station wagon; trying to be all 3 is just failing at everything…but I digress lol). As soon as I settle and buy one, I just know they’ll bring back sedans.

Yeah, I’ve been watching that. It is supposed to start fulfilling orders this year (last I read anyway), but it’ll be at least next year before I can probably look into one. And even then, I’d want to let some other/braver people test them out for reliability and repair-ability.

leat just hasn’t been updated in 10 years

I thought I read the Leaf got a fairly big update recently. I’ll have to check on that when I have some time.

Features look nice. I guess I’m just gonna have to get over my “crossover” hate and buy a car that looks like a low-top roller skate lol. Was hoping the industry would have moved on from that unfortunate design by now.

Yeah. Gas [pedal] is used here in the same way the “save” icon is still a floppy disk.

I’m with you in spirit, but I’ve been wanting to go PV+battery for far longer than the AI plague has been a thing. I’d like to be able to afford both of those. Otherwise, we’d be adding them to the list of unobtaniums along with SSD, memory, and GPUs.

You did it the installs yourself or through contractors?

Fully DIY unless I reach a point where I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I haven’t started moving circuits from the main panel yet, but I’m confident I can do that and meet code. I may call in an electrician when it comes time to convert the old main panel into just a main breaker and wire its output to the PV inverters, but that’s mostly just to make sure that part is safe and up to code.

How many years do you reckon it takes for that scale of solar to pay for itself

Not fully sure. I’ve got about $7,000 invested so far just in components and materials plus probably another $1,000 or so on the horizon for another 4 panels, wiring, and other accessories. The two 16 KWh batteries are the largest expense ($2600/each) since grid-tie isn’t an option for me. Electric rate is currently $0.26/KWh and rising, so this is mostly a way to insulate myself from further rate increases as well as provide backup power (I re-allocated the money I was saving for a whole house generator to the batteries for this).

Very, very rough math estimates at current rates, break even is just over 8.4 years. That’s $8,000 cost divided by $0.26/KWh divided by 10 KWh per day (5 hours @ 2 KW) divided by 365 days in a year. That break even time could be reduced by adding more panels (already planning to) and/or electric rates rising more (they sure aren’t going down anytime soon/ever).

My utility power isn’t on the chopping block (yet?) but skyrocketing rates have finally pushed me to install a real PV system.

Currently sitting on 2.4 KW of PV and 32 KWh of battery storage. Still in the process of installing as the specific mounts I need have been out of stock, but should have those hopefully by June and can finally begin the install in earnest. Once I have the mounts, I’m going to get a few more panels and will have about 3.5 KW of PV on the roof. Would like to do more, but that’s all the south-facing roof real estate I have to work with. Planning on a ground mount setup for another 3 KW or so but need to get the base system going first.

I’m tempted to go ahead and buy some more battery capacity because I have a sinking feeling the demand (and price/availability) for those is going to increase dramatically in the next few years.

I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person

Same. Which explains why I (twice, lol) incorrectly used the terms “theory” and “hypothesis” interchangeably when those are totally different things in sciences.

I’m not entirely 100% dark matter exists in galaxies the way often described. … The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies opposed to the current understanding of it being am attractive force. Plus, if it were a phenomenon that pushed things apart, it could also explain Dark Energy.

And to me, that’s a perfectly valid theory. Like other proposed explanations for dark matter or dark energy or “whatever the hell it is we can detect the effect of but can’t identify”, it’s difficult to test.

That’s why I enjoy science. It’s like a big puzzle, and sometimes you get halfway done and realize you put it together wrong and have to start over.

The thing with dark matter is it’s just a placeholder term for “we don’t know what the hell it is”, and aren’t most hypotheses pulled out of the ass before experimentation to prove them?

Plus, Dr. Kaku is a string theorist so wacky is pretty much par for the course in that field. Granted, I consider him more of a TV personality these days and grew up watching him as a speaker on [insert any number of Discovery Channel shows here].

Maybe I’m just biased and enjoy the wacky theories because I’m more interested in seeing them proven right or wrong and thinking about the implications if they happen to prove correct.

GLaDOS/GabeN: They’re sentient, you know. I think that one was about to say “I love you”.

Yes

While the amount of content from such an increase would be the same, the posting patterns are more organic from real users compared to the indiscriminate torrent coming from people running bots to repost everything from Reddit. That allows for a lot more granular management of resources.

Guess that just illustrates that social media addiction is a real problem. I’ve never found myself in that position, but every once in a while I’m reminded that it exists.

I’ve been here since the API exodus in 2023 and have seen it enough times to know that it’s typically someone coming in new from reddit, seeing that the feed of new stuff here has an endpoint and recharges slower, so they want to make a repost bot so there’s more content. They’ll never actually read that content, but they just want it so they have something to mindlessly scroll past. I don’t think they’re going for popularity contest, at least not primarily, anyway.

Giving them the benefit of doubt, I think they’re just highly misguided.

I could totally be wrong. This is just based on my observations and the occasional post in c/Fediverse when some new user talks about how it feels inactive here and suggests reposting crap from Reddit. I also try to go with the most charitable explanation for behavior I see.

Technically speaking, yeah.

But the instances that run on donations are more likely to get donations to cover the growing hosting costs from a 100x increase in real users as opposed to one bot spammer spewing out 100+ user’s worth of content each month. Ideally, that 100x increase won’t be concentrated on a single instance and will be spread out among many instances.

While the amount of content from such an increase would be the same, the posting patterns are more organic from real users compared to the indiscriminate torrent coming from people running bots to repost everything from Reddit. That allows for a lot more granular management of resources.

In short: it’s low-engagement spam.

In longer form:

It’s just blasted out via a bot and not posted organically. It makes scrolling by /new impossible because of all the noise. It’s bad because it strips away any identity the Fediverse has and makes it a literal cheap copy of Reddit full of bot-reposted slop no one wants to engage with.

Instances are run by volunteers and rely on donations from users or in some cases the admins foot the bill entirely. It costs money to host Fediverse instances. Each sloppost from a repost bot takes up space in the database, consumes CPU resources sorting through it, bandwidth to federate it out, and takes up storage space with the local thumbnails. And that’s just on the home instance where it originates. Add in the bandwidth to federate it out to who knows how many receiving instances which each also have to store it in the database and store the thumbnails.

It’s just so much waste. And for what? It’s just noise. Content for content’s sake so someone can mindlessly scroll past stuff they’ll never read.

If you feel this place lacks content, post something. Every time there’s a new influx of users, some genius thinks “It’s a lot quieter here than Reddit. I know! I’ll write a script that reposts stuff from Reddit. People will love it! I can’t believe no one has thought of this before! I’m so smart!”

If one wants that kind of slop, there are dedicated instances that do nothing but repost reddit garbage indiscriminately. alien.top and lemmit.online. Find an instance that federates with them (many instances de-federate from those because of the noise) or sign up there.

I’m not gonna out the user since that would put this post in violation of one of the rules here, but it appears they’ve set up camp and created their own communities to botspam to. I DM’d the admin of their home instance but who knows if they’ll see a problem with it.

Edit/Update: That spammer now appears to be banned on their home instance.

For me, it’s the people that come here and feel the need to bring all of Reddit with them. Like, do they also bring their shitty exes and all their baggage on dates with their new SO?

And it’s not like instances are largely (entirely?) volunteer run and rely on donations or admins footing the bill for hosting. Oh, wait. They are. 18,200+ posts (as of this comment) from a two month old account with the associated thumbnail images, each federated out to who knows how many other instances that store copies and local thumbnails is a pretty clear abuse of the platform. I’d also wager that the userbot in question isn’t donating to their home instance, either.

AI mixed with news sourced from X. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, hard pass from me.

Every time there’s an influx. :bangs_head_against_wall: