🇨🇦 tunetardis

  • 2 Posts
  • 107 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I see what you’re getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you’ve got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it’s possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don’t function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it’s possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

    But you have to consider that averaged out, you’re looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that’s a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it’s not up as much.


  • About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.

    But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.











  • Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.


  • I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

    It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.



  • Digital services tend to be an area where the US enjoys huge trade surpluses. If that pandora’s box is opened, it’s going to be really bad for the tech giants when retaliatory steps are inevitably taken. I thought this was why Trump was trying to keep the tariff war focused on material goods?

    I know in Canada, FB stopped serving news when they refused to contribute to a government fund to help the struggling domestic journalism industry which they were scraping content from with reckless abandon. Personally, I’m happy to see one less stifling algorithm-fed echo chamber. It’s like a breath of fresh air.