All corruption is bad. Selective enforcement of the law is worse. It increases corruption by giving a strong incentive to win favors from powerful people.
I find that it is better at thinking broadly and at a high level, on tasks that are tangential to coding like UX flows, product management and planning of complex implementations. I have yet to see it perform better than either Opus 4.6 or 4.7 though.
I use it through the desktop app, which has a lot of features I appreciate. Today it was implementing a feature. It came across a semi-related bug that wasn’t a stopper but should really be fixed before go live. Instead of tackling it itself or mentioning it at the final summary (where it becomes easy to miss), it triggered a modal inside the Claude app with a description of the issue and two choices: fix in another session or fix in current session. Really good way to preserve context integrity and save tokens!
How to you get CC to connect to your dev container? I have the CC app but it’s kinda useless as I’m not have it barebacking my system, so I’m left with the cli and vs code extension.
I just run CC in a VM. It gets full control over the VM. The VM doesn't have access to my internal networks. I share the code repos it works on over virtiofs so it has access to the repos but doesn't have access to my github keys for pushing and pulling.
This means it can do anything in the VM, install dependencies, etc... So far, it managed to bork the VM once (unbootable), I could have spent a bit of time figuring out what happened but I had a script to rebuild the VM so didn't bother. To be entirely fair to claude, the VM runs arch linux which is definitely easier to break than other distros.
Seconding this, it's what I immediately thought of. It's a really beautifully made movie. And yes cats are front and center, but it's also using them as a window on humanity, the city of Instanbul and its living history from a very different perspective. It's a very sober film as well, celebrating life but also not shying away from death and the passing of time. The "cat's eye view" is a more 3D sort of feel from a lot of the typical explorations of a city, going at ground level, up and down buildings in 3D etc.
It's become a family favorite film we tend to watch each winter now. All ages can take something from it.
>> You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself
I think it would if it was indeed “essentially free”. Rooftop solar is unfortunately a racket though, and companies price-gouge like crazy and also collude to keep prices inflated.
American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones. I got 3.9kW installed almost ten years ago for just £5500, including all the paperwork for feed-in-tariffs. It has long since paid for itself just in subsidy, let alone actual consumption.
I just paid ~$35k (pre-now-expired-tax-break) to install a grid-tied 25kw ground mount system. I DIY'd everything except the connection between the array and the grid, which I paid an electrician to do, and the trenching which I paid my buddy with a mini-excavator to do.
It was a bit of a PITA, but mostly because I didn't finally make up my mind to do it until October and had to have it constructed by Dec 31st to take advantage of the expiring tax credit. If I'd given myself 6 months, it would have still been a big project, but way less stressful.
My neighbor's paid the same price to a contractor for a 11kw system.
Even at 46°N, and with relatively cheap electricity, my system should pay for itself in 6-8 years.
Being an honorary or actual redneck in an exurban American setting will be the sweet spot for this. Your neighbor's rusting Bobcat is not useless after all. You have the space for ground mounting. I toyed with a rooftop solar DIY project with an electrician handling the AC side, but in my urban context PG&E wanted a six-figure fee for a subterranean transformer upgrade. In 2024 the state regulator established rules that PG&E can't charge for that kind of service upgrade so maybe I should start considering it again.
Modern cable trenching at least if you're not hitting rocks is to take a wet vac and a pressure washer and just cut a slit, make sure you got ergonomics sorted and a place to dump the sludge for drying (c.f. kiddie pool, or one of those pools that rely on the top inflated ring to keep the otherwise loose bag of water from spilling...except made from geotextile or something rock/dirt friendly that'll filter the sediment letting the water seep past) before you backfill.
In EU it would be some $3k for inverter, $5k for panels, another $5k for cables, connectors and mounting and that's it if you DIY everything. Prices with VAT included.
Same in the Philippines here, and we're all buying the same Chinese materials at the end of the day so somehow Americans are getting really fleeced hard on this equipment.
Payback time is 2-4 years.
It reminds of healthcare and infrastructure in the US. When you really dig into why both are so expensive, it's literally every step. Every link in the chain between supplier and consumer is some kind of inefficient market, or burdened by regulations, etc.
Americans are just so rich they don't care enough to see these huge margins and undercut the competition, which is what happens here and keeps markets much more efficient.
We looked at trying to get some mini-split heat pumps for my mom's place & were getting quotes $30k figures for two modest units (it's a tiny well insulated house). I don't know what the frak is wrong with this nation; this is so fantastically worrying.
Home HVAC is the most obvious current regulatory caused scam in the US. Virginia just added an 'easier' license that 'only' requires two years of experience to receive (and 160 hours of formal training, but that's not the bad part obviously).
Something like a minisplit though can literally be DIYed in under a day. With experience, a DIYer can do it in a couple hours. They're literally designed to be easily installed as a complete system. Even in Japan you can get one installed for under a grand (including the unit). In China it's obviously even cheaper.
Obviously HVAC companies don't want it to be easier to get a license, they make boatloads on entire home systems and maintenace. Being able to just replace a broken unit for $600 would kill their entire business model.
Electrical is a similar scam, though for some reason if you get enough quotes you can usually find one that isn't charging the equivalent of $1k/hr in labor like getting a mini-split from an HVAC company tends to be.
There indeed are plenty of mini-splits you can just buy & install.
I would too. Alas mom lives in a northerly area, and we really would prefer something high efficiency. There's some rebadged 37mpra units about that are 35+ SEER2, which if the number means anything is a colossal leap. The good stuff though doesn't seem to be directly purchaseable. I'd be happy to lay the concrete bed, set it up, drill walls, mount the ductless... Getting help actually vacuuming would be good but I could do it.
But I can't go purchase the system.
It's all deeply infuriating. This is just such a rude awful thing that American society keeps having to put up with such deeply captured deeply absurd base costs everywhere. These tradespeople deserve to make a living, I don't bergrudge them that, but this feels like there has to be so so much more going wrong for these prices to escalate like this.
You can get efficient DIY units - specifically look for mini splits with quick connectors and you’ll find them. Installed one last year and the efficiency is actually better than it says on the box.
HVAC is wildly variable, even more so than other trades in my experience. Get several quotes, there will be five digit differences between the top and bottom.
Since people seem to misunderstand what I'm talking about, if you call a major HVAC vendor you will get a high price, but they have spent a lot on advertising. If you buy the equipment and have someone install it, it can be a lot cheaper, and those installers can often help you source the equipment as well.
Mini-split systems should be the cheapest to install but things like brick walls can make an aesthetic installation more difficult.
We had 18x510w panels (9.2kw), 2xZappi chargers, PW3 & Eddi (to heat hotwater) installed ~5 weeks ago. Total cost was £17k (inc. scaffolding, cert, etc), in the SE England, with a small recommended contractor. The UK solar market is full of rogues as well, charging massive sums, many for pretty questionable systems. We had 5 quotes to get there, 3 of which were crazy in one way or another.
We hit our first MW/h of power today. In England. In April. Total electricity bill for the last 6 weeks is about £30, and that includes our driving (previously £150 to £200 p/m) and most of our hot water. If you have the property for it and available investment, the ongoing savings are instant and obvious! My instant regret was not having done it sooner. Driving around on your own sunshine does feel magical as well!
It isn't often we Australians get to brag: I put 32kW solar, 40kWh battery, DC EV car charger, AC car charger - US$35,000.
My 4 adult household has two EVs and the house is centrally air-conditioned. Average daily usage in January-March: 100kWh per day. Average feed in price when the sun is shining: about $0/kWh (but negative if it's a bright cool day.) Average electricity bill: a small credit. Cost of electricity where I live USD$0.23/kWh. Pay back time: 4 years.
Country with the most rooftop solar installations per capita: Australia.
Country with the most household kWh of batteries installed per capita: Australia.
Your labor costs are far lower than coastal US... and that was 10 years ago. Ten years ago in San Jose I got 5.5kW installed for $17k. Because it was that long ago, this is something like 23 panels.
> American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones
One of the reasons for this is that in many parts of the US, solar has sadly been market segmented as a luxury product, just like other high efficiency products like heat pumps or EVs.
This is enabled by both the prevailing cultural attitudes about efficiency and renewables as indulgences for the better off, and industries that are happy to keep captive high margin markets of those customers, i.e. the continued lack of a US produced low-cost EV.
The American cult of individualism is also at play, wherein collective solutions are shunned vs private ones, which is why renewables and storage are so popular among off grid libertarian types.
One of the things I like most about balcony solar is that you can DIY it (at least, in the places I know that have approved it) instead of getting scammed.
The disruption from below cycle is coming on hard here. I'm so excited for balcony solar. This is going to expand solar access for so many people & be such a great thing!
It's also such radically better priced equipment when it's consumer focused. My little Bluetti Elite 100 v2 was $400. It's a 1kWh battery. But as much as anything I bought it because it takes 800W of solar input! On this tiny cheap thing! That's better solar input density than most of these stations, but also, the other guys don't really have an excuse: if you are making a power station like this, it's such a minimal extra cost to integrate a decent solar buck MPPT controller controller on too. 60v 20a capable mosfets transistors have become unfathomably high performance & affordable.
There's all sorts of really amazing
units being built. Zendure SolarFlow 2400 Pro doesn't come with batteries but is ~
1500$ for a 3000w input unit. Not quite as good a proposition (2W:$1 again, but no battery) but is more home sized, to put down another data point. Lots of players & competition, vs the "buy Victron" age! (Still, that Victron reliability.)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Zendure-SolarFlow-2400-Pro-rev...
When there's so many contractors involved, it's like, yeah, give me the good expensive electronics; the marginal cost is whatever. I like how balcony solar is so disruptive from below though, how it breeds a cost conscious
I have one of those terrible fake balconies on the front of my house.
I am working on replacing it with a real deck/carport combo and will probably put 600w solar over it, should be room for 4-6 of them.
That will be a 2-3kw solar install, not enough to replace my entire draw by a long shot, but enough to carve a pretty big dent out of it.
I'm already going to be spending $10k-$15k on the deck/carport install plus the french doors to replace the window looking over the fake balcony, so what's another $3k-$5k for a modest solar install?
Use simple roof geometry.
Use frameless panels in rails/frames made for keeping the building dry under exposed glass roof.
Put regular insulation underneath, don't just expose it.
Profit.
Just hard to get the stuff it seems, mostly because the market has a fetish for early-gen retrofit/independent solar panels, as far as mounting goes.
Sure it isn't up front, and there's probably something to be said about scammers seeing green with subsidy money.
But the very idea of not being dependent on the grid or fossil fuels, if one can afford it and costs are comparable, should sell itself.
But my dad watches Fox News so he brings up lies like how bad wind turbines are for the environment (coal anyone?) or how we shouldn't make ourselves dependent on China for solar (as if we aren't dependent on a lot of bad hombres for our current energy mix or as if receiving solar makes us dependent at all).
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Edit: HN's conversation throttler childishly patronized me for "posting too fast". At least do me the honor of telling me you don't like what I'm saying, instead of telling me I'm posting too quickly when I'm making 1 message/hour.
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In response to dataflow below:
It still reveals an ignorant cult-like derision for renewables that isn't explained by reality. The people who gleefully mock the issues with renewables do it because they have been trained to want renewables to fail, and to see active support for renewables as a signal for softness and liberalism.
My local town Facebook group gleefully mocks local solar each time it snows/is cloudy, as if. There’s never been anything (eg, a war in the Mideast) that could disrupting fossil fuels pricing and availability…
> My local town Facebook group gleefully mocks local solar each time it snows/is cloudy, as if. There’s never been anything (eg, a war in the Mideast) that could disrupting fossil fuels pricing and availability…
Your counterargument is even worse than theirs. The predictability, frequency, severity, mitigability, etc. of these are extremely different.
I guess technically the weather is probably bad for solar or wind more often than geopolitical disturbances to the oil market but, if we go by when its bad for solar _AND_ wind, I feel like I'd need to see the data.
> severity
Tied, maybe? Depends if we're including like, the 70s and if we're looking at just from a US standpoint or if we're including Europe.
> mitigability
I feel lot more confident in my ability to add more panels than to negotiate reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Fossil Fuel is disposable energy, like dixie cups, use once and then throw it away. Renewables are reusable energy, day after day.
Also oil and gas tankers move at about the same speed of someone riding a bike, across the ocean, taking nearly 2 months to cross. Its insane the amount of time and resources wasted like that.
>> Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.
You were the one who made the claim that Haiku is fine most of the time. To any reasonable person, the burden of proof is on you. Maybe you should share some high level details about your codebase, like its stack, size, problem domain, and so on? Maybe they are so generic that Haiku indeed does fine for you.
>> Today, late optimization is just as bad as premature optimization, if not more so.
You are right about the origin of and the circumstances surrounding the quote, but I disagree with the conclusion you've drawn.
I've seen engineers waste days, even weeks, reaching for microservices before product-market fit is even found, adding caching layers without measuring and validating bottlenecks, adding sharding pre-emptively, adding materialized views when regular tables suffice, paying for edge-rendering for a dashboard used almost entirely by users in a single state, standing up Kubernetes for an internal application used by just two departments, or building custom in-house rate limiters and job queues when Sidekiq or similar solutions would cover the next two years.
One company I consulted for designed and optimized for an order of magnitude more users than were in the total addressable market for their industry! Of that, they ultimately managed to hit only 3.5%.
All of this was driven by imagined scale rather than real measurements. And every one of those choices carried a long tail: cache invalidation bugs, distributed transactions, deployment orchestration, hydration mismatches, dependency array footguns, and a codebase that became permanently harder to change. Meanwhile the actual bottlenecks were things like N+1 queries or missing indexes that nobody looked at because attention went elsewhere.
Thank your for posting this. I disagreed with OP but couldn't _quite_ find the words to describe why. But your post covers what i was trying to say.
I was quite literally asked to implement an in-memory cache to avoid a "full table scan" caused by a join to a small DB table recently. Our architect saw "full table scans" in our database stats and assumed that must mean a performance problem. I feel like he thought he was making a data-driven profiling decision, but seemed to misunderstand that a full-table scan is faster for a small table than a lookup. That whole table is in RAM in the DB already.
So now we have a complex Redis PubSub cache invalidation strategy to save maybe a ms or two.
I would believe that we have performance problems in this chunk of code, and it's possible an in-memory cache may "fix" the issue, but if it does, then the root of the problem was more likely an N+1 query (that an in-memory cache bandaids over). But by focusing on this cache, suddenly we have a much more complex chunk of code that needs to be maintained than if we had just tracked down the N+1 query and fixed _that_
> All of this was driven by imagined scale rather than real measurements
Yes. When I was a young engineer, I was asked to design something for a scale we didn’t even get close to achieving. Eventual consistency this, event driven conflict resolution that… The service never even went live because by the time we designed it, everyone realized it was a waste of time.
I learned it makes no sense to waste time designing for zillions of users that might never come. It’s more important to have an architecture that can evolve as needs change rather than one that can see years into the future (that may never come).
"Stunt", eh?
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