That’s illegal, right?

That’s got to be doom metal 🤘🔥🤘

The low level of the Rhine could have economic consequences for several of Germany’s industries, such as the chemicals and steel, which depend on the river to transport large quantities of goods.

Cynicism aside, in the last few years, when there was another new record low, some “Hungersteine (hunger stones)” showed up in the rivers. The future’s looking bright.

Thanks!

Damn, that sounds like something to satisfy the doomer in me. Do you happen to have a link?

Quite some time ago I found this article somewhere here on lemmy, it tries to cover both sides, i.e. pro-AI and con-AI, with a lot of sources. I still haven’t managed to read through all of them. It provides some very good arguments, while not outright rejecting AI. Granted, it focuses on a lecture, but the arguments still mostly hold, and the sources apply no matter what.

https://emergingethics.substack.com/p/why-were-not-using-ai-in-this-course

Since we’re already drifting off topic - all big tech companies make a lot of money by selling hardware, compute, or some other service to the oil and gas industry, they just don’t go out bragging about it. Before the AI boom the oil and gas industry was among the biggest customers of the tech industry, just a quick search gives:

https://www.amd.com/en/solutions/energy.html

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/energy-resources/oil-gas

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/industries/energy/oil-gas-operations/

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/energy/oil-gas

https://www.ibm.com/industries/oil-gas

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/2025-06/aramco-executive-brief.pdf

All of this sounds great, especially +1 for avoiding unnecessary travel! A lot of people start to drive more once they get an EV, as it’s “more eco-friendly”, in the worst case creating a rebound-effect. It takes willpower and thoughtfulness not to fall into that behaviour

I’m really wondering what your situation is then. That sounds like a worst-case scenario. Do you have a tree in front of your panels? Are you only running electrical equipment at night? 10-15 cents a day in summer either means your electricity is damn cheap, the panels don’t generate much for whatever reason, or you are not using it when it is being generated.

Also for 500 Watt peak a battery does not make much sense, if at all it should be a small battery to buffer peak demand (the refrigerator compressor turning on or other similar high-power short duration load, but that’s definitely not worth it unless you are trying to go off-grid, but that’s a completely different topic.). That’s obviously gonna decrease your ROI.

But just straight up saying that you doubt whether balcony solar is making its money back is detrimental to the whole cause, especially since there are enough people out there using it that are easily getting their money’s worth.

I feel the 500kw balcony vertical install won’t cover 20% of a household.

That depends on your household, but again - since you were emphasizing ROI - the balcony solar not being able to cover a lot of your consumption means their ROI is better! This does not mean, that one shouldn’t install bigger systems, I’m just trying to convince you, that balcony solar does have a very reasonable ROI in most cases.

What kind of refrigerator are you running? Around 100 Watt should be enough to run a decently sized refrigerator. Solar panels are somewhat forgiving when it comes to the proper angles, 100 Watt peak should be easily achievable with an 800 Watt setup, even if they are very badly angled. Sure, not 24/7, and maybe not all year round, but that’s not the goal.

Also, since you focused on ROI, that’s the nice thing about small installations - basically all the energy generated is directly used by you, meaning it directly replaces energy you would have had to buy otherwise. This is the more expensive kind of energy, and you “make” more money with that as if you sold the electricity. The ROI of solar power (for everyday people) goes down the bigger the system gets, as you won’t be able to use all the peak power when it is generated.

Completely agree, saying that solar is heat sensitive when talking about not being able to power ACs is pretty far out there.

Adding to what you said, ambient temperature only has a slight impact on solar’s efficiency. Solar’s efficiency usually mainly goes down due to self-heating which is due to higher irradiance. So in some sense they are less efficient because they generate more power.

However your example numbers are way off, solar panels generate much more peak power during summer than during winter, they aren’t close to being similar (depending on lattitude, but I guess that’s a given when talking about “summer” and “winter”).

^[1]

And the other part that should not be overlooked is that there tends to be some correlation between hot weather and long sunshine, which can also be seen in the plot. So not only is peak power of solar higher during the time when heatwaves are more likely, they also generate power longer.

I’ll try to help if I don’t miss it :D

The website didn’t load properly on my phone, does anyone happen to have the exact date?

My gaming machine is still using DDR3. Never really saw a reason to upgrade, games mostly became more demanding in the graphics-sector, even the first-gen i5 is doing reasonably well with most games, even newer ones. And if not, I blame badly optimized games.

RAM speed usually is the last thing you have to worry about in games.

In case you are being serious, there are ways around faulty RAM sticks, usually just a few cells/rows are affected. In case anyone needs to know this, here is a pretty good summary on stackoverflow on how to deal with this on linux. In general, look for “memmap”.

Keep your hardware running as long as possible! Iirc newer RAM is unfortunately somewhat more susceptible to failing. My DDR3 is still working fine.

Hell yeah, another fellow user of DDR3. It’ll live forever!

I don’t really see a reason to upgrade, my i5 from 2009 is still running fine. Damn, now that I’m writing it out, that does sound old

JD Power

Thanks for reminding me of this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSBsq6HBBzw

This is your example of capitalism working? Then I don’t want to see it failing.

You have to do a bit more than just open the website and immediately dismiss it. Granted, it’s in German, but clicking on the individual reactors gives you a list of incidents there.

If you want something more condensed, here is a list of incidents in

Germany https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_meldepflichtiger_Ereignisse_in_deutschen_kerntechnischen_Anlagen

or Europe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Störfällen_in_europäischen_kerntechnischen_Anlagen

though also only available in German. Just because an incident does not make it to the news, does not mean that no radiation was leaked.

Sure, I basically agree with everything you said. The thing is that even without data centers we’d be in this mess. I’m not trying to defend them, they definitely undo the little progress that was made. However, Trump would have undone the regulations with or without the data centers.

It’s just that it’s not only data centers that are fast tracking climate change. I mean… gestures broadly at everything basically everything is fast tracking climate change.

I guess you definitely are right in the sense that it’s one of the sources that’s among the easiest to get rid of.