skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on NASA’s attempt to save the Swift telescope has failed in ~space
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NASA’s attempt to save the Swift telescope has failed
5 votes -
Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkWhat it’s like to spend a weekend with more than 2,000 sets of twins [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]What it’s like to spend a weekend with more than 2,000 sets of twins
Every August, for more than half a century, siblings who first met in utero take over Twinsburg for the Twins Days Festival, the world’s largest annual gathering of twins and multiples.
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The celebrants arrive in twos, threes and fours, mirror images of each other or as dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff. Many are first-timers, but even more are repeat attendees stretching back years.
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The festival is held the first full weekend in August and always in Twinsburg, about 25 miles southeast of Cleveland. In 1819, identical twins Moses and Aaron Wilcox changed the name of the settlement from Millsville, which honored a popular mechanism from that era, to Twinsburg, which celebrated a biological phenomenon now affecting about 3 percent of the U.S. population.
The community first hosted an abbreviated version of the event in 1976 as part of a larger U.S. bicentennial celebration. Three dozen sets of twins showed up. Over the years, the festival has ballooned. It now stretches over three packed days, and the number of twins and multiples regularly exceeds 2,000 registered sets. (By Sunday afternoon, this year’s tally was 2,085; festival organizers will release a final count next month.) The identical and fraternal pairings arrive by car, plane, foot and baby stroller. A handful cross rivers, oceans and the international dateline.
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The Double Take Parade is one of the festival’s marquee events, a 1.3-mile-long processional that, depending on the theme, can feel like a march of pop culture clones.
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The twins and multiples who attend Twins Days every year say the festival is a place where they can feel normal and understood. Where they don’t have to explain the difference between identical and fraternal or A and B (first and second born). Where they can wear whatever they want, which for many means dressing exactly the same.
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The festival dedicates a corner to research. This year, three universities, one plastic surgeon and Olay set up studies, taking advantage of the large sample size of twins — a windfall for researchers. Olay is studying how skin ages when genetics are not a factor.
For 20 years, the Procter and Gamble brand has conducted facial imaging on about 100 sets of volunteers, in exchange for a swag bag of lotions, serums and sunscreen.
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Comment on ForeFront Power completes its first Erthos solar energy system for the city of Fresno in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] It's solar, but the aesthetic is rather "pave the earth." Nothing will grow there. Maybe aesthetics aren't that important.From the article:
Erthos distills the complexity of solar energy systems into a modular, repeatable design. Unlike traditional ground-mounted solar energy systems supported by structural steel, Erthos’ Earth Mount Solar system places modules directly on the earth, which allows solar project developers to eliminate all the costs required to procure and install structural steel. Leveraging Erthos technology, ForeFront Power was able to reduce its total cost to develop its solar energy system and pass those savings to the City of Fresno in the form of lower electricity rates.
ForeFront Power approached Erthos in 2023 when a combination of inflation and supply shocks caused the price of labor and materials to spike. The ForeFront Power team realized that the cost of a traditional ground-mounted system at this site would be significantly higher. This in turn would increase the cost of the electricity that ForeFront Power would sell back to the City of Fresno through a Power Purchase Agreement. Under the terms of the Agreement, ForeFront Power owns the system and charges the City a fixed, lower rate for electricity than the utility for 20 years.
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Since the system entered commercial operation in late March 2026, the system has consistently outperformed expectations, operating at an average of 101% of expected energy production and has already delivered 862 MWh of energy to the City. ForeFront Power and Erthos continue to work closely together to optimize system performance. Both organizations are encouraged by the project’s early results and outlook for continued strong performance in the years ahead.
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In addition to avoiding material and labor costs from structural steel, ForeFront Power was able to achieve a higher generating capacity per acre thanks to the unique architecture of Erthos systems. With no row spacing, Erthos offers the highest energy density of any solar architecture in the industry. Another unique feature of Erthos Earth Mount Solar system is that, although the solar modules are mounted flat on the earth, they can follow contours up to 15% slope, meaning they were adaptable to the natural topography of the Fresno site.
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Custom-designed for use on an Earth Mount Solar array, the ErthBot cleaner is deployed nightly as needed and returns to its charging dock after each use, ready to be deployed again the following evening. Erthos handles the operations and maintenance of the ErthBot as part of its Energy Services Agreement with ForeFront Power.
It's solar, but the aesthetic is rather "pave the earth." Nothing will grow there.
Maybe aesthetics aren't that important.
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ForeFront Power completes its first Erthos solar energy system for the city of Fresno
3 votes -
Comment on Git at any scale in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Over the years, companies that tried hosting Git repositories at scale noticed that this packfile-based design was a major limitation on both availability and scalability. Packfiles are large binary files that must exist on a filesystem for Git to access them. The simple approach of having an HTTP server in front of a repository on disk has a very low ceiling. Ideally you'd want the repository to exist on many disks and many machines (this lets you run many Git operations in parallel, and keeps your repository available when a server crashes). But how do you do that?
There are broadly three possible approaches to accomplish this, in increasing order of complexity: distribute the filesystem, distribute the packfiles, or distribute Git itself.
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Spokes was originally developed at GitHub around 2013, and it has since become an industry standard. Most Git hosting services use a variant of the Spokes approach (application-level replication for Git repositories) in their architecture. The main reason Spokes has worked well for many years is that it made three fundamental choices that, over time, have been proven to be optimal:
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Spokes is a consensus-based distributed system. It works by storing several copies of your Git repository on different servers. Whenever you push new data, an orchestrator fans out your push so that every instance of your repository receives a copy. The "fan-out" is synchronized with a classic consensus algorithm called 3PC (three-phase commit) so that a push is only accepted if a majority of the nodes acknowledge it.
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This scalability constraint also applies the other way. When agents work with Git repositories at scale, they often operate outside of a monorepo by creating vast numbers of small repositories, many of them throwaway, and most of them barely touched. Spokes struggles here because it still requires three replicas for every one of these repositories. Three mostly idle replicas, which cannot be trimmed down because then the system wouldn't be fully consistent and data loss would be possible. With three-phase commit, the floor is always too high, and the ceiling too low.
Another flaw, impossible to see up front, but painfully obvious after having suffered through it, is that Spokes can be rough to operate at scale. Because the repositories on disk are always the source of truth for consensus, every copy of every repository is very important. You have to treat repositories as pets, not cattle.
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Continuity is a simple system (a system cannot be easy to operate if it is not simple). The core primitive behind it is a write-ahead log, which we store in S3-compatible object storage. In production, we run directly on S3, but we designed it so it can be deployed on any cloud.
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The local copy of the repository is, of course, a normal Git repository stored on a very fast NVMe drive. We do the same thing that Spokes does because I think Spokes got that exactly right. It allows us to reuse all the amazing OSS work of the Git community, including the upstream Git client and its many performance optimizations. It lets us focus on shipping new features, instead of doing weird stuff with Git.
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We've seen that one thing that makes a Spokes cluster hard to operate is that it's very important to keep track of the location of every repository on each server. Continuity does this very differently. Where does every repository live? The answer is "anywhere". It doesn't matter! We treat repositories like a warm cache on disk, but the source of truth is always the write-ahead log in S3. The system is stateless, and there are no routing tables (and no relational database to operate — hashtag blessed). If a repository is missing from the local disk when accessed on a host, we just materialize it from the WAL. We can do this very efficiently, but of course we don't want to do this all the time, because it'd be wasteful. In production, we use rendezvous hashing to map a repository ID to the list of nodes where we expect it to be. All the state we require to route repositories is the repository ID and the current set of healthy nodes in a cluster. But if this state gets out of sync (e.g., a node becomes unhealthy), that's perfectly fine too. We'll just materialize the repository on whichever node comes next.
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Git at any scale
7 votes -
Comment on Ukraine planned to swarm Moscow airports with AI-guided drones (gifted link) in ~society
skybrian (edited )LinkMaybe this explains the leadership shakeup? I guess they went with attacking Wildberries warehouses instead. Neither side in this war seems quite willing yet to escalate it into a wider war, so...Both sources told me planning for the operation was halted in July, when Zelensky abruptly fired its mastermind, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. As the architect of Ukraine’s military drone program, Fedorov had worked on the plan for most of this year, keeping it a secret even from some of his closest aides. He helped assemble a team of Ukrainian computer programmers to develop the AI guidance system, and he secured financing from Ukraine’s allies in Europe to produce the autonomous drones at scale, the two sources said.
Maybe this explains the leadership shakeup? I guess they went with attacking Wildberries warehouses instead.
Neither side in this war seems quite willing yet to escalate it into a wider war, so it's happening slowly as they test the boundaries. But escalation is a risk and civilian aviation seems rather vulnerable if the drone war gets further out of hand.
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Comment on Founder of collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande sentenced to life in prison in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI would expect there to be a deposit held in escrow. I wouldn’t expect the builder to effectively be borrowing money from the home buyer. They’d get loans from a bank for that, or maybe raise...I would expect there to be a deposit held in escrow. I wouldn’t expect the builder to effectively be borrowing money from the home buyer. They’d get loans from a bank for that, or maybe raise money from investors.
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Comment on Founder of collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande sentenced to life in prison in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI’m wondering why this pre-paying was a thing at all. It seems like a weird thing to do to use a real estate company as a bank if you’re saving up for an apartment? Why were there no government...I’m wondering why this pre-paying was a thing at all. It seems like a weird thing to do to use a real estate company as a bank if you’re saving up for an apartment? Why were there no government protections?
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Comment on Moderna, Merck say mRNA vaccine prevents melanoma from returning in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
The study is the most advanced of a number of trials testing the approach against a variety of cancers, including lung, bladder, kidney and pancreatic cancer. While small trials have shown the promise of the approach, the Moderna and Merck trial was seen as a bellwether in demonstrating the technology — and a first step toward transforming cancer care with treatments that are individualized to a person’s tumor and that may ultimately be able to stay ahead of it as it changes.
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Comment on Car break-ins drop in San Francisco as drone use increases in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentI don't know anything about them but the articles I shared mentioned a few.I don't know anything about them but the articles I shared mentioned a few.
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Comment on AI usage patterns in software teams in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Executives are personally active on AI at rates that match or beat their teams. CEOs at companies of 201 or more people went from 9% to 36% in six months, the largest jump of any cut in this report, suggesting the most senior leaders are learning the technology by using it rather than reading about it. Company size comes from third-party enrichment, so this cut covers fewer workspaces than the rest of the report.
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Two years ago, fewer than one issue in a thousand was created by AI. Teams now use AI to write just under half of everything created in Linear, and at the current pace it will soon author more than people and integrations combined.
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Teams that connected a coding agent roughly tripled their weekly pull requests over two years, from 21 to 65, while teams without one went from 8 to 10. These teams were already higher-output before coding agents existed, so the levels aren’t directly comparable, but each cohort against its own baseline tells a clean story, and nearly all the growth sits on the agent side.
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The clearest indication of AI’s influence on product development is the dramatic output gains experienced by teams using coding agents over the last two years. We have no way of knowing whether this increased output led to positive business outcomes, but it shows a very clear correlation between AI adoption and acceleration.
Perhaps more intriguing is the makeup of that adoption, and how it appears to be blurring roles. Senior leaders are doing more of the hands-on IC work, adopting AI aggressively to help them do it, and non-engineers are committing code. The suggestion that everyone in an organization is becoming a “builder” seems to be directionally true.
Those gains haven’t shown up as time saved, though. Time spent on existing tasks in Linear held while AI usage appeared as a new layer of work, meaning the overall time spent on product development is going up rather than down. As far as we can observe, teams are working more, not less, suggesting AI has a Jevons paradox quality beyond token consumption.
Many will rightfully argue that looking at pull requests indicates motion rather than value, which is certainly true, but it’s still a step forward from measuring tokens. A mechanical refactor might burn lots of tokens while a meaningful bug fix or code review doesn’t, so token spend and value don’t line up at all, and using one as a proxy for the other will be remembered as a relic of AI’s early days.
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AI usage patterns in software teams
19 votes -
Comment on Guyana’s oil-driven economy has seen the world’s fastest growth in GDP per capita in recent years in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] From the "some kinds of economic growth are better than others" department. But it sounds like they're handling it ok so far?From the article:
Guyana, a small country in South America, has seen the fastest growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world over the past decade.
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A large and sudden expansion in oil production has driven most of this growth. Between 2020 and 2025, the country’s oil production grew 860%, making it a key contributor to global crude oil supply growth.
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It’s too early to see the full effects of this, and hard to measure how far the oil boom has translated into better living standards in the country. Official poverty estimates, for example, have not been published since production began. But there is early evidence of the government channeling oil revenue toward citizens, for instance, through cash grants for every adult, free tuition at public universities, and increasing health spending.
From the "some kinds of economic growth are better than others" department. But it sounds like they're handling it ok so far?
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Guyana’s oil-driven economy has seen the world’s fastest growth in GDP per capita in recent years
10 votes -
Comment on How a giant battery is transforming a town centre in Cannington, Ontario in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
The glowing phone booth, it turns out, is actually a giant battery. Built by Toronto-based startup Civic Grid on behalf of The Nourish and Develop Foundation (TNDF), it helps power the neighbouring food bank for cheap while providing residents with a mini town square to gather and recharge. For Civic Grid, the pilot project is a demonstration of a new kind of community infrastructure.
“This square provides … lighting, shelter, seating, [and] an open courtyard to be an extension and to strengthen the TNDF’s existing programming,” Civic Grid founder and CEO Max Fine told BetaKit in an interview on Thursday. “Having these spaces within these communities, big or small, I think, are really essential as we electrify our systems and we go through this energy transition.”
The courtyard’s 60 kWh energy system charges during the cheap, off-peak night hours, then powers the TNDF’s two buildings for six hours the following day. That keeps its fridges and community kitchen running at less cost, while also providing insurance if the power goes out.
Fine said a battery like this shows how important energy access is for people to participate in society. Already, multiple people are charging their phones in the courtyard in the morning, and it has helped an electric wheelchair user get moving when they ran out of juice. This philosophy is also reflected in the design, with the stone base meant to evoke a community water well.
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How a giant battery is transforming a town centre in Cannington, Ontario
11 votes -
Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentIf a purely socialist system succeeded at exporting, say, cars that consumers in other countries will buy, that would be quite an achievement! And tough to do now when competing with China. But...If a purely socialist system succeeded at exporting, say, cars that consumers in other countries will buy, that would be quite an achievement! And tough to do now when competing with China.
But the place to start is probably something like manufacturing clothing. The bottom isn't a country that has a clothing export industry like Bangladesh. It's the countries that can't even do that. There was an attempt to build a clothing industry in Haiti after the earthquake, but it's collapsed further since then.
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Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance
skybrian Link Parent"intrinsic inevitable" is doing a lot of work there. You can rule out a lot of failures by saying they weren't intrinsic or inevitable, but they're still failures, at least until the country..."intrinsic inevitable" is doing a lot of work there. You can rule out a lot of failures by saying they weren't intrinsic or inevitable, but they're still failures, at least until the country finally succeeds.
Meanwhile, the track record for growth due to export-led global trade is pretty good. It's certainly not "pure" capitalism since it's often due to intentional government policy. (China is an example!) But it's embedded in a trade-based global framework.
From the article:
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