Solar panels are even worse. Here in Poland they're covering entire fields in the countryside, I have no idea why they don't build them on parking lots or on factory roofs.
Yes I have no problems with them looks-wise. They don't build them on parking lots/factory roofs because of efficiency. Good solar panels follow the sun, which isnt really a mechanism practical to setup in a parking lot. maintenance is also a lot easier if you have one field generating a gigawatt of power vs having to service 20 parking lots that generate a gigawatt of power. Also obviously the land itself is cheaper in the countryside. Renewables are operating on relatively thing margins profitability wise, so you really want to make the juice worth the squeeze (the main value being sovereignty from other countries as discussed in the thread)
of course. Ive not met a person that doesn't like them, either. I love hiking and have travelled pretty wide across europe.
Solar panels are similarly lovely to see. I'd just as rather see them than a uniform field of corn or maize or somesuch thing. I can't understand the mindset that objects to such things? is it just a straight up childish nimby "I don't want ANYTHING to be built" or would you prefer natural gas+coal power plants ? or any other built structures for that matter (I think they are better than concrete buildings etc - they are white tree-like things, thin with smooth curved surfaces, or rows of curious purple and black panels swiveling to face the sun)
I'm sorry I came off a little hostile. I do find it hard to understand how people can be so opposed to such clearly necessary infrastructure on purely aesthetic grounds.
Compared to all the things that could be built, it seems like the aesthetic harm is so small (a six lane highway, an industrial plant, a train line, sewage processing plant, refuse pile, the list goes on and on) - all of these must be built in places too. I can't see how anyone can think themselves anything but lucky that they get wind turbines near them instead
I know several people who think oil pump jacks are pretty but wind turbines are ugly. Myself, I did a bike tour of Denmark in 2006 partially to see the wind turbines...
I've never seen a pumpjack nor any hydrofracking equipment. I have seen a few capitalists but I can't be positive they were red-blooded ones (whatever that means).
The red blooded thing was tongue in cheek. Go visit California. Eat at In n Out. You may see a pumpjack next to the place you’re sitting enjoying your animal style fries. They’re pretty common. I don’t mind them really, but do find them to be equally / neutrally as a wind turbine in the area (also common sight in California), admittedly the wind turbine is sleeker and more modern, but the pumpjacks have more history.
Looks amazing, I don't know if this is legit or useful feedback, but I navigated away after reading "Generate & update apps using AI".
I'm so tired of AI everywhere and everything trying to sell to you because of AI this and AI that.
I think that at this point we assume AI will be available if it makes sense for the product, making it a selling point to me is like slapping "No cholesterol!" on lettuce.
I think about this a lot because I try to never buy anything Chinese or low quality unless I have to.
Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium. For instance, a carpenter here in Poland that decided to be a carpenter would rather cut up pre-made cabinets to your specs than make them from scratch using wood, even if I pay them 10x.
Then, people aren't willing to pay premium for stuff. For some reason, they would rather buy 20 products that last year than 1 product that can last 20 or more.
It's a problem for me because I value quality and would be willing to pay premium, but I just can't ever find anything.
It's an old stereotype - between 1990 and 2010 or so, Chinese manufacturing was usually seen as of a lower quality.
This was often unfair and incorrect even then, but it's clearly mad now. Chinese products run the gamut from the lowest to the highest ends in almost every consumer field. But some people hew to old stereotypes.
I'm not sure where you live, but it is reasonable to bet that "we" still does.
The US manufactures more than it ever did - but the number of people working to manufacture stuff is way down (while population is way up), and so few people have visibility into what is being made. There is a lot of cool stuff made in the US. Whatever country you live in likely has a similar story.
Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.
For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.
I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.
For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.
I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.
I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.
Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.
We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.
I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.
I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.
For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.
Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.
It might be possible, I don't know. Singapore is a fairly small market, so we don't really get any bespoke stuff.
Transport shouldn't really be worse: once you put anything on a container ship, it doesn't really matter much how long the ride is. But imports could be more annoying in other ways.
We do have a lot more people speaking Chinese here (around 3/4 of the population are ethnically Chinese after all) and lots of personal contacts, so we get a lot of people running small import businesses getting in Chinese stuff.
Of course, there's still plenty of low quality stuff you can buy. But I see that as a benefit: it's good to have the choice available, if you want to take it.
Regulation doesn't have much to do with quality. For example, there's plenty of regulation to make food safe, but almost nothing about making your food high quality in the sense of taste and texture.
You get quality from competition and customers opening their wallets for quality.
Another example: Apple assembles some nice consumer hardware in China. Their quality doesn't depend on regulation.
I definitely have to do a lot of work every time I need something, but I can often find products that aren't made in China (normally Germany).
If not, I usually just don't buy it new and just go to the thrift store. I can usually find what I need, made 30 years ago that will probably last me for the rest of my life.
Most of my "smart" devices are Chinese. Huawei creates superior products than most western/korean/japanese counterparts. I would prefer everything I own is Chinese, the quality is superb.
> Unfortunately, from my experience artisans aren't willing to do the work anymore, even if you pay them premium.
"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).
And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.
With Claude—and I feel Opus 5 in particular—I always feel like I'm talking in circles.
Just when I think the task is finally done, it mentions a caveat that might invalidate the whole thing. Or it adds a hint at the end about something that it didn't look into but might be a potential problem. ALWAYS.
If I ask a yes/no question, it's always a short novel that barely answers the question and adds 3-4 side quests.
It's exhausting. Luckily I get paid for it but Jesus Christ, can't they see how annoying it is to use the thing? What were they thinking
>The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audience
I don't know how to read this sentence other than "there are breaking changes we want to make"
The migration guide does say there are breaking changes, but the interpretation I have is "this won't have new features but allows us to develop new features".
I wish I were joking that I literally haven't received a delivery of four GET endpoints I wrote requirements for six months ago. The problem is that nobody seems to understand why this is an issue. We are constantly advertising to our customers that we are moving to API-based integrations and that the future of our product is being able effectively use our product without a user interface, and yet the management team is okay with four GET endpoints not being shipped in six months.
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
OP said in a comment that the devs are approaching retirement and their expertise is in COBOL and other really really legacy systems. I doubt they’re inclined at all to start using LLMs, or anything that changes how they work.
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