Pointer accuracy and the possibility to keep your hands on the keyboard while navigating the cursor. Clickpads make it harder to get pixel-perfect pointer accuracy without compromising pointer speed since the act of pushing down on the pad to click invariably moves the pointer. A touchpad with separate buttons does not have these problems but those are becoming rarer and have not been available on your preferred device for a long time.
Is it possible to operate the trackpoint with your thumb? Being able to keep my fingers on the home row while moving the pointer would be a feature I'd pay for.
Seeing how your thumb normally rests somewhere in the vicinity of the space bar and the 3 buttons underneath it it is possible but not the most ergonomically sound way to do it. Normally you'd operate it with your middle finger, use your thumbs for the buttons and space bar and that way your hands do get to rest in their assigned areas on the keyboard. It sits between the g/h/b keys so you can try simulating using one on any keyboard you have, just imagine three buttons - two wide ones with a raised smaller one between them - just underneath the space bar.
Really? I have always used one of my index fingers, the other fingers stay on their keys in the home row. Do you find an advantage to using your middle finger or just one of those things you do because that is how you always have done it?
Yes, index finger, I stupidly used the wrong term. INDEX FINGER. It is too late to edit that post so for anyone interested in not getting some weird crippling finger affliction use your INDEX FINGER to massage the nub.
Besides what the other poster said, trackpoint scrolling is amazingly good and life is just better in any programs which require a great deal of back and forth between keyboard and mouse; PureData is a good example, type a few words, select and move stuff, type a few words, select, move, repeat for hours on end.
Some people have years of trauma from poor touchpads on windows laptops. I have coworkers who to this day when sitting down at a computer will as their first action plug in a corded mouse.
Trackpad != trackpoint. The track point is the little eraser nub pointer embedded into the keyboard. Many thinkpad enthusiasts disable the trackpad entirely.
Great read. There is something special here that the author isn’t commenting on: the fact that cold hard business logic was allowed to lead to a sustainably (money-wise) better product without interference for decades is unusual.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
I’m missing something. Is the operator paying actual cash money if the market price goes up? It’s not just that they’re forced to produce electricity at a rate that’s possibly less than what it cost to buy fuel?
(Or in the case of renewables: producing for less profit than they would if they made their contract later)
Think of it this way: as a windfarm operator you know your costs and you know your expected amount of energy produced. But you don’t know the precise timing and therefore the market value at generation time.
From the first two you can calculate what you need in terms of £/MWh (include whatever profit you want in there). Now you can go to the government and bid that price in the auction. If you win, you have a safe profit and all risk (and upside potential) now lies with the government.
As GP said, in the case of 2022 you would have lost out on revenue. But that’s the price foe guaranteed margins
The CfD part is a technical detail. It ~ doesn’t matter whether you first sell the energy and then go to the government for reimbursement. Or whether you sell the energy to the government which then handles the follow up sale.
What I’m not sufficiently familiar with is whether you _have_ to go to such an auction (i.e. whether the auction also is the mechanism of capacity planning) or whether you are free to bypass this system and just hook up your wind park and carry the risk yourself. But functionally this is an insurance scheme for profits, with a market based pricing system
> ~ doesn’t matter whether you first sell the energy and then go to the government for reimbursement. Or whether you sell the energy to the government which then handles the follow up sale
Still missing something in relation to a point above. Does one of these scenarios involve the operator “paying” or “giving back” actual money when the market price is higher than agreed? As opposed to just operating at a loss or less profit?
If you are willing to ignore the mechanics, then the result rounds to: The operator will receive the auctioned value of x £/MWh for each MWh delivered to the grid
If you are interested in the mechanics, then _I think_ (i.e. not first hand knowledge) the operator will join each auction (once per day for each 15 min interval of the next day) and offer his energy amount there. He will then receive the integral of (auction price) times (volume) from “the grid”. If that is too little money he then goes to the government and asks for a top up to (contract price) times (volume). If that was too much he has to pay the government the difference.
But again. That is purely mechanical. The end effect of the contracts is you will always receive say 80£ per MWh delivered. Independent of the MWh was worth 500£ in that 15 min interval or -50£. It’s “just” a risk transfer
Ah I’m seeing a possible confusion. There are two different auctions in the description. The first one is for the CfD price and happens (for each project) once. The second one is the daily-price-discovery one and happens daily
> at a rate that’s possibly less than what it cost to buy fuel?
You might need to sit down for this. The wind farms don't use fuel. Wind just happens, it's a natural phenomenon that has no real regard for our stupid "wind farm" even as we're harvesting gigawatts of power the wind doesn't ccare.
If you were thinking "Wait I thought all the providers have these contracts, not just renewables" then er no, they're a subsidy, the CfD is a subsidy scheme. That cheap to make, expensive to run open cycle gas turbine some asshole put on a local industrial estate doesn't get a CfD, it can offer to sell the resulting electricity at market prices, and really the big problem is as you observed, that's possibly less than what it costs to buy fuel. Yeah, it is, bad idea to keep building Open Cycle Gas Turbines I reckon. Sure enough the UK almostly exclusively has more expensive to build but cheaper to run Combined Cycle plants.
CfDs are used to subsidise renewable future power. A long term energy independence strategy. Even if you don't care about the planet warming and the sea levels rising you won't be burning all this gas in a thousand years 'cos there's not enough gas. Whereas the sun will shine until long after we're gone, and the accompanying winds won't stop either.
The size of the subsidy varies, if you're building a pilot plant of a new technology that you're sure will revolutionize clean energy but, alas, no-one ever made one that worked before, the government might be willing to pay you four or five times as much money for your energy, partly because they're not expecting you to actually make any energy because you will likely fail. If your plan's big problem is that it's way less mechanically reliable than you'd like, this is a big incentive to incrementally improve that reliability. If your device that involves being in and out of an incredibly powerful tidal stream of corrosive sea water at freezing temperatures makes power but doesn't crack, tear, fall to pieces or explode in the scheduled period of operation you're that much closer to actually having a useful technology and paying you five times over the odds for the MWh you did make is a reasonable price.
The non renewable operator would be free to sell at a competitive price or not at all. Perhaps on nights when there’s no wind at sea they might be able to make their obsolete infrastructure pay for itself briefly.
But that is exactly what is happening. Each seller can offer their price and each bidder can also offer their price. And since running a gas turbine is more expensive than wind power they are forced by the market to turn their gas turbines off when there is wind. However when there is only a little wind they can power up their gas turbines and sell to the highest bidder. But since there is also a little bit wind, the wind power people can also sell to that highest bidder. That is how it happens that suddenly wind power is just as expensive as the gas turbines, because there is simply not as much wind power to go around for all the people that need electricity.
The people who gathered stats professionally are correct.
I’m twitchy about this because I’m hearing from relatives in far more dangerous countries and cities about how London is under siege from immigrant criminals and sharia law is being imposed in the streets. Their news bubble is full of current articles that use as “evidence” pictures of riots from a decade ago where the violence was not committed by immigrants.
This would be laughable if not for how completely these folks have swallowed this nonsense.
It’s at best unscrupulous journalists desperate for eyeballs but given how pervasive this is it feels naive to assume anything but a paid, coordinated campaign.
“Are you ok in the UK?” Yes, I’m right here in London. London is fine.
I don’t understand why ONS should be expected to do anything but gather numbers. If good policing is the cause or reduction in alcohol consumption is the cause who cares?
Also, on looking for incentives the very obvious incentive to try discredit these orgs is so that politicians outside London can blame crime on immigration in the city that has the most immigrants.
This is straight out of the playbook of groups who want to manipulate public opinion so that they can get away with something that is not in the interests of the electorate.
Look at the US where these capabilities have been under siege since the start of this presidency, for example NASA’s climate data and the EPA’s air quality health impact measurement. Or more directly relevant: “immigrants are eating dogs and cats” and it doesn’t matter that the people who track crime professionally say “no they aren’t”.
It isn't the ONS. I believe it is a research unit of a university who collects this data, and they produce press releases on this dataset.
The reason why the difference is important is because it implies extremely different strategies to fixing it...obviously.
"politicians outside London"...ah, ofc, the Londoner conspiracy theory. It is wrong to blame immigrants for crime but correct to blame people outside London? The reason why people think there is a link between crime and immigration is because there is a link between crime and immigration. I am not sure what else can be said. You are implying that public opinion should be manipulated to hide this fact (even though this is already something the government does) whilst complaining about other people manipulating public opinion. Classic.
Just to clarify: you're saying the alcohol vs crime stats are from a research unit of a university? If so:
- I admit that I don't know much about ONS but its name suggests that they are not about research/speculation/anecdata into how we got where we are or how to fix it, they are just there to collect data
- I would count the reduction in alcohol consumption as an extremely positive step for fixing problems; societal problems like crime need holistic solutions. What the correct solution is seems orthogonal to my point which is that stats orgs work hard to produce rigorous data and it is dangerous to undermine them in favour of groups (bloggers?) who have no such standards applied to their work
> It is wrong to blame immigrants for crime but correct to blame people outside London
I'm not sure what point you're making, I'm not blaming crime on people outside London. I imagine that the small amount of crime in London is committed by people in and around London. I expect the tiny minority of immigrants to be responsible for a tiny minority of those crimes.
> there is a link between crime and immigration
I'd be interested to read stats from a reputable source that applies the sort of rigour that the non-political civil servants who typically gather stats.
> You are implying that public opinion should be manipulated to hide this fact
I am stating that the fact of low crime rates in London should not be undermined in favour of conspiracy theories that are used to demonise the civil service.
Even if there is a link between crime and immigration the low rate makes it far less of a problem than the other societal problems we face, like the quick political points scored by demonising and hollowing out the civil service.
> even though this is already something the government does
This government already bows to this immigration nonsense. They are not a good example in your case.
I noticed this too. Everything lacks consistency, wrapped in headings that are designed to make me feel good. It’s uncomfortable reading one thing that seems so right followed by code that feels wrong but my usual instincts about why help less because of how half right it is.
(But still, LLMs have helped me investigate and write code that is beyond me)
> (But still, LLMs have helped me investigate and write code that is beyond me)
They haven't done that yet[1], but they have sped up things via rubber-ducking, and for documentation (OpenSSL is documentation is very complete, very thorough, but also completely opaque).
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[1] I have a project in the far future where they will help me do that, though. It all depends on whether I can get additional financial security so I can dedicate some time to a new project :-(
