Marques Brownlee got a top-of-the-line Tesla system installed in his home to figure out the costs, benefits, and quirks of it all. He found huge fluctuations season to season, which mostly washed out over the course of the year.
The end result was a very high-tech and nearly cost-free home electricity system... it’s just going to take a while to pay itself off.
The identity verification service no longer seems to be able to verify identities on Reddit — at least, not for me and a handful of others who have tweeted about it. I’m guessing this is because of Reddit’s change to start charging for API access.
On the other hand, it could be because Zoom, which bought Keybase in 2020, seems to have mostly stopped updating the service. On iOS, it’s only gotten a single bug fix in the past year.
so I’m just gonna leave you here with some lyrics from Grimes’ new song:
I wanna be software
Binary heart
Infinite options
State of the art
The New York Times has a deep dive into Starlink, the internet satellites deployed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — and how they’ve become crucial to communication in war zones like Ukraine.
Just like the rest of us, it turns out military leaders are also concerned about Musk’s somewhat erratic decision making.
In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy.
[The New York Times]
The New York Times reports that the US government is searching for malware in “networks controlling power grids, communications systems and water supplies” that could let China’s military disrupt operations in the event of a conflict.
The malware, one congressional official said, was essentially “a ticking time bomb” that could give China the power to interrupt or slow American military deployments or resupply operations by cutting off power, water and communications to U.S. military bases.
[The New York Times]
Sorry, I mean: Ye is back on X.
Elon Musk’s social network unbanned Ye after nearly eight months. He was banned back in December 2022 for posting a swastika after making a series of anti-Semitic statements on and off of Twitter.
The Wall Street Journal reports that ads won’t appear beside Ye’s posts, and he won’t be able to monetize his account.
I just finished this deep dive from Jaime Brooks, aka Default Genders / Elite Gymnastics, on music technology’s march toward AI-synthesized voices like the the Drake / Ghostwriter situation, and why the current industry model — at least in the US — isn’t designed to support it.
[Drake] could transition from being a recording artist into something more like a landlord, renting out his own voice to aspiring record producers. Though this sort of business model has no precedent in the western record business, the artist-as-platform model has been powering Hatsune Miku’s success in the Japanese market for over fifteen years.
[jaimebrooks.substack.com]
Kamila Wojciechowska at Android Authority has been on a run when it comes to Pixel leaks, and her latest shows off four new faces reportedly destined for the Pixel Watch 2. This one below reminds me a lot of some complication-heavy Apple Watch faces.
