is germany increasing or decreasing the amount of coal it burns every year?

right now, they’re ramping up massively.

they have a blog post on this

that’s nice, if a bit loose. i hope it’s a working solution.

you are out of the game too long, they switched to google a while ago

that link is broken for me, but from their privacy policy it seems they use both. not that google is any better, unfortunately.

For the first time in its 16-year history, Ecosia users in France will now receive a proportion of their search results directly from EUSP’s independent European index.

that’s very good to hear. hopefully it rolls out to more than just france.

Try to stay positive eh ;)

thanks for the reminder. genuinely.

think of it like this. you build small tools for internal use, so code quality, maintainability and documentation are not your highest priorities, right? most important is to ship the features needed by your colleagues right now. i’ve been in that same boat, building internal testing tools for a big multinational.

say your tool contains shortcuts for interacting with some internal database. you don’t need auth because it’s all on the internal net, so it’s just a collection of shortcuts. you don’t really care about maintainability, because it’s all just temporary, so you throw every new request together in the fastest way you can, probably trying out new techniques to keep yourself entertained. you don’t really care about testability, because you’re the only one testing so you can check that everything works before doing a release and if something slips through one of your colleagues will walk down the hall and tell you.

now imagine it gets enough attention that your boss says “we want our customers to use this”. suddenly your priorities are upended: you absolutely need auth, you definitely need testability and you absolutely definitely need the tool to not mess things up. best possible world, you can reimplement the tool in a more manageable way, making sure every interface is consistent, documentation is up to snuff for users, and error handling is centralised.

the claude cli leak is the opposite of that. it’s the worst code quality i’ve ever seen. it’s full of errors, repeated code, and overzealous exception handling. it is absolutely unmaintainable. the functionality for figuring out what type a file is and reading it into a proper object is 38 000 lines of typescript, excluding the class definitions. the entire thing is half a million lines. the code for uploading a pdf calls the code to upload jpegs, because if a file isn’t identified it’s automatically a jpeg. and jpegs can go through the same compression routine up to 22 times before it tries to upload them because the handler just calls itself repeatedly.

and this is the code they thought was robust enough to withstand the internet. imagine what their internal tooling looks like.

ew :(

so fun fact, i live within walking distance of that dc project (close enough that i was invited to attend a presentation by edc on what it would do to the immediate area) and i’ve done the math on the grid load. the hydro plants in the city currently meets about 40% of its needs. edc wants 750MW of reserve power generation (that’s diesel) installed on the site. if we assume that’s double their average usage, they will still more than double the energy needs of the city. and that’s in the middle of an infrastructure crisis that means we’re stuck buying german coal.

ecosia has always felt kinda skeevy to me, because tree planting isn’t actually carbon positive. it becomes positive after 40 or so years, granted that the trees are not cut down. which is usually what happens. also, just like ddg, ecosia is dependent on bing, the search provider with the worst carbon footprint, to function.

and i probably don’t need to tell you what cobalt mining does to the environment or the people who handle it.

so it does help to look deeper at the things in your daily life :)

what’s everyone else doing then? isn’t it specifically for code?

after the client leak i should think it was even more poignant. a bit like tearing down a wall and finding it full of mouldy razor blades

i’ve not actually looked at the demographics. is that available somewhere?

a google ai search, sure. a normal web search uses several orders of magnitude less energy.

sure let’s just burn down half a hectare of the amazon for a seven line script.

engineering philosophy is where the rubber hits the road. building software with the right philosophy can mean the difference between needing a datacenter or a raspberry pi for the same job. it directly translates to money saved in recurring costs.

can i pick neither?

code is not the product. code is the tool we use to build the product. it’s not about swinging your hammer, it’s about knowing where to put the nails.

do it yourself, like in the distant past of *checks calendar* six months ago

it does show their general style of work, eg no checks of the source at all, complete ignorance of the capabilities of language models, and lots of pleas to not hack the user when they ask a question. with that leak i’m not surprised they think a model is “too dangerous”. they could barely stop the old one.

so it is

well yeah but things like this, printed in newspapers, tend to reference specific events.

2008? the hell was happening in sweden in 2008 to make them draw this? is this a reference to göteborgskravallerna?

oooh, finally i can get the panchroma cmyk combo so my toolchanger can do true color!

oh god the smurfhits albums… you got them too? i don’t know which one of us started it but i’m glad that’s over.

i have consultant colleagues who have worked for ikea. shit’s everywhere.

fun fact, the subsidiary they worked for is not listed.

god, the reading comprehension on this site