Colby Brown @colby@transportation.social

EV sales remain healthy despite online doom and gloom

Battery EVs are expected to account for more than 8 percent.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/ev-sales-remain-healthy-despite-online-doom-and-gloom/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Open Source is NOT a business model!

Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/some-startups-are-going-fair-source-to-avoid-the-pitfalls-of-open-source-licensing/

LinkedIn is "TikTok" for middle aged people.

You know how older people are always scared of TikTok messing up young people's minds with disinformation and bullshit, of influencers getting kids to do dumb shit for their profit? That's exactly what LinkedIn does for middle aged people: A constant stream of weird influencers selling absolute garbage to people who are unsure about what their job means and what they care about.

American mathematician Dorothy Vaughan was born #OTD in 1910.

She was the first respected Black female manager at NASA, thus creating a long-lasting legacy for diversity in mathematics & science for West Area Computers. As one of the first female coders in the field who knew how to code FORTRAN, she was able to instruct other Black women on the coding language & paved a wave of female programmers to integrate their work into NASA’s systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan

#mathematics #womeninSTEM

"Patrick McCray @patrickmccray.bsky.social

If you're having a rough day, remember that in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee's paper for the World Wide Web was rejected and he was relegated to the poster session.

https://bsky.app/profile/patrickmccray.bsky.social/post/3l4e4yrnt4u27

Woah

A lot of anti-DEI folk were genuinely surprised by Kamala Harris' debate win. They're in shock that a talented Black woman that had to earn it, completely dismantled a white man that was given it.

The same folk should acknowledge that BYD now outsells Tesla, that BYD's workforce is more diverse, and that BYD USA's CEO is an Asian woman.👍🏿

And they should acknowledge that Waymo is ahead of Tesla in self-driving cars, that Waymo is more diverse, and that Waymo's co-CEO is a Black woman.👍🏿

1/N

🤣
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1792461897/i-have-a-concept-of-a-plan-presidential

No, school shootings do not have to be a "fact of life."

— Gun laws in other countries have stopped mass shootings

— More guns don't make us safer

— A majority of Americans want gun reform

We do not have to live like this. No other country does.

So apparently bitcoin miners who've gone big, buying defunct power generation plants to feed their mining gear, have found that they can make significantly more money simply selling that power into the grid.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto

In places where there's an actual market for electricity (unlike South Africa where the price is fixed by a state regulator, and is constant throughout the day and night), you can sell spare capacity back to the grid. If you've got rooftop solar, and your batteries are charged and are harvesting energy that you can't use, you can sell it back to your provider. And the power firms themselves are able to do something similar, and so wholesale prices fluctuate constantly as demand and supply shift. We all know this, from those amazing stories about electricity prices sometimes going negative in places like Germany.

So the bitcoin miners with their crappy old coal-burning generators have found they can play the market: when demand goes up because it's hot and everybody's running the AC, they can turn off all their mining rigs and sell the power to the grid for a pretty healthy profit - $32m compared to $8.6m in one example

In other words, bitcoin is a very inefficient use of power: The process of turning electricity into bitcoin caused an almost 75% loss in value, which is the opposite of how manufacturing usually works - you turn a thousand dollars worth of raw material into $5000 worth of refined material, into $10000 worth of manufactured goods (completely made up example numbers to illustrate the point).

Bitcoin gets it backwards!

The existence of libraries says, We want EVERYONE, to have access to information, entertainment, and services for free.

So, what are the people who want to defund and censor them saying to all of us?

{spanishoddata} is a new and in-progress #rstats package for importing large origin-destination (OD) datasets released by the Spanish Ministry of Transport by Egor Kotov, me + growing #opensource community. Thanks Eugeni Vidal-Tortosa for improved docs it's ready to share, feedback welcome 🙏 https://buff.ly/4fN4vsO

A friend just gave me this wonderful analogy about elections:

“Elections aren’t an uber taking you to exactly where you want to go, they’re a train carrying a mass of people to the station nearest your destination.

You have to board the train that’s going in the same direction you want to go, even if it doesn’t take you to the street, or even the town you’re wanting to reach.”

Edit: please don't @ me on this

#uspol #politics

*Taps mic*

As a lifelong teacher, homework should be abolished.

At every grade level.

No research we have supports homework as being effective, and most of it (like teaching grammar) *ACTIVELY HARMS STUDENTS*.

(Except maybe some very mild homework in math and a couple of highly specific sciences).