Month: October 2019

Playing transparent chess with Vitalii Menshutin. Didn’t get past two moves. (Who came up with that!)

Nadezhda and I released another report over the weekend about the opening of a small trail. When I learned about the event, it seemed very amusing to me. I immediately sent Nade an image of deputies in Tula opening a backyard clothes dryer and a grand opening of trash bins in Novokuznetsk.

However, upon closer inspection, everything turned out to be more interesting. And considering nearly four years have passed, it’s even more understandable.

So, a simple paved path along the road about a couple of kilometers long took 14 years to build. Partly, the opening was so grand because it was a very important event for many, taking years to happen. The funding was mainly local, literally by the residents of the settlement. A small segment received federal funding because this piece of road is in the registry of historic roads, and there needed to be detailed planning and coordination involving various slow-moving organizations. Meanwhile, $90,000 remained from the construction, which was transferred to the next stage.

A nonprofit organization, where all participants are volunteers (meaning, they don’t get paid, only spend their time), is managing this construction.

Building a path in the States along a road, as it turned out, is not a trivial matter. The thing is, there’s only a small right-of-way zone around the road that road workers still control, but beyond that starts someone’s property. Designing a path that does not touch anyone’s property while being safe and convenient is quite challenging.

Great Falls, where all this is happening, is a very nice place. We have already written a lot about local events, and each one gives the impression that people in this quite large settlement live as one whole, and highly value this unity. If I ever have an extra four to five million dollars, I’ll buy myself a little house there.

In Houston, there’s an interesting startup – Griddy (GoGriddy dot com). It’s an alternative electricity provider. Here’s the concept. A typical provider bills you at a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, which is almost always significantly higher than the wholesale rate, and that’s where they make their profit. The wholesale rate, which is what the typical provider pays for the electricity, fluctuates – like lower at night, higher during heatwaves. Plus, the volume is important – if their customers only use 80 percent, the rest just burns off. So, in Texas, you can switch providers. In zip code 77060 (north Houston), there are 55 providers available. One of them, Griddy, bills at the actual wholesale rate, updating it every hour. Allegedly, in 96% of cases, this rate is below the Texas average. Plus, they charge ten bucks for membership to cover peaks and make earnings. There’s an app that shows you a chart – actual electricity usage, rate schedule by the hour. They have API and FTTT to set up a smart home to use less electricity during high-cost periods, or just to receive SMS notifications.

Since Griddy collects and analyzes data from all clients, they can predict quite accurately how much energy to purchase. This allows them to get a better price than traditional energy providers who also calculate but maintain a flat rate and make a profit on the delta. And Griddy calculates more precisely and doesn’t buy excess.

It’s claimed that this allows for significant savings. However, this past August, many Griddy clients took a hit because there was extreme heat, electricity consumption was at its peak, and the wholesale rate was above the Texas average, a lot of people found out that their bills didn’t go down at all, and there was an uproar. It was like “we did warn about those four percent,” but Griddy decided to be accommodating and refunded everyone’s ten-dollar membership.

Additionally, there’s a prepaid account that automatically (or manually) gets replenished from a card, and Griddy takes the money from there on its own.

But overall, the concept is interesting. In Russia, I could never have imagined that there could be “virtual electricity network operators.”

I, Robot

There’s one thing in macOS Finder that really annoys me. You download a zip archive into the Downloads folder, where you already have a million files (I clean it every six months). And then you unpack it. The folder from the archive doesn’t appear next to the zip file, but somewhere lower down, sometimes much lower. This is because the files are sorted by creation/modification date (which puts the zip file at the top since I just downloaded it), and the unpacked file ends up somewhere in the middle because its creation date is in the past. And finding that folder or file can sometimes be very non-trivial, because you don’t always remember what it was named in the archive.

UPDATE: Thanks to Naumov Aleksey – you need to sort by Date Added. To do this, you need to enable this column, which is not enabled by default. Sorting by created/modified date is now out the window

Hope and support

Interestingly, everyone washes spoons and forks, but no one washes cola cans before licking them

By the way, I’ve been tormented by this question since visiting NASA – does it make sense to use a multilayered complex architecture, like the whole Windows with drivers, for solving algorithmically simple tasks, which include both moon landing and ballistic missile control? After all, a simple algorithm directly controlling a microcontroller can realistically be tested for all branches, whereas in a complex system one has to introduce the concept of faith and hope. I mean, if a manufacturer promises something, and it’s lengthy and complicated to verify, it’s easier to believe that the manufacturer has already considered everything and to address problems as they arise, hoping that there will be no problems at all. The result of your work goes as a component into a more complex system, where they now trust you. And so a cascade accumulates, at the end of which unreliability arises.

Civic-patriotic education and cultural-recreational activities in a typical American school and Lisa’s quarterly project for the Government of the USA course on organizing PR support for a real Senate candidate in Virginia. What amazing work they do! Read about it, it’s out of this world. Many of our political technologists need to go learn in the 12th grade at McLean High School.

The first hospital in my life turned out to be not bad 🙂 fixed the menisci