And yet again another failed launch from Google. I pay for their AI plus Google one package to get more cloud storage (have no interest in their AI bundle but you have to pay). and all I see in the Gemini app is 3.6-flash
With all due respect, I don't have any of this nonsense with multiple products with different models with OpenAI. Anything I want to do, I just load up the ChatGPT app and I'm off to the races.
Well it's in AIStudio and Antigravity always the same day even free tier. Chat is usually low priority, especially if you don't have subscription. Are you on Pro/Ultra?
I think you're under-estimating how hot it gets inside well-insulated European homes. Your mileage may vary across European countries, but in the north where it gets cold in the winter our homes are built to trap heat. Opening windows won't get you very far as the temperature radiates through the windows and traps in the walls. Closing blinds will help, but not by much. It got over 40c in my office this summer. This is not livable conditions with a fan.
When it's around 20C, it's impossible for me to make my rooms colder than say 23C, because there is no way I can make so much of air exchange.
Even if I somehow manage to pull the air in, the moment I close it - the walls that have all that heat will start giving it back again, bringing the temperature back to where it was.
It's so funny, that when the winter starts, it's long into the winter before I have to turn on heating in my apartment.
We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building. I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony railings that face outwards as it ruins the "look". Given almost all apartment buildings are built consistently between every floor they could ensure consistent placement of condensers across all floors and it wouldn't even look that bad.
What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.
In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.
While I hear you, I think AC is better centralized for the building, along with heat and water.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
Agreed, new builds should be mandatory, but this is not easy to retrofit to existing apartment buildings in a country where labour and parts are notoriously expensive and have to be split with the residents.
I can run a broken toilet tank all day long without extra fees, hundreds of gallons. Can turn all faucets on without penalties, nobody is counting and the utility doesn't care. The maintenance fees for water cover it, spread across all residents (although they are not low, like $1,800 on top of mortgage, subsidizing things I don't use, like card rooms, ping pong hall, etc.). Some families live 4-5 in a 2 bedroom, in my case it's just the two of us and the dog. Pretty insane, no logical solutions in sight. Moving isn't inexpensive.
That seems unusual to me. I've never lived in a place where water was not metered and charged by the volume consumed. A necessity like water (and A/C) should be as you describe, but I've never seen it, at least not in the USA.
I live in a condo in Florida in a 3 building high-rise compound. There are no water meters per unit. Water is covered by maintenance fees. They are atrocious and rising, but water is "free". Retrofitting will increase maintenance fees, likely by a lot more than I would save paying for my own water usage.
I had a similar situation involving electricity when living in Los Angeles, in the Valley. Electricity costs were averaged across all units, there were no individual meters per unit. My family of 3 humans in a 2 bedroom apartment consumed a lot less than a 10 human family in a 3 bedroom, and that was a thing. I subsidized their electricity usage. This involved things like pool heating, grass maintenance which I never cared about or used. This was at Bella Vista near Warner Ridge. https://www.equityapartments.com/los-angeles/woodland-hills/...
In the US, utility companies don't bill you for actual usage, they have "predictions" on what you may use. IME. You can burn candles and eat canned food for a month and still get billed $300.
The problem with shared is the issue of shared cost. How do you determine how much a user consumes?
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
For most of the buildings from communism era - all the utilities run through the apartments anyway and there is absolutely no place or way to retrofit these utilities without extensively either re-doing it from scratch, or trying to somehow retrofit it on the outside.
All of these options are a non-starter considering basic AC starts from $500. Why should anyone invest more than that?
Permissions and structural concerns aside, you only need one 65mm/2.5" hole in the wall to run the high/low pressure gas lines, a drain hose, and a power cable, plus couple more non-penetrating drill holes on the wall to mount the inside and outside units. You'll need a hole saw attachment on a drill, a vacuum pump to thoroughly dry out the system, and bits of plastic putty to fill the hole against intrusion. It's a less than 5 man-hour job.
you don't really need drain hose for outside multisplit unit, my AC drain hoses from all indoor units are connected to my WC tank, I used previously pumps to push the water to the roof, but they were not reliable and once after thunderstorm they died when I finally went for passive solution, should have done it from the beginning)
Many communist-era buildings had a service shaft the width of the back wall of the toilet closet (yes, bathroom and toilet are separate rooms). This was hidden from everyday view with large cabinet doors.
A national-scale project can likely package cooling for these shafts, possibly emanating from rooftop units.
> We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
I've had one placed like this in the balcony of a XVth century palazzo turned museum plus hotel, straight in the historical heart of Verona. If they can do it, everybody can do it as well.
Doesn't matter what it looks like, problem is it changes the facade. For that you need to submit some paperwork and get it approved.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Obviously, people thought about this, and there are lots of fence designs that admit plenty of airflow and lots of products ready-made for this already.
Service technicians hate fences unless they are easy to remove during a service call. Honestly, esthetics is not as much concerning as the noise from compressor and condenser fan. I stayed in an AirBnb, where the outdoor unit next to the bed room, and I couldn't sleep.
Sometimes it's not about the fence, it's about exerting power. Put people in charge of the decision that shouldn't be there, and you're in world of pain.
I think you misunderstand what isolation does. It will also keep the heat out. Having window awnings to block sunlight from directly warming up the room will go a long way.
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as both daytime and nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
Now here is exactly one place where the regulation can hit hard: awnings are maybe not allowed because the house wasn't designed with them. Possible to get the new design approved? For sure. Simple? Ha.
You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.
I'm not talking about historic buildings that are hundreds of years old. I live in Finland - we don't have many of these. Almost all apartments are built after the 60s outside the downtown and look like concrete boxes.
if you have balcony you could hide multisplit unit under railing
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
Maybe the author is a non-native English speaker, and this enables him to communicate things he's not able to do himself. Should OSS maintainers start hiring professional translators? Are you going to fund that?
We really should stop jumping to conclusions and shaming people for using these tools just because you don't like the language of the LLM. How is a non native speaker meant to determine what is English slop and what isn't?
I should also note, I am a native speaker. There's absolutely nothing wrong with what's written in the part you chose to paraphrase, and it makes sense to me.
A non-native speaker most likely writes more 'understandable' English than the weird convoluted Claude style.
FWIW though, you can ask an LLM to write in 'Simplified Technical English' (see: https://www.asd-ste100.org/), which at times reads like its written for a child, but it is much better for inclusion of non-native speakers.
This is a recent degradation; they've been writing blog entries for years.
As a non native English speaker I can also attest to this trade being extremely demanding of English fluency:
> public static void DoTheThing(Configuration config)
Isn't something you can not understand and still function as a software engineer. Yes, some schools and universities teach in other languages, but the entire ecosystem from code to documentation to articles is nearly almost always in English.
It doesn't matter. I work with people who aren't native speakers (in a country where English-education is a very high standard) but are mostly fluent in day to day conversation and meetings and they are not comfortable writing long-form texts - and it shows. Your expectations are unrealistic.
Never heard of Logitech options, have just had G Hub installed for ages (and had a huge number of problems with it on MacOS when I first got the G502 lightspeed 3y ago).
Looks like this is for the "Logi" high end office series. They use different software for some reason, I guess Logitech thinks their customers don't want to see anything gaming related in their app because it looks unprofessional.
I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.
Hi. Long-term HN user based in Helsinki. I'd join but don't really want to share my phone number with a large group of people. Can you not find another way to co-ordinate?
There should be an email sent out whenever a meet is organized. WhatsApp group is mostly for choosing the most suitable date and a place , it’s not mandatory for participation
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (I've never used it myself), but Google Voice doesn't seem to be available in Finland at all so probably not?
> Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. telephone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the contiguous United States.
Not sure what I'm supposed to do with a US phone number anyway, I'd probably be more embarrassed about using a US phone number then letting people in a HN meetup group see my real phone number.
