In Sweden, to avoid this kind of malicious leaks, we leak the residents' data officially. https://hitta.se lets you look up personal numbers, names, addresses, birthdays and sometimes phone numbers of any resident. The residents are not asked for consent, the data goes there automatically (some of my friends had success with having it removed from hitta, but it comes back once you change residence address).
It's quite convenient, when you meet a new friend, to go and check what neighbourhood they're from, who do they live with and where they lived before.
What's the big deal, Danes? What do you have to hide?
(The provocative tone is intentional as a joke, I'm not even a Swede, I just find the brotherly rivalry between Scandinavians amusing.)
These services were just the natural extension of the phonebook. At the exact same time as the phonebooks stopped being circulated, these services popped up online.
And since everyone's name, address and phone number was in the phone book (At least for their city) people didn't find it weird when it popped up online. Sure, to do the same thing for the whole country you'd need dozens of phonebooks for different areas, but it was just the same information.
Which makes me wonder: weren't there phonebooks in US cities and in other countries before? Were they incomplete/opt-in?
The key thing about the Swedish phonebooks were that they were opt-out, so people were basically all in the phone book. So even before the internet, it was just very natural that your name, address and phone number was public. "Getting someone's number" as in moves and TV wasn't a thing. You could just call anyone if you knew their name.
Yes, we had phone books. And it was useful. But they didn't generally include personal information such as birthdates, salary, etc. And it was easy to opt out. Additionally there were not a bunch of online services with financial impacts that used phone numbers are primary keys.
And, importantly, they were physical in a time when it was hard to collect and collate the data in all of them. In 1990, there were about 5,000 distinct "white pages" phone books in the US. And OCR was pretty crappy.
Also, in all the places that I lived, mobile numbers didn't end up in the phone books, only residential landlines did. I don't know if that was universal.
Right. It was harder to spoof my bank (since banking was an in-person affair), and steal all my money back then. Now, this information is available to anyone in the world, and there aren’t good protections. I don’t know the solution, but the world is a different place than it was in the days of white-pages.
In the UK, you could always choose to go 'ex-directory'. More and more people did over time I think and the personal part of the phone directory got slimmer and slimmer, basically just leaving the business part.
Are there no murderers, crazy ex-boy/girlfriends, targeted harrassment and spam calls in Sweden?
Not that any other country does much better in this regard. Still it sounds a little wild to me that you can get this information without even needing to hit a shady forum and download some csv. Maybe lowers the bar too much.
When I lived Norway, my gf at the time would look up the license plates of cars that annoyed her and could see how much debt they had on the car to make fun of them. Scandinavians are oddly very open with this type of personal info.
In Sweden I have looked up someone's phone number through the info I got from the license plate to notify the owner of a BMW M5 that their 20 years old son was often speeding down the 30km/h street close by my house where kids would cross coming from the metro or a bus stop nearby.
The owner just thanked me, and said was going to have a chat with the driver. Never saw that car speeding nearby again.
I don't even see salary or what your debt is as "personal information" (am Swede not in Sweden), personal information is stuff that no one else would need to know. What people earn affects not just people around you and others in the workplace but also society at large, makes a ton of sense for that stuff to be public.
Especially great that you can see what employees at competitors earn, what your peers at your workplace earn and what your boss earns. Become a hell of lot easier to ensure you're not exploited. Helps that Sweden has a really strong union-culture as well.
> I don't even see salary or what your debt is as "personal information" (am Swede not in Sweden), personal information is stuff that no one else would need to know. What people earn affects not just people around you and others in the workplace but also society at large, makes a ton of sense for that stuff to be public.
In a high trust culture I get this. But what about if you're in a low trust culture with quite some "not so orderly behavior" (if you will).
I think it's the opposite, the mismatch of information availability between employer and employee makes that a low trust culture, which is addressed by making that information public instead. If it was a high trust culture, employees would trust their employer pay them fairly, but they don't, hence this information deserves to be public.
Yep, and this applies to several other types of crimes too. Countries with the very lowest rate of reported rape, domestic violence and so on tend to be horrible for women, because the reason for low rate is that they are too afraid to report the crimes.
I've been told back in the day it was quite normal get a physical, dead-tree book with similar information sent out to you every year, until people decided that was a waste of paper.
It used to be illegal here to reverse look up a name matching to a phone number, since it was "owned" by the state telephone company and they didn't want that happening. But you were allowed to reverse look up the address of a number and then look up the person and match it to the number. So that magic happened under the hood. The trick was getting the residential information but since that wasn't a problem in the '90s I'm sure it is even less of an issue now.
When I was a kid there were reverse phone books that were indexed by number. Not common, and I think they were pretty expensive, but the IIRC the local public library had them.
> Are there no murderers, crazy ex-boy/girlfriends, targeted harrassment and spam calls in Sweden?
Of course, contrary to popular belief, Sweden is not a perfect country without violence and shit people!
It seems to be somewhat respected overall though, but I'm sure it'll eventually disappear. For the people who are stalked and what not, it's relatively easy to apply and get "protected identity" if you're affected by those things, and then eventually all those 3rd party websites remove the stale data.
Personally I solved this problem for myself by moving away from the country.
I learned this (public info) about Sweden a few years ago and as an American it really pissed me off.
In the US you can get the exact same info and probably more by simply paying a private corporation/middle man (background check services).
It seems like a huge trend in many sectors. We have the same setup as other countries, but shittier for consumers because there are lifeless leaches as middle men to make a quick buck.
I worked on systems that has this, it would be funny if it wasn't putting people at risk. You can see the address, and then as you say there is a field that indicated that this is a protected address, so don't leak it,... unlike the others with you're then completely fine to leak?
I have been advocating for Denmark to do the same for 15+ years. The fact that your social security number can be used for anything on it's own is a disaster. Mostly it can't anymore, because you have to do electronic signing with MitID, but it's still considered secret. If you own a home in Denmark, address information is already public, but a little hard to lookup.
The problem with this leak mostly going to be those with hidden addresses or secret phone numbers. Last time something similar happened was when it was shown that you could pretty much just guess a persons social CPR number if you had their birthday. Normally you could narrow it down to 6 or 8 possible numbers then use the phone companies websites, pretend to create a new account, enter the CPR number and check if you guessed correctly. Because the demo was done with politicians, then phone companies no longer ask for CPR upfront.
I feel like this should be the default. Responsible disclosure to the affected company, followed immediately by disclosure to every politician in the dataset. Once we start collecting high profile cases this way instead of waiting X days for a faceless corporation to release a fix, companies will think twice about their security and the data they collect if that could make them end up on the shit list of the local government.
The review conducted shows that the unauthorized access does not include the names and addresses of individuals who have chosen to register with name and address protection.
I was actually surprised when I heard about this for the first time. Also I've heard that even the salaries of people are publically available. That's really cool.
This probably improves economic efficiency a lot. Want to build something and remember meeting a relevant expert 3 years ago at a party? Easy to find that person and start doing business...
That's more of an American thing, wages in places like Denmark are much more set by the job classification and maybe seniority, not individually based on one's background and what one previously earned.
And private individuals as well, as you can see what your colleagues earn without having to ask anyone, and can even see what your boss earns, or what the competitor to your current workplace earns! I have to say salary negotiations are a lot more straightforward (and fun) in Sweden as an employee than other places I've worked.
Overall the benefits for employees seems way broader than the benefits for the companies.
FWIW, wage transparency has been studied quite a bit in economics literature. The short version is that while it does reduce wage variance i.e. wide differences in pay for the same job, it also consistently reduces average wages.
On a purely economic basis, wage transparency primarily benefits employers because it reduces how much they need to pay based on actual performance in practice.
> On a purely economic basis, wage transparency primarily benefits employers because it reduces how much they need to pay based on actual performance in practice.
Why would transparency reduce how much employers have to pay? Usually capitalists would make the opposite claim, by keeping salaries opaque, it's much easier for employers to underpay people, but you seemingly are making the opposite claim.
If I can see how much my employer pay others, doesn't that help me ensure I too get fairly compensated from the employer? How could the employer leverage this situation to pay me less than I already know I'm worth?
It follows from the wages being allocated from a relatively fixed pool of available money. What people think they are worth can be significantly different than what they are empirically worth, both high and low. There is some price discovery that needs to happen at the individual level.
When wages are opaque, an employee only needs to justify their worth to the employer. Employers pay for value net of wages, so they are often happy to pay someone much more if the individual value generated justifies it. When wages are transparent, an employee needs to justify their worth to everyone else because a higher wage is tacitly reducing their wage. This creates social pressure separate from the economic argument.
Other employees are incentivized to maximize their own wages regardless if it maximizes value for the employer. And there are many more average employees than high performers. Employers can leverage this social pressure to cram down the wages of anyone who wants to be paid above average because they no longer have to defend a lower wage on a purely economic basis. Empirically, this is what happens.
Anecdotally, I've seen this play out countless times at companies.
Then your salary will be decided by lowest common denominator. Employer does not leverage this situation, employer reacts to the incentives this situation creating.
> Then your salary will be decided by lowest common denominator.
Why would it? That's not what happens in practice, and you have raw data to point at, with things like "Person A is half a fast as me, and earns X, that's why I deserve X+N", not sure why you think there would be another outcome here, and it's clear you've never experienced this sort of environment yourself.
You haven't sufficiently manage to enter the mindset of a Swede. Your salary information isn't "your data" in the first place, it's public information. The company is selling public information if you have this mindset, does it still make sense to make it illegal then?
I think what you want to argue for, is for salary information to not be public data anymore. Selling people's private data without authorization (or even handling it incorrectly) is already illegal and actively punished today when it happens, via the long and slow arm of the law.
Any data that personally identifies information about an individual is personal data.
That is not an opinion. That is a fact. It's not public information, and anyone arguing that is categorically, provably, wrong.
The entire country of Sweden can collectively come together and decide that 1+1=3, and I would give that about as much thought as these semantic games around private and personal data.
It is considered personal data by the likes of the EU, the issue however a pesky little thing called the Swedish Constitution, specifically chapter 2 of the "Freedom of the Press Act" which basically states, in very simple terms:
1. Everyone(1) shall be entitled to have free access to official documents.
2. Official documents are all(2) documents held and produced by the authorities.
(1)=Everyone includes everyone in the world, you do not have to live in Sweden or be a citizen and you do not have to identify yourself.
In short, most government databases are databases of "official documents", including the citizenship registry maintained by the tax authorities.
Downside: All the mundane information about you is public property; address, birthdate, tax records, school grades, drivers license, passport photograph, martial status, court cases and pretty much everything else you can't think of.
Yeah, you can either assume your worldview is the only one that exists, then seemingly not understand why certain decisions are made or how things work elsewhere, and everything looks stupid and doesn't make sense to you. Or you can try to understand things from other perspectives, and maybe actually understand the reasoning behind it and what it means.
What is and isn't personal data is subjective, regardless what "truth" you believe you're sitting on. I won't claim you're right/wrong as there is no such concept for subjective things, I suggest if you want to understand instead of wave your hands around or whatever you're doing, you'd try to see things from another's perspective and forgo dogmas.
> What is and isn't personal data is subjective, regardless what "truth" you believe you're sitting on
Ontological games are just that - games. Personal and public data is not an opinion, and it's not subjective.
I legitimately think that it's harder to have a coherent definition of a chair than to define personally-identifying vs anonymous data, and pretending otherwise is stupid.
If you login with an account (which you can create for free), you can also see the personnumber. See someone elses salary without them knowing about it for 39/49SEK, which is around 3-4$
Why would you have to give consent? It's a legal requirement that the information is public. I genuinely don't understand your point there, do you also complain that you had to pay taxes and you weren't even asked for consent?
At the same time it is significantly more "hardware-change" resilient, since the same backed up config file (minus perhaps some very system specific lines that you may or may not have) can bring up a functionally equivalent working system on quite distinct other hardware as well.
Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
People built centralized grids because it's cheaper to build and service when the equipment is concentrated in one place. The economy of scale kicks in.
If you move to decentralized so there's fewer outages, but now you're paying extra to maintain it, your solution is not as good as it used to be, that's economic damage right there.
And your enemy probably will also stop targeting the small decentralized grid elements, so they're not spending bucks on missiles. They can use more of them to hit other parts of your economy that are still centralized.
Estimating the net impact of this change is bigger than the article suggests.
> Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine's energy sector is to make the country ungovernable. They attack the energy sector in winter because they know that causes suffering and hope that will cause the populace to turn against their government or at least against the war. It's not just a matter of causing economic damage, turning off the heat is a means to an end in ending the war in their favor.
That is a stated goal but it's repeatedly happened through history that someone has attempted to do that same thing and what it really did was make the population even more eager to go to war to defeat you.
But isn't West getting tired of war? For example, in Germany, an "Alternative for Germany" is winning which calls for making a deal with Russia to get the cheap energy and stop supporting the war. West thought that Russian economy would crumble under sanctions, but instead it seems that Western economies are not doing great, and the West has depleted its ammunition reserves due to the war in the Middle East.
Most polls in the EU show around 60% support for military assistance to Ukraine. People are fed up with many things and opposition parties are more likely to be pro Russian to get that vote. If anything the last years have shown Russia's true face and I don't think there is much appetite for renewing those business deals which have been shown to be such a dangerous dependency.
Ukraine is the one being attacked here, not Germany. I am not sure what your point is.
Certainly, Europe in general is tired of the war. Western Europe has been against war in general for a long time. That's not necessarily a sign that they're going to stop supporting Ukraine. Different countries, of course, will do different things, but overall, signs are, while Europe is tired of war and wants it to end, Europe is not willing to end it on Russia's terms. We will see countries have been flowed their support for Ukraine, but I would say overall all signs are Europe is still going to continue supporting Ukraine in the war for the foreseeable future. Only time will tell, but that's my current read of the situation.
Yes of course, but that is the point. Why do you hit substations when you could permanently destroy the individual targets of that outage?
You do it because targeting the individual sites is not economical. If every 1000 units of currency of range you inflict on your opponent costs you 2000 units of currency, you are basically just hurting yourself.
You target the substation because with one hit you can deny the service on many smaller targets, something which may not be economical if you targeted them one by one.
That means there are targets that would have been attractive targets in a central system, that are no longer attractive in a decentralized one.
Generally centralized systems can be run more efficiently, however it depends since electric transmission is not lossless and the construction/upkeep of the infrastructure is not free. That means the geography of the place plays a huge role. The more spread out the individual sites are, the more a decentralized system makes sense.
Renewable upkeep is a question of the requirements. I know mountain huts in high alpine areas that run on solar for the past two decades and have had basically zero maintenance cost, if you don't count the occasional shoveling of snow. Batteries of course need to be swapped out as well, if you have them, but they can also last a while. But the cost of running centralized power to a single high alpine hut is incomparably higher (if it wasn't, that is what would be there).
Even the big targets nowadays take hundreds of drones launched to destroy, because of air defense. Air defense seems like one of those thigs that's easier to concentrate around a select number of key sites. You won't put a Patriot next to each residential building, but you can put some next to a big power plant.
And the drones today are made with large targets in mind, carrying one bigger payload of explosive. I wonder how they can change if the goal would be to target stacks of fragile solar panelts with best cost efficiency. I've seen on the news yesterday that Russia started targeting bridges more because that have some new payload that's more destructive to them than just a big lump of explosive.
I don't know what's actually true here, just some ideas on what else need to be taken into account.
What does the distinction between economic damage and not being an end goal in itself have to do with anything? Either way it's a live goal being pursued and decentralizing will mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain.
You're right that centralized grids are cheaper (as long as the utilities maintaining them are good faith actors) and that switching to decentralized solutions brings new maintenance costs. But this is a war, the choice isn't been idealized central distribution and costs of decentralization, it's between the latter and a grid under siege by missiles. Relying on a grid that's being struck by missiles with no backup plan isn't economical either.
Also in your other comment you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.
In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).
And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.
> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.
My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.
> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.
I agree that they hit civilian targets, the evidence is there. How do you know they targeted them? Missiles sometimes can miss or or be shot down by air defenses, then fall and explode.
It's been broken down many times with a lot of examples from history: harassing civilians only mobilizes them. So Russia must be not only cruels but also stupid if you want to argue that they're targeting civilians.
The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
It's cheap to demonize and dismiss the side you don't like, picture them as cruel, stypid, evil. And from there, creatively explain everything they do with these qualities. It seldom helps you understand reality though.
So it could be that your case is special, you're not just being lazy and racist in building your worldview, but people you don't like are actually unreasonably cruel, evil and also stypid. Or maybe not, and your explanation is lazy and of poor quality. Guess which one is more likely.
Double-tap attacks are a tell-tale sign of this. If half an hour later another missile or a drone "accidentally" hits exactly the same spot to kill rescue workers, there's not much mystery left.
> The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
Modern drones and missiles are rather ineffective for killing lots of people. Most of them get shot down, and those that reach their targets have relatively small warheads. Nothing compared to old-school area bombing. A typical major air raid (500-800 planes) in WWII delivered 2000-4000 tons of bombs to a single city. A typical 200-drone strike in 2026 delivers potentially no more than 10 tons spread across the country, probably even less if we account for decoys. The largest strikes (drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles combined) had about 40 ton payload, of which 10 tons reached the intended target. In WWII terms, that's about 3 planes' worth of bombs.
I'm not sure how those killed in Bucha were _not_ targeted?
I'm also not sure how the execution of POWs could be accidental (with the evidence used in various reports provided by videos taken by Russians themselves) or the documented systematic torture (HRW report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-tortu...)
Or the kidnap of children (documented by UN) or the findings of the UN human rights commission:
> The Commission found that Russian authorities committed a wide range of
war crimes, and the corresponding human rights violations, including willful
killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape and other
sexual violence, as well as unlawful transfers and deportations of children.
Or the findings of HRW (Human Rights Watch) of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populated areas, including homes, hospitals and schools.
Reading about this stuff - by credible sources like the UNHRC, Amnesty International, HRW, endless media and independent journalists' - and forming an opinion does not make me "lazy and racist".
Sometimes, one side are simply the bad guys and in this particular case, it's the Russian regime.
Because I was responding directly (I even quoted the line) to the claim that Russian’s actions could be understood as being part of a “clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget”.
Your attempt to deflect is very odd. We’re discussing an aspect of Russia’s behavior and strategy with respect to the invasion of Ukraine. If you want me to comment on the behavior of a different belligerent in a different conflict then feel free to start such a discussion concerning that conflict - then I may (or may not) respond to claims about the behavior of some country that isn’t Russia.
These attacks have been too well documented for your "propaganda" attack to appeal to anyone but the brainwashed or those acting in bad faith. Outside of Western media, multiple UN reports have presented direct photographic and have found physical evidence for these attacks.
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sustained-large-scale-attacks-b... - documents and presents the irrefutable evidence for, among other attacks, the double ballistic missile strike on the historic centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday. The second exploded above a public area, killing at least 31 civilians and injuring 80. The UN describes civilians traveling to church, going to the market, working at a coffee stand, etc.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - another UN Commission report that found that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a civilian apartment building, killing 24 civilians. There was no military or economic target there and so the UN concluded that Russian forces had conducted an indiscriminate attack on a residential building
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Russian-attack-strikes-shopping... - found that a Russian long-range drone struck an operational shopping centre full of civilians, then another drone struck it about 30 minutes later. At least 16 civilians were killed and 128 injured. Investigators found no military presence, activity or equipment at the site.
Or read any of the Amnesty International reports (who have also been critical of some of Ukraine's actions so can hardly be accused of purveying Ukrainian propaganda), such as:
>Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain"
Oh but it is, there is no other explanation why civilian heating facilities are being targeted during winter otherwise, they don't cost much to fix, and actually cost a lot to target, but they do bring a lot of pain to the civilian population (winters in Ukraine are brutal).
And as if it wasn't obvious enough, the anti-ukrainian government bot campaigns that always coincide with the attacks make it obvious beyond belief.
Luckily, NATO spokesman answered that question 27 years ago.
Press conference by Mr Jamie Shea, NATO Spokesman, 25 May 1999 [0]
Question (Norwegian News Agency): I am sorry Jamie but if you say that the Army has a lot of back-up generators, why are you depriving 70% of the country of not only electricity, but also water supply, if he has so much back-up electricity that he can use because you say you are only targeting military targets?
Jamie Shea : Yes, I'm afraid electricity also drives command and control systems. If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he doesn't do so we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces.
>The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
Again there's an integral relation between those two things. Insofar as that distinction reinforces any point, it would seem to be the decentralization is a cost in and of itself and that Russia would consider that objective achieved once the cost of decentralization was incurred. As you point out there wouldn't be motivation to attack individual PV systems, yet you keep insisting there's a vulnerability to attack even though the whole point of your inflict pain/drain budget distinction is that such an attack wouldn't have a motivation.
>These are all hypotheticals
Why does them being hypothetical make having contradictory positions on them more defensible? One thing hypotheticals test is whether the totality of your explanations hang together without contradicting each other. And these aren't even distinct hypotheticals that are isolated from each other. They're contemplating basically the same scenario.
If talking about Russia not attacking decentralized system because being decentralized was the inflicted cost is the goal, then individual residential PVs aren't a really target after all. If they are a target, then Russia either wasn't satisfied that the switch inflicted damage that met a strategic goal, or you were wrong that they're distinguishing between inflicting pain and meeting some higher level strategic objective. I don't see that the hypotheticals are actually quarantined off from each other, they're about the same thing, so the contradiction can't be explained away by insisting each part of the contradiction was quarantined off from each other in separate hypotheticals.
A hypothetical is not a position. They are a logical/rhetorical tool that let's you see what are the implications of X being true without saying that X is true. The point of a hypothetical is seeing where something leads without making that something your position.
One reason to do hypotheticals is to see if X being true leads to any valuable, surprising implications. So that after that you can go back to talking about whether X is true, this time knowing why you need to know it (or skip talking about it if it doesn't lead anywhere interesting).
Making two hypothetical that contradict each other is extremely useful and common way to use them. One typical example is case matching. If you show that some Y holds under the assumption that X is true, then you show that Y also holds under the assumption that X is not true; this allows you to conclude that Y is true, no matter whether X is true.
In don't know if Ukraine moving to decentralized will make attacks on its grid useless. In two differs branches here I consider what happens if it does and what happens if it doesn't. In response to whatever the other commenters seem to believe in. When someone states X as their position, sometimes I prefer to see what are the implications of it, and if any are interesting come back to talking about whether their position is true. If no implications are surprising, I won't even approach the costlier task of trying to understand if the commenters position is true.
You seemed to believe that decentralizing will make grid attacks not viable, and from there try to go to saying decentralization helps. My point to you was that there's a few variables (decentralization penalty, Russia's next best target after grid) that must be taken into account if you were to conduct an argument like that. I'm saying that without stating (or even having) a position on whether decentralization will stop grid attcks.
In the other thread the discussion was about whether grid attcks will stop. And my point was that I don't find it obvious that they won't.
Strictly speaking, none of this was stating my position. There's so much more to logic and rhetorics than stating positions and defending them.
The article suggests that renewables are somehow more helpful in a war when your grid is targeted by drones and missiles. It doesn't do a comparison to back it up though.
Decentralized power production vs. centralized does make sense: decentralized doesn't offer a single point of failure taking out which causes a lot of damage.
But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too? Sounds only better than renewables because it doesn't go up and down throughout a day, and doesn't need grid to amortize the jumps.
Renewables sort of need to be out there in the open to harvest energy from the elements. Solar needs sunlight, wind needs to spin its huge blades in open air. A diesel generator, on the other hand, perfectly goes underground, much harder to target.
So the article doesn't really establish that renewables offer a clear advantage over fossils in a war.
Upd: some comments below have convinced me that fossils don't decentralize as easily as renewables.
>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.
Right. I think the most optimistic take would be that vegetable oil with some processing, can be used for diesel but I'm not sure how practical that is or how reliable access to waste vegetable oil is
The drone will disbale more than one of those 1kW panels if it hits an array of them. Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage? Sounds a bit odd, because Wh is not the currency I pay bills with.
How much does it cost to replace an array of solar panels, compared to the cost of sending another diesel truck (and paying for the destroyed one + its fuel)?
>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?
Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.
I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event of PV getting attacked.
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people
Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.
I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.
And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. etc. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.
Solar panels are dirt cheap. Which idiot would send drones to hit a solar panel? Going by your economic argument, use drones that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to hit something thats costs 10 bucks?
Do you think thats sound strategy? The military generals in US would accept that?
The diesel alone in the fuel truck that used to fill my 1000l oil fired tank costs far more than the number of solar panels a single drone could destroy, let alone the cost of the truck itself.
Hell my 1000l tank alone costs more even when empty.
You're comparing diesel to PV which doesn't speak to the merits of PV vs centralization. There's also the massive disadvantage of fuel distribution from diesel, which is a form of centralization and bottlenecking, and then there's fuel shortages and costs which PV doesn't have to bother with.
Also is Russia targeting individual PV systems? That's tantamount to targeting individual residences which, if we're granting that, there's no amount of decentralizing that would ever mitigate those attacks so diesel vs PV would be moot.
Lastly I don't think that's what greenwashing means. Greenwashing isn't representing renewables favorably, it's tying some external negative practice to language of environmentalism with vague buzzwords and questionable claims of environmental benefits to make that thing look better. But in this case there's no external thing being tied to environmentalism, we're just talking about PV directly.
Right, a classic example of Greenwashing would be the UK's Drax power plant.
Drax burns "waste wood" to make electricity and argues that this is a carbon neutral endeavour.
Now, on the one hand yes these are not fossil fuels. The trees grew, probably over decades or centuries, but they weren't underground for millions of years before we burned them. However, "waste wood" to a lay person conjures ideas of sawdust or the offcuts from woodworking or maybe the bark from trees pulped for paper, something like that. Drax actually uses specially made pellets, produced in places such as Canada, from whole forests which are designated "waste" so as to meet their requirements...
Because this is "green" the majority of the UK's "green electricity" subsidies are spent on Drax†. And yet when you see people ranting about these subsidies being too high, they will invariably point at Wind Farms and Solar power.
† Because Drax is relatively old, lots of its subsidies are via an obsolete scheme we don't get raw data for, so all we can see is that billions of pounds were spent in the overall budget and the rational explanation is that we paid them to Drax. In 2027 Drax will move entirely to Contracts for Difference like a modern renewable power plant so then we can see more clearly what we're getting and how much it's costing under those new CfDs.
At least there's a certain creativity to the concept of overseas waste forests. You could take that further argueing that the vessels importing the pellets only burn^H^H^H dispose of waste minerals, and demand more subsidies. Although “minerals” has a bad ring to it (uuugh, “mining”), so rather call it “waste bio detritus”, which it is according to the theory (“rotten dinosaurs”).
> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?
And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...
I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.
Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.
A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.
The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.
The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.
Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.
A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.
There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.
I don't think they have to worry about lack of access to cold for the next few months. I believe you're accurate re: India and sources of biomass in that context and the possibility of some processing/conversion, but how representative is that of the resources at disposal of the typical person in Ukraine? I imagine more urban residences with electricity and not a lot of cows.
Sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic and might've failed! There is no way to do distributed fossil fuel infra. I was suggesting the OP get a few dozen cows to build one!
My bad, I understand now and I completely agree. If you try and imagine exactly what domestically sourced diesel fuel is supposed to mean in practice it's going to range from unrealistic to downright comical.
That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.
Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".
Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.
I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.
The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.
Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.
Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.
Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)
And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.
Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.
I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.
Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.
On "greenwashing". As the article said, the environmental aspect is at the bottom of Ukraine's list of concerns at the moment.
This is the most concrete evidence (if it wasn't clear to anyone not lobotomised by the fossil fuel industry propaganda already) that renewable energy is a sovereign asset, not an external risk like shipping gas and oil round the world from mostly western-hostile nations.
Ukrainians are fighting for their country and this is the route they take. Any government not doing that same is deliberately weakening their country.
But check the position of supposedly nation-first right wing political parties in the west and they all LOVE making their country energy dependent on Saudi Arabia or the US, or Russia. I wonder why that could be...
Coming from fp background, I find Nix language very sensible. Especially for something like hermetic packaging.
The primitives for packaging in nix feel exactly like what they should be. When you look at a definition, the things that piece of code could do in principle (and things you could do with it as a consumer) tend to cleanly match it's semantic purpose and its responsibilities. So a lot of things are self-documenting.
Was there a reason these features were not accepted to upstream Immich and needed to be in a fork?
Looking at the latest commits, Noodle Galery has many signed with Claude, but Immich doesn't. Is LLM policy a reason for fork? (Just speculating, I don't know.)
UPD: Immich has this in CONTRIBUTING.md, seems like its LLM policy is more strict:
> We ask you not to open PRs generated with an LLM.
vs. Noodle Galery:
> We actively encourage the use of LLMs and AI coding tools.
It also even easier to get working and integrate into your system in a sustainable manner with NixOS. Do it by hand or throw an LLM at it, it will get you a declarative patch for your NixOS config that brings llama-cpp into your config that you can review and add under version control (no random `make install` build artifacts contaminating your system, no wondering "what was it that I ran? what are all these files? how do I do the same with a newer version?" a couple months later). There's also likely some build cache where Nixoids have already build what you want.
I had a great experience with llama-cpp with Nvidia backend on NixOS.
What concrete arguments are there to believe in your talent hypothesis instead of their tool hypothesis?
A couple more comments like this from you, and I'll be able to say, "cyanmoonx has a history of blaming the talent rather than bad tools". There being a history like that is neither an argument for nor against tools being bad. And also, don't forget that bad tools and bad talent don't rule each other out.
Claude code is just pool quality. They don't make how this thing will behave clear to the user, or give control. They fail at anything that needs an abstraction or model, not just APIs and shell scripts glued together. And "just ask AI" seems to be the default fix.
That vibe coding they brag about as if it was a good thing, it shows.
Take their notation for describing permissions. The docs are not comprehensive, and in practice it doesn't quite work how they describe it.
Or their management of sub-agents. I once lost a sub-agent, it finished and disappeared from UI. Apparently, you can't bring it back yourself: you have to ask the parent agent to do it for you. But the parent was Fable, and I ran out of credits, so I was locked out of using my opus sub-agent because of it.
Or an even more grotesque example: when you paste your claude API token to authorize, it covers characters with *. But it seems like an LLM has hallucinated a limit of API key length and the tail of your key stays visible.
What amazes me is how, for a vibe coded product where all they have to do is use their AI to fix things ... NOTHING EVER GETS FIXED!
I've probably gone to file 20 bugs. In all 20 cases there wasn't just one issue already filed for it: there were several, each which had a bunch of upvotes. And in all 20 cases ... every. last. one. ... Anthropic closed the ticket with no comment.
IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A SHITTY VIBE CODED PRODUCT, AT LEAST USE YOUR SHITTY AI TO FIX THE SHITTY PROBLEMS!
I mean. This is what happens with vibe-coded projects. When there's no actual software engineering going on, I wouldn't expect anything better than this.
What is a "document editor"? I edit my documents in Kakoune, and send a PDF. Where is that history supposed to be?
About your actual point: can you also make AI actually say things and have something to say, and not just try to imitate someone who is trying to get a point across?
I'm not catching students, I'm reviewing comments in code and documentation written with AI. I even wish it would convince me and try not to notice it, but I can't. I'm pretty sure I'd fail AI generated slop, not for cheating, but for nonsense.
Ps. You didn't write that comment with AI, did you?
It's quite convenient, when you meet a new friend, to go and check what neighbourhood they're from, who do they live with and where they lived before.
What's the big deal, Danes? What do you have to hide?
(The provocative tone is intentional as a joke, I'm not even a Swede, I just find the brotherly rivalry between Scandinavians amusing.)