and yet, the problem remains that the US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980, regardless of what happens elsewhere
> low-e glass windows
> South-facing windows are backed by local stone floors that capture and radiate heat in winter.
Have you done any analysis or testing on low-e vs normal glass windows in the wintertime? In summer, obviously you want the low-e glass to block the radiant energy. But in the winter, you'd want to allow that radiant energy through, which the low-e glass is not doing.
It seems like low-e glass is only good for summer, and not winter. Have you put any thought into this? Maybe I am missing something crucial about the situation though.
> But in the winter, you'd want to allow that radiant energy through, which the low-e glass is not doing.
Low-E glass reduces inside heat radiating to the outside, too. You can find many articles online discussing the advantages during winter/heating season if you look.
I tested a couple years with/without a tinting film on my west-facing windows (under mini-blinds) and noticed a very, very small increase in winter heating costs, with a big decrease in summer cooling costs, and more consistent temperatures throughout the day in both seasons, which is a benefit in itself (you can use a lower-capacity HVAC system). I suspect a proper upgrade to low-E windows (or at least tinting ALL my windows) would have done much better.
And 100% of people will live much worse lives 100 years in the future, all because we're blind to see the somewhat obvious result of all this hockey stick growth...
It's trained on a dataset that contains images together with text describing the image. Some images have been scraped from artstation, and if they were scraped from the "Trending" page, where well done images end up, it's included in the description. So by adding that to the prompt, you influence the image to be more similar to images that have been trending on artstation.
A relatively small minority of web projects really benefit from async. There's a performance benefit that comes at the cost of going all-in on the async ecosystem andunless you have a very high-traffic website where hosting costs a significant part of your IT budget, or you need lower latencies or a few other situations it likely won't be worth it.
If you're doing any kind of database / external network calls - won't you gain a huge amount of requests per second?
I ask partly because on one of my projects, we have a fastapi app, but it's not using async, and I have been toying with the idea of converting it to async. It will take some work though because it uses libs that don't support async.
I thought the advantages would be worth it because we hit postgres and/or redis on all requests.
The only reasonable use case for asyncio is an API gateway or similar, when you issue a huge amount of HTTP requests, do very little CPU intensive tasks and waiting for I/O all the time.
Flask has historically been used in combination with gevent/eventlet which are greenthreaded async frameworks that predate python's async/await support. These still work and are still a great choice for an async server with many concurrent requests. The big downside is just lack of compatability with the new async ecosystem.
I think I'm in a similar situation with you, and asyncio has been great.
Not sure what libs you use, you'll probably need to switch libraries, it's not common for one lib to support both sync/async. I'm using aiohttp for http/websockets and asyncpg for postgres, running on uvloop as the base event loop.
Something which is trivial with asyncio: I receive 10 consecutive heavy websockets requests, I spawn a task to handle each one of them and they will be served back out of order as Postgres returns results. With no locking or messing with threads.
Another benefit is knowing for certain your code won't be interrupted unless you call "await", this simplifies a lot using shared state without requiring locks.
Flask is a multi-threaded server, so while only one thread can execute Python code at a time (due to the GIL), you still get concurrency with respect to IO. Not to say that e.g. FastAPI won't get you more RPS, but it may or may not be as dramatic as you would expect.
> Does the lack of async still make Flask a good choice for non-hobby web projects?
[ed: the lack of async probably means little for how good flask is for a new project - it's a great little framework].
However, with the birth of fastapi - I would be hard pressed to name a greenfield project/situation where I would recommend flask over fastapi. And the support for async in fastapi have nothing to do with that.
A few years ago I ordered something off eBay. It was overpriced, but it was the only place selling this particular variant of the item. Anyway, the next day they sent me a message saying that variant was out of stock and could send me another instead, but of course I opted to cancel. After a lot of back and forth (them offering me dodgy extras and me refusing) they sent it anyway and told me to return it.
To cut a long story short, they did indeed send the item, but not me. And the mad part is, PayPal admitted to not caring, even with written proof from Royal Mail that the order wasn't addressed to me, PayPal pretty much said (I cant find the original dispute now, so not verbatim) that as long as the order was sent to someone, I have nothing to complain about.
In the end I just asked my bank for a chargeback, which took 5 minutes compared to the literal month the above took.
That's a pretty common scam in the US with FedEx as well... someone must have access to lots of tracking numbers, they sell stuff on ebay and provide a tracking that sort of matches your city and paypal won't do anything as long as tracking sort of matches the supposed destination.
I ordered a drone, but the package supposedly weighed 75lbs and consisted of 2 palets and went to my city but the wrong zip code according to tracking -- I documented everything and started a dispute but paypal did not care.
This works best with Fedex because they won't release full tracking details afaik unless you know the destination address, which you don't know, of course.
Ahhh, thanks for posting this - this happened to me one time, and I couldn’t figure out that bit of the scam (access to a sufficient number of tracking numbers where they can point to a seemingly matching shipment).
I bought a home automation device from a dodgy site at a price I knew was too good to be true. Needless to say, I never got it, and when I filed a dispute with PayPal, the buyer “substantiated” the shipment with a tracking number. I, of course, never got the package, nor did I get a refund.
There were all kinds of inconsistencies with the seller’s response (as I recall, their first response was that it had already been shipped, and when I escalated it, the tracking number was for an item that didn’t ship until after my dispute), but it was facially good enough for PayPal so the scammer made $60 off me. Live and learn.
I had the same thing. Company sent me something, FedEx screwed up and it got returned and delivered back to the merchant. I tried to do a chargeback, but my bank (Square) said that it had been "delivered" somewhere, which was enough for their support script. They couldn't change their support script to handle the fact it hadn't been delivered to me, so they terminated my account to solve the issue, per their T&Cs which allow terminations for no reason.
Their internal payment system is so terrible it won't even work with smaller banks. The verification system just fails with an unhelpful error message.
Customer service's approach to fixing this is to submit a ticket to engineering that never gets looked at, then encouraging you to open a new account with one of the larger banks (Wells Fargo, Chase, etc.).
You know things are bad when your customers are pining for Paypal back.
I think the 1 easiest way to improve schools right now would be to differentiate kids by ability.
Right now, teachers have a handful of kids 1-2 grades above their peers, a handful of kids who are 1-2 grades below their peers, some ESL kids, some kids with behavioral problems who cause classroom disruptions, and then majority average students.
So, teachers have to figure out how to teach to all of those different groups. It's a recipe for disaster and none of the groups are being well served.
If an elementary/middle school typically has 3-4 classes per grade, why not differentiate and split those up so each class has a more homogeneous mix of students?
Now each teacher is designing curriculum specifically for their group of students and can teach to the class as a whole.
I realize there would be a lot of implications here, like the differentiation would naturally have a racial/demographic split. But why is that so bad? Each class would still be getting better educated than mixing everything up as it is done now.
This is the hard part. All the good contractors do this themselves, or they charge so much you don't make any money on the sale, or they're booked out 3 months in advance.
US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980.