By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.

I see it more as a way for relatively well off people to do a little bit for the environment rather than any sort of solution of high energy prices for the poor. The nice thing, of course, is that the more people buy them, the cheaper electricity is for everyone else, so you're doing everyone else a small favour by having one.

I'll certainly be buying one, not because of the ROI/payback calculation, but just because it's fun to talk about with my kids and a nice thing to do.

Similarly, plug in batteries are on the way (see recently Octopus announcement). I'll probably buy one for the same reasons.

That said, the payback time also looks very favourable, especially relative to a full rooftop install, so you don't even need to be alturistic!

Do you account environmental impact of manufacturing of this device, shipping and energy used to place it in the store, time spent on customer service, people transporting it to their homes etc? How hanging it off balcony will offset that? Isn't that just virtue signalling?

Solar is cheap in terms of environmental impact and embodied energy as well. The balcony and plug-in part just makes the install cheap, which is by far the largest cost of residential solar.

Why would well-off people not go for rooftop solar?

rooftop solar installation costs are a bit higher, it's not as good a return though it does scale a bit better.

Rooftop is also not an option for condos or apartments.

Does using chat in the new codex app use up your allowance? Any indication openai are moving to a model where al usage is metered?

Same, no Sol (i'm on plus)

It works fairly well empirically: my 7yo likes to watch trains and we regularly use this map to know when to expect one to pass. Not perfect, but pretty good

I wrote a blog post a while back to address this question here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_duckdb/

I get them occasionally - maybe every couple of months or so - and I have nothing like that sort of following.

But I do have a 'say thanks' page on my blog rather than the more usual 'buy me a coffee'. Perhaps people feel less awkward doing it when it's invited! Anyway, I recommend it because the emails are always nice to receive.

https://www.robinlinacre.com/thanks/

Nice, I recently found something like this was possible too. Gpt-5.5 one shotted the basic game, but then I added some ai generated graphics/sounds/music and asked it to write then up.

It's a vocab building game, playable here (desktop only): https://rupertlinacre.com/vocab_annihilation/

It kind of blows my mind I can go from: 'I want a fun way to help him learn vocabulary, and I loved total annihilation as a kid' to 'heres a game that's he finds genuinely fun that helps him learn something ' in a few prompts.

Yes, but it's important to note that just because a lot of aid is ineffective doesn't mean it all is. If you want to give to very poor people and be confident most (85%+) actually gets to them I encourage you to take a look at https://www.givedirectly.org/. Full disclosure, I'm an unpaid trustee of the UK sister charity

$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat

Ah I'd read so much about the downgrading of that plan I didn't think that was still true?

It depends on what you’re comparing it against. For $20, OpenAI is still probably the best value for SOTA models. In terms of limits, you can use GPT-5.4 instead of 5.5. The intelligence feels similar, but it’s cheaper. You can also experiment with other harnesses like pi. It’s lightweight but capable enough, and its token usage is definitely much more efficient.