There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

1 kg of radioactive isotopes blasted into the atmosphere as a byproduct of coal combustion: i sleep

1 ton of PTFEs blasted into the water table as a byproduct of making slick cooking pans: i sleep

untold tons of carcinogens dumped out the exhaust of automobiles within our cities: i sleep

1 kg of nuclear waste safely sealed in a bright yellow barrel: i scream and kick and seethe

If you think nuclear waste is the biggest challenge we face as a species regarding waste management, your stance is profoundly misinformed and inconsistent. The only reason we’re talking about it is that it has “nuclear” in the name and it is highly visible because we capture it all, which is ironically the one thing that makes it safer than all the other pollutants out there.

Full size entry level induction is in the 200-300 € range nowadays and already beats gas stoves. Just check your nearest IKEA. There is ZERO reason resistive stoves should still be allowed for sale. NONE. The idea that “induction” is a premium offering is a complete myth and has been for years.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.

Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.

Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.

THANK YOU.

I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.

Induction is objectively better than every other option for anyone connected to the grid looking to buy a new kitchen stove.

Unfortunately it’s one of these things that takes five minutes to explain because everyone has tried the Slumlord Special resistive stove and the general public can’t tell the difference. Those five minutes are why induction uptake is pathetically low compared to how superior it is in literally every way.

Same deal with people who would still buy incandescent lightbulbs if they could just because they don’t understand that technology has moved on from CFLs and to them it’s all “newfangled economic bulbs that can’t light for shit”.

It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.

Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.

It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.

There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

I don’t trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I’m kinda surprised Google didn’t already gift an underage child to Trump so he’d make the problem go away.

However a perfectly viable option that I’m sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google’s former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone’s best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

This wouldn’t be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a “common good” is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
270G	.

I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.

When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?

The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it’s completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.

With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go “uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you’re at it?”.

This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency… on Arch Linux. It’s rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org’s homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?

Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about “feeling superior” when you’re out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.

I don’t see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that’s the only reasoning you’re willing to entertain… Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.

You’ve completely missed the point.

You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.

HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation’s first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn’t nag with software updates, for music that can’t be “unlicensed” and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.

The entire point of analog is that it’s “worse”. It’s un-clinical, it’s raw, it’s tactile, it’s physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don’t crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.

The hard part isn’t processing payment… They already basically do that for themselves with the steam wallet.

The problem is getting the ability to withdraw funds from your customers’ bank accounts. That requires a commercial relationship with your customer’s bank and going through an insane amount of red tape. And there is no standard worldwide protocol for this, you’ll be starting from zero in every market by cold-calling major banks.

The only viable approach is to have an army of salespeople, accountants, and project managers to do all those individual negotiations.

The EU has been trying for years to have an indigenous continent-wide payment processor. The first attempt failed, now Wero is poised to succeed in the next few years but that’s building off negotiations that started a few years ago with pressure from the EU and buy-in from the financial sector, and still only a handful of European markets have been integrated at this point.

Now imagine all this difficulty but you have to also get active buy-in from every market worldwide. There’s a reason Visa/MC have a near monopoly on international payments in the western world, and it’s not that no-one else thought to get a piece of that very juicy pie that’s making them literally billions in profit every year.

I don’t see how emergent consciousness is incompatible with some intelligent animals theoretically having a conscience. Nor how having a conscience is a sufficient and necessary condition to having rights. After all a human baby’s brain is not performing better than an adult dog’s and we have no proof (that I know of) that newborns are conscious, yet we frown upon their murder more than a dog’s. So clearly proof-of-consciousness is not the key factor.

This entire discussion about rights and welfare seems completely orthogonal to the question “what is consciousness and how does it arise”. I think it is extremely naive to think that the lack of definitive proof that chimpanzees are conscious beings has significant bearing on our approach to medical experimentation.

Especially if and when consciousness turns out not to be an on-off switch but another biological spectrum, emergent or not. Fuck, we don’t even have a non-fuzzy definition for what counts as alive, and we’re out here pretending that there would be a clear one for what counts as conscious?