12
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Just end it already.

More seriously, odds to hit are low, the effects would be local to the impact site, and we should have a good idea of where it will come down long before impact if it does hit. The potential impact sites are in Northern South America, North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

34
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Just preliminary reports, but after efforts to rush it through before any reaction were delayed, legal backlash may have forced inmates to be returned to the right gen pop.

No guarantee it holds, be ready and organized to move if you live in a few hours drive from Fort Worth, legal funds are still going to need help, etc… but for now they might be safe.

[-] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago

As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.

This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.

Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.

61
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

A well backed as usual peice by Benn Jordan on the basics of how misinformation farms work according to their own internal documentation, the goal of creating a post truth world, and why a sizable percentage of twitter users start talking about OpenAi’s terms of service every time they update it.

37
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

And older talk, but regrettably still very relevant to us, especially given recent events.

4
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Mirrors in audio form much of the discussion i’ve seen around here if you prefer that, particularly on how the DNC going right hurt trunout.

20
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

This short bit just made it out of HBO and feels like a pretty good closing argument for things. Also has a bit of a hopeful message at the end.

36
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

A detailed three hour video essay by Tantacrul on the rise, and soon after numerous privacy and foreign influence scandals, within one of the largest tech companies in the world, and how a website where you could talk with old classmates brought about everything from a vast decline in mental health to ethnic cleansing.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Standard procedure to reduce copycat killings and be respectful to the families of the victims killed on stream. Imagine why people in the US might want a hypothetical livestream by the Sandy Hook shooter of them shooting a bunch of kids taken down.

3
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

If anyone here is interested in a more technical interview, here are two socialists with doctorates in economics talk about why after two hundred years of talking about fixing the housing market haven’t gotten anywhere.

3
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Not sure if this fits here given it’s more foucued on prek-12 than Academia, but I figure it impacts the students going into college quite heavily and most of the same points still apply.

64
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Evidently the joints on the flaps still need a little work into not letting gases through, but it seemed to still have enough actuation to keep the spacecraft stable until the engines took over for the landing burn.

24
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

A detailed discussion of the Shuttle program as well as some ethics in airspace.

[-] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago

Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.

On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.

[-] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Minecraft, you can only pretend to have gotten away for so long before the block game calls again.

[-] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

Yes, but at the end of the day SpaceX is the work of tens of thousands of people, not just the guy who provides a pile of money in exchange for constantly forcing the engineering teams to do stupid stuff if they can’t explain why not at an eighth grade level.

[-] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago

How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.

For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Personally, the thing that gets me the most about the whole thing is that the vast majority of the singe use ones you find lying next to the road have perfectly good rechargeable lithium batteries in them. No charging port or easy way to refill them, but for two cent change pins on the main circuit board and a change in the molding the same device could easily be used for a decade or more.

[-] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Worth noting before you get too excited with the possibilities that this is just at lab scale. Being able to manufacture a few grams of a novel design is no guarantee that you can even make it on the scale of tons, much less do so cost competitivly. Even if it is actually possible it will likely take at least a decade before it starts to be available to the public.

I mention all this because battery tech is an area of massive dramatic investment and rapid research for decades now, and a lot of the news coverage tends to talk up the lab stuff and ignore the boring practicalities of what their talking about, which leads to a lot of the public asking why they’ve been hearing breathless news about how new batteries are going to change the world, but never these miraculous new inventions never make it to the public.

The answer of course is that a lot of them run into practical manufacturing problems or are too expensive to be competitive, and the ones that do make it and are coming out today were the subject of breathless news coverage back in two thousand five, which are now competing against the ninties new perfect future batteries.

It’s also worth noting that the practical effects of such new batteries are unlikely to change much. If you need a battery that can output a massive amount of current you use lead acid. If you need a cheap battery that can last for 8000 charge cycles you use lfp, and if you want millions of charge cycles you use the middle 70% of a lfp battery since degradation only happens on the extremes of its range. If you want very small powerful batteries and fast charge times you use lithium ion.

As a result of this, there are few applications where you can’t already do something becuse the battery tech is the limiting factor. Like being able to recharge an EV in five to ten minutes is great, but it’s not going to suddenly allow EVs to do a bunch of things they couldn’t do with our current fifteen to twenty minute charge times, which themselves arn’t that diffeent than the early 2010s thirty to fourty minute charge times. I mean it is a improvement, and it does help with range anxiety while making long trips more comfortable, but it’s not an massive shift that will change the world forever overnight.

Similarly, having a phone that is 20% thinner or lasts an extra hour is an improvement, but it’s not going to suddenly change how we use phones or comilunicate. These are small incremental improvements, like all new technologies are.

The transistor was the largest technological leap of the twentieth century, and it was invented in the forties but only starred to make its way to industry in the fifties and even then it only began to have an impact in the seventies. Technology takes time to scale up and is almost always an small incremental improvement on what came before.

[-] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing, I take issue with it citing Norway’s 89% EV sales as insufficient becuse only 20% of vehicles on the road are EVs yet.

Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.

While I also agree that simply replacing every ICE with an EV isn’t enough on its own and that trollybuses and other electric mass transit need to be part of the solution, it’s not a question of one or the other. If we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we need to be doing both and a whole lot more beside, especially when it comes to cleaning up industry.

We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with. We need solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate clean power in the first place. We need heat pumps and geothermal to turn that into the heating and cooling necessary to keep people safe in a world with increasing dangerous temperatures.

We need trollybuses, metros, and high speed intercity rail to electrify the transport of people. We need denser housing in our cities and EVs in our rural areas and service and delivery vehicles. We need overhead cantanarys to electrify our railroads. We need green hydrogen to decarbonize farming, steel marking and a thousand other processes. We need net zero bio and synthetic fuels for ships and aircraft. We even need carbon capture and sequestration to deal with the industrial processes that can’t otherwise be decarbonated.

Any framing that expects a single one of these to solve the problem on its own ignores the things it can’t cover. Our current actions are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, that is not a sign we should roll back one in favor of another, it is a sign that we need to be pushing increasing the scale of all of the above.

[-] [email protected] 110 points 2 years ago

TLDR: A bunch of ride sharing companies sprouted up in the 2010s built around no frills EVs they leased to employees and then most of them consolidated or went out of business a few years later, leaving parking lots of used vehicles. Expect them to be auctioned off to either be recycled or hopefully sold on to lower wage nations.

[-] [email protected] 47 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.

One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.

Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago

Hmm, this seems like the sort of addition where it might have been nice to have a bunch of world leading developers and designers hanging around. Seems odd to fire them all if this was the plan.

Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make, but i’m sure it was really a cunning 5d chess move and not evidence that our overlords who are born into wealth are just as dumb as the rest of us.

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sonori

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