AppImage. The "we want the brownie points for supporting Linux but don't want to actually go to the trouble of supporting Linux" of application packaging methods.

Also how do you update appimages other than manually checking when a new version is released downloading the new file? Is it going to need a Windows style update checker that runs on launch and just opens a URL to the downloads page? At least it can't just register itself as a startup item or service behind your back like on Windows.

Outdoor cats mainly kill the things that kill mosquitoes, just saying.

Funny enough, that's a leading theory of why attraction to and the desire to roll around in catnip by felines was selected for.

At least it's an enclosed building this time and not a freestanding stack of blocks with wind sensitive construction cranes on top.

I mean, unless they're directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn't actually help that much. You can't practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all "recycled" concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

Concrete has a very high carbon footprint. The manufacturing of cement liberates a lot of CO2 that had previously been in the ground as minerals. Different reaction from burning fossil fuels but indistinguishable as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Not to mention cement plant furnaces are usually fossil fuel powered.

Since the blocks are not (as) structural, less cement and more gravel/old concrete fragments can be used which would mitigate this to some extent, but I'd still imagine this is pretty similar to electric cars where it takes a significant portion of its service life to even reach net zero from the carbon released from building the thing.

Concrete is quite possibly the worst material ecologically speaking for this application. Presumably it was chosen for its physical properties, but still. I do wonder if just using straight stone quarried directly into the final block shapes could mitigate some of this, since concrete is basically just stone whose shape and composition we can control, and either way the same mass of material needs to be mined out of the ground so I imagine they'd break even on mining ecological footprint. In fact, if you just need something heavy to store gravitational potential energy, and water is not viable for whatever reason, why not use crushed cars or something?

I get why China wants to explore this, they're just putting some chips into all emerging technologies just in case, but I'm still of the "just use the excess energy instead of trying to store it" camp. Storing energy at grid scale is just not practical with our current technology, 100MWh is basically nothing at the level of entire countries' electricity demands, a single city goes through that in a very short amount of time. For example, data centres could be required to only use excess renewable energy for non-real-time computation like training AI, or scientific computation, since they're a load that can ramp up or down almost instantly. Or you can make hydrogen from water or even hydrocarbons from the air with the excess energy, for things like airplanes and rockets that don't yet have a viable path out of burning stuff to work. Or, since the majority of the world's electricity is still fossil fuel based, just build infrastructure to send that energy to where it's needed because there will always be somewhere that could ramp down a fossil fuel plant and use renewable instead. I think only after all electricity is renewable can storage really become viable, and technology will have long advanced by then and all the primitive storage schemes we come up with now will be obsolete anyway, so while I do support experimenting with storage methods (which this seems to be), actually committing to building out a ton of storage right now seems premature and a poor investment of our limited effort and resources.

Two layers of "based on" in your OS is indeed a bit much.

Middle class is and always was just a third class aristocracy that preside over the stolen labour of the imperial periphery. That includes me and I imagine most Western Lemmy users whether we know that's what's happening or not. Maybe not as bad as the real aristocracy but very far from blameless for the exploitation happening in the world. Not wanting to live off the exploitation of others is not an excuse for it actually happening. We're all culpable.

I'd even go as far as to say there is no true proletariat in the imperial core because of how pervasively the spoils of exploitation is distributed here. The poorest person here still actively lives off the labour of even poorer people in the periphery.

Infantino just sounds like a nickname for Trump lol

if a specific source is a regular source of disinformation then you can understand blanket bans on said source

So if it can be shown objectively that a given Western source repeatedly spreads disinformation about a given socialist/anti-Western country, you would support a blanket ban from the government of that country using the same logic you're giving for supporting the EU's blanket ban, right?

Riiiiight?

The ban of RT is in place already

How authoritarian of them

Ah but you see, there's no free speech in Russia. Posting anything could get you imprisoned by the orc regime. For that reason, it would have been authoritarian of us to not criminalise RT, actually.

Hope that makes sense 👍🇪🇺