Humanius

… and the people involved were arrested

I like to think that these videos are the only thing keeping Patrick Boyle sane from his career in finance.

His channel is great. I love his dry sense of humour.

People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

I’m just curious to see where it all goes.

Discord and Whatsapp
I’d love to use Signal, but virtually noone in my sphere uses it.

The Houthis are funded by Iran, get their weapons provided by Iran, and Iran provides them with targeting information.
You’d really have to warp the definition of proxy in order not to consider them a proxy to Iran (even if they are a bit of an unpredictable factor)

Looks like a low effort troll to me.
Don’t take the bait

But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

• During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
• During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

• The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
• The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

My read on this is not as much of a cynical one. I believe the point of surveillance is simply to protect the institution of the state.

The goal of the state is ultimately the continued existence of that state. Otherwise there really is not that much purpose to the state. Surveillance is a tool to suppress actors (read: terrorists) who might want to undermine that institution.

In order to determine who benefits from the continued existence of the state, it mostly depends which state you are talking about.
A state like China exists almost solely to benefit those in power, and thus the surveillance state is used to suppress the citizenry. But a Western democracy, while it also to a certain extent protects money and power, also exists to to benefit the general population.

Keys (house, car, bike), phone, wallet,… swiss army knife, handkerchief.
And during the pandemic a fabric face mask.

It all fits in my pockets

Then dependent on the weather I will bring sunglasses or an umbrella.
I check Buienradar (Dutch rain forecast app) to see whether I’m going to need that.

And sometimes, depending on what I will be doing, earbuds

The headline is a bit misleading. Trump agreed to the ABC debate if Harris agrees to the Fox debate.
This is just a ploy for him to either get Harris to show up on Fox, or if she doesn’t debate him on Fox, spin it in such a way that Harris is somehow not wanting to debate him (Even though she never agreed to a Fox debate)

So they can bitch that people booed, but he won’t acknowledge the reason is he raped a literal child?

Mathew Immers is not the guy who raped the child. That is Steven van de Velde.
Immers is van de Velde’s beach volleyball partner.

Do you mean the concept of up- / downvoting posts and comments in order to determine a suitable order, or do you mean the tally of all your up- / downvotes being displayed as a number on your profile.

As for the up- / downvoting, while it isn’t perfect, and it sometimes encourages people to only upvote things they agree with rather than being accurate, it is a pretty good metric to get relevant posts and comments to the top.

And as for the numerical tally… It’s easily ignored. I didn’t particularly mind it on Reddit, but I also don’t mind its absence on Lemmy.
Seeing the number go up on my individual posts gives my monkey brain enough of a dopamine boost

Which can only really be addressed by making it easier / less of a hassle to become a peer.
I for one would love to host a peertube instance, but I keep running into a wall when I try.

I think something that gets overlooked is the ease of use of setting up a Peertube server yourself.

If I want to host my own Mastodon or Lemmy instance it is pretty straightforward, and I can just do so on my unRAID server with a simple ready-made docker container. But when I want to do that for PeerTube, as a novice I somewhat run into a brick wall.

Okay… So he went to Russia in 2003. Considering that the consensus in 2003 was that Russia was still on its way to becoming a democracy I am not that offended by it personally.
“Putin’s hometown” being St. Petersburg, which is the 2nd biggest city in Russia.

What is more worrying is all the things that happened since 2003.

If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.

If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.

Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.

Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.

(Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.