Big corporations begging taxpayer bailouts and then using them on bonuses and dividends. It’s a humongous waste of money that does nothing but enrich the wealthy. Most of the time it doesn’t even save jobs.

If, as a large corporate, you want a bailout from the taxpayer, then the government/state will take a portion of your shares in escrow, equivalent in value to the amount of money you’re asking for or getting. Those shares (in case of publicly traded companies) are withdrawn from the stock market, become non-voting shares and are frozen at their price at that time. Within a to-be-determined time period (five years maybe) the corporation, if it gets profitable again, can buy back all or part of the shares from the government at that price per share - thus returning money to the taxpayer. Anything that’s left after five years, the government can do with as it sees fit - sell them at market price (thus recovering the spent money), or keep them use them to vote/control the company.

There probably is a lot wrong with this proposal. But something needs to be done to discourage big business from hoovering up taxpayer money like it’s going out of fashion. Most of the time the taxpayer is getting absolutely no value from that spend.

Ask that question again when it’s a site that you need to use.

The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.

Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right?

Deaths from an accident at an active nuclear power plant are not the same as deaths caused by a burst dam that was originally intended to produce electricity one day, but has never produced any. Especially if you call the statistic ‘Deaths per unit of electricity production’. At the time of the accident, it was just a dam, construction of any hydroelectric facilities was nowhere near beginning, so calling it a ‘hydropower accident’ is highly debatable (probably as at least as debatable as calling nuclear ‘conventional’). Without the inclusion of those deaths, hydro would be shown to be even safer than nuclear, given that it has produced nearly twice as much electricity in the time span covered by those statistics, while having caused a similar number of deaths (if you continue to ignore the increased miner mortality, otherwise nuclear will look way worse). The article also does not cite how they determined the number of 171000 deaths, given that estimates for the Banqian dam failure range between 26000 and 240000. The author mentions (but does not cite) a paper by Benjamin Sovacool from 2016, which analyzes the deaths caused by different forms of energy but, crucially, omits the Banqian dam death toll. I will try to get hold of that paper to see the reasoning, but I suspect it may align with mine.

How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?

The article makes zero mention of any such thing, and the section about how the deaths are calculated (footnote 3 in this section) only calls out the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Direct quote from the footnote:

Nuclear = I have calculated these figures based on the assumption of 433 deaths from Chernobyl and 2,314 from Fukushima. These figures are based on the most recent estimates from UNSCEAR and the Government of Japan. In a related article, I detail where these figures come from.

No mention at all of any other deaths or causes of death, nothing whatsoever. It’s the deaths from two nuclear accidents, that’s all. The figures from the cited study alone would multiply the number of nuclear deaths in this statistic. What’s worse, the author has published another article on nuclear energy which essentially comes to the exact same conclusions. But if you include deaths from a burst dam that has never produced electricity (but was planned to do so eventually), then you must include deaths among people who mine the material destined to produce electricity in a nuclear plant.

To me it simply looks like the author of this article is highly biased towards nuclear, and has done very selective homework.

Edit: It’s also the cleanest and nearly the safest source of energy, including the disasters. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I love how the ‘Death rates per unit of electricity production’ graphic highlights deaths from a 1975 dam break in China, therefore making hydro seem less safe than nuclear, when the dam in question up to that point hadn’t produced a single megawatt of electricity (and by the looks of it, still hasn’t to this day). At the same time it appears to conveniently ignore the increased mortality among uranium miners.

Nuclear falls under ‘conventional’ - the PWR design of TMI is one of the oldest and most common types of nuclear reactor. It’s just another way of creating steam to drive a turbine which then generates electricity.

Nuclear is also anything but clean. People love to call nuclear ‘clean’ because its low in emissions, but that’s ignoring the requirement for either safe storage of radioactive material or reprocessing thereof, as well as the emission of radioactivity in the water cycled through the reactor.

Three Mile Island is the epitome of

conventional dirty energy

It doesn’t make financial sense to build new nuclear power plants. They’re hugely expensive and such projects routinely run well over time as well as budget. If it did make sense, Microsoft would be building them, instead of reviving the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the US. Thing is, they want lots of power, and they want it yesterday. By the time you can build a new nuclear plant to satisfy these needs, AI will have run its course and big tech will be on to the next scam.

But hey, why pay attention to such nuances?

Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it.

It’s not that cut and dried.

A look at the postmarketOS devices page reveals:

• “the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI” (aka what you need a phone to be); Device count: 5, not a single one of them the kind I can go into a regular phone shop and buy

• "Devices that have had a lot of work put into them, where regressions are actively fixed, and the port is overall in a pretty good shape (read: your experience will likely be bumpy and not overly smooth); Device count: 28, largely older devices (pre-2018, so again not something I can just go and buy, and exotics like above; There is a lot of orange in the features table)

The rest is under “Testing”, and the best summary of that status I can find is “All the devices in this table can at least boot postmarketOS. To monitor boot progress, you must be able to receive output from the screen, a network adapter, or a serial port”. So there is a total of 33 devices right now, largely exotics and older devices, that you could reasonably use with postmarketOS for any purpose other than testing and tinkering.

I am what you’d call ‘tech interested’. I tinker with Arduinos and solder electronics as part of my hobby. I do a smidgen of self-hosting and similar, though I am not nearly as far into the weeds as many people, and it’s not my key interest or activity. The thing about a phone is, I need it to work, because I need it for work. I don’t have time or compunction to go through the process of installing an OS the manufacturer doesn’t want me to install. I don’t have time to deal with a non-polished UX or capricious apps that need workarounds to install on a ‘non-standard’ OS (for lack of a better term). I know that’s not the fault of the OS, but a choice made by phone manufacturers and app developers, but that doesn’t make it any less real or an issue for me.

I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.

The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.

Sure, training data selection impacts the output. If you feed an AI nothing but anime, the images it produces will look like anime. If all it knows is K-pop, then the music it puts out will sound like K-pop. Tweaking a computational process through selective input is not the same as a human being actively absorbing stimuli and forming their own, unique response.

AI doesn’t have an innate taste or feeling for what it likes. It won’t walk into a second hand CD store, browse the boxes, find something that’s intriguing and check it out. It won’t go for a walk and think “I want to take a photo of that tree there in the open field”. It won’t see or hear a piece of art and think “I’d like to be learn how to paint/write/play an instrument like that”. And it will never make art for the sake of making art, for the pure enjoyment that is the process of creating something, irrespective of who wants to see or hear the result. All it is designed to do is regurgitate an intersection of what it knows that best suits the parameters of a given request (aka prompt). Actively learning, experimenting, practicing techniques, trying to emulate specific techniques of someone else - making art for the sake of making art - is a key component to humans learning from others and being influenced by others.

So the process of human learning and influencing, and the selective feeding of data to an AI to ‘tune’ its output are entirely different things that cannot and should not be compared.

Generative AI is not ‘influenced’ by other people’s work the way humans are. A human musician might spend years covering songs they like and copying or emulating the style, until they find their own style, which may or may not be a blend of their influences, but crucially, they will usually add something. AI does not do that. The idea that AI functions the same as human artists, by absorbing influences and producing their own result, is not only fundamentally false, it is dangerously misleading. To portray it as ‘not unethical’ is even more misleading.

sew

Pronounced exactly the same as sow, if you mean the right sow and not the other sow, which is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

Re 1, 3 and 5, maybe it is upon the AI projects to stop providing shiny solutions looking for a problem they could solve, and properly engaging with potential customers and stakeholders to get a clear understanding of the problems that need solving.

This was precisely the context of a conversation I had at work yesterday. Some of our product managers attended a conference that was rife with AI stuff, and a customer rep actually took to the stage and said ‘I have no need for any of that because none of it helps me solve the problems I need to solve.’

More recently, probably a wireless handheld controller for my model railway.

Model railway is a hobby for people with lots of time, space, and money. I generally fall short on two of those, although lately there is a bit more disposable income to go around. Last year I was able to splurge on the control setup that I always wanted, which is a stationary controller - basically you sit at a table and control the trains with two rotary controllers and a touchscreen for a number of other things. Looks a bit like this.

But since it’s stationary and my layout is fairly big, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome to test something that’s five metres away. So I decided to also splurge on the matching wireless handheld controller, an Android-based device with another rotary controller and the ability to control almost all aspects of the stationary device.

Did I need it? Hell no. If I had waited a few more months, a perfectly suitable free smartphone app would have been available that I could have used for the purposes intended. But am I loving it? Fuck yes. Irresponsible to boot, but no regrets, not for one second.

You need some salsa for that chip on your shoulder, or is there another reason why you’re getting so personal?

Don’t answer. I don’t actually care.

This is a way in which you can discredit any attempt at proposing correct or logical language use. Yes, language changes. Your assertions are still debatable. English is ambiguous enough as is. It’s not ‘showing ads’ to propose some form of consistent or logical usage of words. I’m happy to count that as a petty hill I’m willing to die on.

And since we’re being petty, it’s either ‘grammatical rule’, or ‘Grammar rule’.

It’s simple though. If you can count it, it’s fewer. If not, it’s less.

Fewer people. Less noise.

Here’s my thing about ‘Ten’.

I love the first half of this album. It’s some of the best music I know in the genre. High energy, catchy, passionate. But somehow, the second half feels to me like the band ran out of ideas and gas. After ‘Jeremy’ it’s all pretty average, low-energy stuff, with the exception of ‘Garden’.

Dream Theater “Awake” (1994). Extraordinary from the first to the last note. 75 minutes of phenomenal prog metal. They’ve made good and great albums before and after, but they never excelled the pure class and artistry displayed on this album.

Bruce Dickinson “The Chemical Wedding”. I never liked Iron Maiden much, but Dickinson’s solo stuff is a different class. Fresh, creative, varied, energetic. Most of his solo albums are well worth the listen, but “Chemical Wedding” stands out for its high variety and creativity.