He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.
For reference: even though plant photosynthesis is reasonably efficient at producing glucose, if you were to extract and process that glucose into a usable biofuel like ethanol, the usable energy conversion for us is around 1%
Solar energy to glucose energy through photosynthesis is about 10% to 12% (this includes energy lost through light wavelengths that is not compatible with the photosynthesis pathway, similar unusable wavelengths also exist for solar panels). So that amount of solar energy is available to the plant for metabolism. Interestingly enough, if you ate the plant, you also get a similar usable energy of about 1% (of the sun’s original energy) so our biofuel conversion processes are on par with biological digestion, and our current solar cells surpass natural solar energy conversion in plants (though that’s not a completely fair comparison since we’re generating electricity while plants make glucose, which has additional losses in the chemical reactions).
Neurological and mental patients are treated like shit all the time. The medical industry doesn’t see them as fully human because a part of their brain doesn’t work the way doctors decided it should work. Legally, if you have certain mental or neurological conditions, doctors don’t need your consent to treat you or do anything else to you, and they’re allowed to abduct you if you don’t come in willingly.
Interesting how China is all about exporting their HSR tech everywhere they can while Japan, who very much has every opportunity to do the same and be a serious competitor and threat to China as the rail-oriented country right next door and the one whose bullet trains are (at least perceived to be) more mature and longer running technology with fewer incidents, seems almost allergic to exporting it. Gotta keep that shit in the sunrise empire I guess. Their loss, Southeast Asia especially has a ton of demand for HSR and it’s demand which has not been filled for the longest time.
So if it’s using water for evaporative cooling, which generally doesn’t give a shit about water quality, any word on what kind of water and where geographically it’s located? Because there’s a huge difference between using up clean tap water in California during a drought vs using minimally filtered river water in Florida during monsoon season, vs using raw sea water, vs using treated sewage and wastewater that needs to be discharged far from human settlements anyway if it wasn’t being evaporated in a data center.
I don’t even like OpenAI due to their other practices and am not defending them, but this seems like one of the less significant things to freak out over compared to the other shit they’ve pulled. If anything you should be worried way more about how much energy they use and whether that energy comes from fossil fuels.
I don’t know how much energy AML checks consume but I imagine since their workflow is not literally centered around wasting a set large amount energy as proof of legitimacy, crypto mining probably surpassed it ages ago. Not even defending AML checks here, but I just find it really weird you’re talking about that.
As an environmental science major, I can tell you right now that climate change and the energy crisis is a human extinction level threat, like, literally the thing that is most likely to kill the most people in history, possibly all people. What level threat do you think not having proof of work crypto is? (Not even banning all crypto, literally just phasing out the by far most energy intensive one.)
I very much do not think that fact is worth the ridiculous power consumption associated with it. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a global resource and climate crisis and absolutely do not have spare energy or hardware to throw at Cryptos. People are having trouble affording their home heating/cooling due to lack of electricity, critical sectors like hospitals and individuals alike are having trouble getting the chips they need. We do not have energy or silicon to spare for mining. Between the energy and hardware being used for scientific and biomedical computation (which is desperately needed by the way, the relatively fast development of anti-COVID medicines/vaccines were entirely thanks to advancements in biomedical simulation technology, with the main bottleneck being the speed at which the simulations could be run), compare that with the same resources being used to uselessly calculate hashes to make money for some rando, I think the answer is clear. Maybe in a Star Trek level universe with infinite energy we can use proof of work, but we’re not there and won’t be there anytime soon.
Back when I lived in Canada food delivery and stuff used to happen in cars, which is insane to me. Much more scalable for it to be done on motorbikes.
I guess if it was cold I can understand. Even here in Vancouver it gets uncomfortably cold for biking sometimes, plus there’s no shielding from rain or snow on a motorcycle.
Why shouldn’t they? NATO, the EU, and G7 bully them with the combined power of their alliance, so coalitions like BRICS and ASEAN are the logical response to even the playing field. I do think these alliances will be proper rivals the Western ones in the future, most likely a much nearer future than most people in the West think given the world’s political trajectory (they might even merge into one big alliance or the two alliances themselves will form a higher order alliance).
The most popular non-Canonical derivatives, Linux Mint and POP OS, have both totally rejected and vocally criticize Canonical’s bullshit, Snap or otherwise. This isn’t going to make the fall in line, this is going to make them finally get serious about ditching Ununtu and switching directly to the upstream Debian base.
Without changing anything else about how the code is managed, which, doubtful considering Musk (at least not for the better), a rewrite will end up just as dysfunctional as the original codebase by the time it’s reimplemented all the features.
And if you were committed to changing your coding practices, a rewrite would almost invariably be unnecessary as slower incremental revisions will invariably cause the codebase to turn over and shed the problematic parts while keeping the working stuff.
When larger codebases than Twitter have managed to completely shift languages without a full rewrite, this idea is coming from ego and Elon’s savior complex, and not a place of logic and actual necessity. Not even shift languages like Java to Kotlin (which, Twitter is written in Scala which is another primarily JVM language) I’m talking full ecosystem shifts like PHP to Python or JavaScript to Rust while keeping the codebase continuous. Not saying it’s easy, but it can at least be mostly painless if and only if it’s managed correctly. For context, Google has switched from Python to Go for its core infrastructure, Firefox is switching from C to Rust and Tor is following the same route, Patreon changed from PHP to Python a few years ago, and Discord is also switching its core infrastructure code from (IIRC) Node.js to Rust.
I’m still manually doing HTML includes for jQuery and Bootstrap. Not from CDNs either, I download the files to my repository with the correct license and attribution notices and host them on the same static file server as all my custom assets. It’s really not hard to do and also means your website has one less tracker for users to worry about (yes CDNs track you, even the ones that swear they deliver files anonymously because how exactly do you plan on proving that they actually deliver files anonymously).
Also, never really found PWA frameworks any better than good old jQuery and Bootstrap, so yeah I still use those two. This also mean my webpages do not require JS to load, making them lighter, more compatible with legacy browsers, as well as working most of the way with JS disabled if the user is not comfortable with allowing JS from some rando’s blog (which, as a rule, users shouldn’t be).
This is really important to know going into any new tech platform. You will need to search things up, this is true even on something like iOS where they spend billions of dollars on making everything as intuitive as possible.