He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.

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Cake day: oct. 03, 2019

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but every distro will lead to some googling

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.


At least it aligns with when air conditioning is used the most. That’s the hardest thing to shift temporally, everything else just requires some conscious effort and is relatively painless to switch.



Don’t particularly like that first source being Wikipedia either. Literally the article for “timeline of solar panels” lol, could have just read that and cut out the middleman.


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).



They’re realizing that the only people not suffering is the ruling class that’s imposing and enforcing these sanctions. Crazy coincidence right?




Related: I always say it’s not evil AI you have to worry about, but evil humans making the AI.


Yeah this is the norm for large corporations. Most are brazen enough to outright destroy or falsify their records (why wouldn’t they? it’s not like they’ll ever get punished for it) so this is fair game in their mind.


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.





The paradox of the enemy: They are endlessly threatening to our existence while being endlessly incompetent and inferior to us in every possible way.


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.


“Owe more”

Yeah the people most households owe do not deserve that money. The fact that they owe what they do is a sign of a shithole loser system in a shithole loser country.




Norway Nandway Nxorway Notway




Ok, I’m sick of “vegans need to take supplements or need specific nutrient-fortified plant based meat to not get malnourished so obviously it’s not natural to live off a plant based diet!”
Yeah? And what part of the meat most people buy is natural? Tell you what, if you insist on eating meat, then go get a sharp stick and hunt it yourself. Not with a rifle or anything like that btw, that's not "natural" either. Sharpen a stick with your own teeth and face that herd of wild bison with it, good luck! Not only will we won't bother you in that case, but if you can pull it off and make it out alive none of us would even be in a position to bother you and will probably be scared as hell of you. And don't you start with "do you know how processed and full or cHeMiCaLs those vegan meats are?" Yes, I'm aware you need to do a lot of processing to make plants look like meat. You also need a lot of processing to make meat look like the meat you'd recognize. You can make fairly convincing plant based meats fairly easily from grocery store ingredients in your own kitchen btw, in that case it's still processed food (processed by you), processed isn't this scary word that means the food is evil. "What about all the artificial flavours?" What about them? Just because it's artificial does not mean it's dangerous or even that it did not come from a natural source. When you eat organic almonds, you're ingesting something called "[benzaldehyde](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=a95a0iMOICU)", which is the primary flavour compound that we associate with almonds ([it's not cyanide, that's a myth, cyanide smells like bitter almonds, not the sweet almonds people normally eat, because bitter almonds actually produce quite a bit of HCN, but most people have never smelled bitter almonds before since it's very uncommon, and even then most of the smell of bitter almonds still comes from benzaldehyde](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=WYagO-nup6c)). When you eat an artificially flavoured almond bread, you're ingesting that exact same chemical, but because we synthesize it in a factory instead of milling tons of almonds to get a comparatively tiny amount of oil it's "artificial", does it mean it's evil? And you know who else gets tons of nutritional supplements among numerous other drugs? Livestock. The ironic thing is that the drugs they give livestock doesn't actually end up as nutrients for us, they're to keep the animals *alive* long enough to produce an economical amount of meat because they live in environments they are totally unsuited for and would die immediately if not heavily supplemented. So yeah, tell me again about how raising livestock is "natural" while a human taking supplements is not. Also, I'm about to dive into the concept of "natural" and "nature" here. I'm an environmental science/conservation major, which is where I get my hatred for modern meat production from. The notion of "humans are not part of nature", that we're above it or parallel to it is totally false. We evolved on this planet, we're subject to its rules. Everything we do is "natural", including using our naturally big brains to develop alternatives to meat and then choosing not to eat meat anymore. Deviating just a bit from veganism to colonialism: The concept of "humans are not apart of nature" has historically been used to justify oppression of indigenous peoples. Those national parks that no one is allowed to live in because they want to "preserve the nature"? They were filled with Indigenous peoples doing their things for ten thousand years, until Europeans came and said "well we want to preserve nature and humans aren't apart of nature so all of you savage natives have to GTFO." So the entire notion of "this is natural" and "this is not natural" is invalid. If we find a way of doing things that produces better results overall compared to how we used to "naturally" do things, switching from meat based to plant based diets for example, nothing in "nature" prevents us from doing that or says we shouldn't. Again, we evolved big brains as part of our niche in the natural ecosystem, we should really use those things more and come up with mutually beneficial solutions.
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Implying there is a tasteful way of unauthorized distribution of someone else’s personal life?


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 should mineable Cryptos exist when we have non energy and hardware intensive alternatives?





They secure their network for them. No one else. So why should any other non-crypto node on the network care?


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).






Thoughts on electric mopeds/motorcycles?
People here seem to love e-bikes, and honestly they're pretty good and I love them too. But what about electric moped scooters or electric motorcycles? I remember riding on an electric moped back in China, sitting in front of my aunt who was driving, and it felt really cool, though thinking back I don't remember either of us wearing helmets so might not have been the safest thing (then again we couldn't go very fast on the dense Chinese city streets either, and it was seen more as "biking 2.0" because most Chinese cities have excellent bike lanes that also allow scooters as long as you ride at lower speeds). Maybe it's just childhood bias and nostalgia but I've always liked the concept of electric mopeds. I've also heard people in North America saying it's a good car alternative especially in places with milder climates, because while it would be ideal to just have walkable/bikeable cities in the first place, if you have no choice but to live in a suburb and don't want a car it can be a good compromise between not having a car but still having a vehicle capable of quickly covering the distances imposed by urban sprawl, but it's a lot cheaper, less resource intensive, and allows you to dart around traffic. The only issue is you can't park it at a bike parkade and have to use a parking lot, and you can't bring it on public transit. What do you think? Do you think electric mopeds and motorcycles have a place in a car free society?
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I always enjoy unpinning edge from my taskbar.

I enjoyed it so much that I unpinned Windows from my computer and installed Linux!



Ubuntu is the stepping stone from Mac/Windows to Linux. Like the tutorial level. It’s also one of the most “corporate” Linux OS vendors outside of RedHat. Of course it’s shitty lol.


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.


And Snap isn’t? If you think Flatpak is bad how exactly is locking you into an objectively worse universal package manager the solution?












Tight, high density suburbs exist. Typically from the pre-car era, and they really show just how much space cars steal from pedestrians and bikes.




Do you think freight trains can ever replace trucks in dense downtowns?
I find the disparity between the popularity and public opinion of urban passenger trains and urban freight trains really interesting. The world's densest urban centres almost all have comprehensive passenger rail systems, and you can almost always get around downtown without a car, or in some places completely without rubber tired motor vehicles. But freight delivery to urban cores is almost always done by truck, from pickups, vans, to full on tractor trailers, and it seems that it's the less dense areas that are better served by train for freight shipping. While there have been some attempts at urban freight rail, like the cargo trams in Germany and Switzerland, it seems that they're either dead or pretty limited in their capacity or extent of network, usually serving a few facilities at best. Most urban shipping is still done by truck. Meanwhile, heavy freight rail is usually viewed extremely negatively in urban cores, and extensive effort has been made to remove urban freight corridors or divert them around the downtown. It seems that freight trains are really good at delivering freight to the edge of an urban centre, but then it needs to be shuffled in an intermodal yard onto trucks. And even if it wasn't, it seems that freight rail, especially in North America, only serves the largest industrial facilities, even when passing through the downtown, so you if you run a grocery store or other small or medium sized business, you can never take advantage of rail and are forced to rely on trucks for your wares. Especially if your business is in a mixed use building with commercial and residential spaces in one, and not a standalone single story department store. This also means you can never have your personal deliveries or mail come by rail. It's a problem because the places most favourable to people (read: least favourable to car traffic) can't take advantage of the efficiency and economies of scale of rail for freight deliveries like they can with passenger rail, and the same bottlenecks on passenger cars these areas have also apply to fright trucks. One would assume that urban freight rail would have the same benefits over trucks as urban passenger rail has over cars. What are your thoughts on this? Why don't we see more urban freight rail, and should we be looking into building more urban freight rail?
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Can Windows just die already? It's clearly obsolete and has jumped the shark.
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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.


A great TLDR of why this is a bad idea: https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/109982182514133646
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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).


Also, now that I think about it browser compatibility might be an issue if you change the standard library willy nilly.


the fediverse was using discord to run a hate campaign against the organization

Why do I doubt that if the Fediverse was going to run a hate campagin, they’d use Discord



Yeah that breakwater’s not going to hold against sea level rise and the increasingly intense storms we’re going to experience (are already experiencing).

I also don’t understand why you would even build this. It’s the worst of both worlds of a bridge and a tunnel.