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

  • 973 Posts
  • 794 Comments
Joined 4Y ago
cake
Cake day: Oct 03, 2019

help-circle
rss









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.















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.






Norway Nandway Nxorway Notway









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.




To be clear for someone wondering: this is NOT a consumer product. If you’re looking to just use it as if it was an ARM or Intel tablet, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you’re looking to develop or test operating systems, software, or compatibility layers, you’re gonna have a great time.


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?

I always enjoy unpinning edge from my taskbar.

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



They say hell is lonely and filled with demons. It’s hell. It’s just hell.






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.



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).


Yeah, it’s almost like the procedure involves checking if you really want to do it or not before you do it! Personally I think the trans community does a great job of helping both trans and non trans people find their identity.


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


Fair enough, but I also think it’s really sad that the open source community, namely the web/JS community, is so averse to copyleft.


I haven’t checked but I am 99% sure that is licensed under MIT which is the darling license of the node ecosystem. When you do that you are basically opening yourself to being abused by corporations.

To be fair, if they’re just distributing the source code, not even AGPL can stop them, since they’re distributing the entire codebase, unchanged, under the same license. Plenty of other reasons not to use MIT, like you said it’s easy for corporations to exploit, but I don’t think this would have helped.

If I had to do something like that I would most likely copy paste the code from a stack overflow answer. Having a whole module for one small function seems ridiculous to me.

Moreover, the JS ecosystem is notorious for its use of helper libraries with a ton of primitives that you then use in your code so you don’t even need to deal with the standard library. The most famous and infamous being jQuery. This couldn’t have been rolled into one of those?


It seems to me that Tesla drivers literally think they’re greener than any other vehicle. Including busses, trains, maybe even bikes based on how they treat those on the road.

Yeah no. Between the oldest, crappiest diesel busses and trains and the newest Teslas, public transit still wins handily. That old bus probably has fewer cumulative carbon emissions than the battery alone.


Also, a mature cast iron pan very much has nonstick properties. I remember threads on Reddit about people freaking out that well meaning but misinformed people scrubbed the surface layer off their cast iron cookware, because that takes a long time to form and is essentially a natural nonstick coating.