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LesserAbe

@LesserAbe@lemmy.world

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LesserAbe ,

What point are you trying to make? That it would have been better if the divine right of kings ended sooner? I'm sure Ursula K. Le Guin would agree.

Or are you trying to say we shouldn't be complacent in working to end capitalism? Because I'm sure Ursula K. Le Guin would agree as well.

The point of even saying this is to rally people who might feel there's no point in trying, because the current system seems unstoppable.

LesserAbe ,

I don't know about all the information, but I'd rather read Wikipedia about a historical event than watch a YouTube about it

LesserAbe ,

I'm a hobbyist, but I've found it to be pretty helpful. Seems like main thing is chunking requests down.

If it's a domain I'm completely unfamiliar with then it's not a good fit because I'm no longer able to identify where it's gone off the rails.

LesserAbe ,

Just splitting something up into smaller tasks.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you, but you wouldn't be like "chatgpt write me an app for telling me the weather" you'd be like "I'm building an app in such and such a framework and working with such and such an API, how would I format this request" (or whatever)

Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.” (powering-the-planet.ghost.io)

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

LesserAbe OP ,

With respect, I think you're projecting a discussion with a different person onto this article.

You're right, the climate is going to get worse before it gets better. You're right, the impacts of climate change will disproportionately affect poor and underdeveloped areas. We can't make that go away with positive thinking, and it's not enough for humans as a species to survive, we need to focus on reducing suffering while we're turning the ship.

What I took away from this article is that the market forces for cheap renewable power and the means to store it are now stronger than the forces for CO2 emitting power. And those forces are moving faster than predicted. That's good, and it's ok to talk about something good when it's true!

People who have been paying attention and care about others have good reason to be wary about the narrative "oh, everything is going to be fine" because that's what industry and politicians have been saying for a long time instead of taking needed action.

We're at a point where most people recognize climate change is real, and they can see it's effects. We're also at a point where many people don't have hope for the situation. It's dangerous to tell people "shit's fucked and there's nothing you can do about it" because they might believe you and do nothing.

LesserAbe OP ,

Yes, we need more storage and generation. The author didn't say we're all good and nothing more needs to be done. What's noteworthy is that renewable energy is cheaper than CO2 emitting, and battery storage is cheaper than peaker plants. (And grid battery can come from things like salt, sand, brick along with better known components like hydro storage, doesn't have to be rare earth elements)

It's ok to acknowledge when good things happen while also recognizing bad things.

LesserAbe OP ,

You're right, we've got to get rid of fossil fuel. As one example, the article talks about how energy storage has reduced the need for gas peaker plants. In California in April the power required from those plants was half what it's been in April the prior three years.

Still plenty of progress that needs to be made, but what's notable is that it's now cheaper for a business to turn to green energy and storage to solve a problem. There's not an incentive to build new polluting tech. So while the impact of climate change is going to get worse (because those emissions and warming are already baked in) the business argument for fossil fuel is no longer viable.

LesserAbe OP ,

I don't agree with you, but also if I did, what then? If we don't believe it's possible for things to get better do we just lay down and die?

LesserAbe OP ,

You're right that people have been thinking about and working on renewable energy for a long time. However what's only become true very recently is that it's cheaper to generate energy using renewable sources than to use fossil fuels. That's a massive milestone because when a new power source is built it will more likely than not be renewable.

People making sacrifices is important, but what if you weren't only giving people the opportunity to help the environment, but also to improve their bottom line? Makes the pitch a lot easier and helps us to build momentum in the right direction.

LesserAbe OP ,

I'm saying it does matter. When you go to a business and say you can buy a widget for $1000, or for $500, and they both do the same thing, the business will choose the cheaper one. Sure, lobbying will get businesses some favors, loosen some regulation, get some subsidies, but at a certain point it's not enough, the economics take over.

LesserAbe OP ,

?

The article I shared is about how solar is now the cheapest form of power. So that is what's happening.

LesserAbe ,

This is one reason I'm especially interested in worker cooperatives.

You're right, people spend 8+ hours a day at work, strengthening business owners, who are essentially working against them. Then some small fraction of people have/take the time to learn about issues affecting them and volunteer a couple hours a week for their chosen cause.

Even those in a union are negotiating from the standpoint of "the company owns the equipment/processes/customers and we own our labor".

What if instead the workers also own the business? Now you're spending eight hours (or less) a day working on something that directly benefits you, and with which you're intimately familiar. It's possible to make democratic decisions because it's not some abstract issue or far away politician. And every successful worker cooperative reduces the money going to some micro-king, and in turn reduces the distorting effect of corporate money on our electoral system.

LesserAbe ,

What are you running from

LesserAbe ,

I don't think that's accurate, there's a social axis from left to right too.

LesserAbe ,

I've seen the compass, but in real life conversation when people say left or right they don't exclusively mean economic views. For example, access to abortion or LGBT rights are generally seen as supported by the left and opposed by the right.

You're right it's reductive, and really there are many dimensions to political thought.

LesserAbe ,

When you look at the material that the human mind generates, it kind of makes you look at output from AI a little different.

USA | Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (www.reuters.com)

The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk....

LesserAbe ,

These stupid motherfuckers.

It's immoral, it's anti human, so that's problem number one. And what's worse, they did such a shit job at it that the social media companies identified the accounts quickly, so surely our adversaries could do the same.

And there was this bit in the article: "The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate."

So I expect we'll see reports of other shithead operations before long.

LesserAbe ,

Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn't. Not saying it's a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn't going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.

LesserAbe ,

If there's one thing I learned from Civ V it's you have to get your population numbers up in order to produce enough settlers

LesserAbe ,

It sucks! I'd guess this was an attempt to get something on the books and maybe they go back for exemptions later. Article says an earlier bill only applied to wheelchairs and then later they expanded to include agricultural equipment.

LesserAbe ,

Good read, and I grabbed a bunch of other links in there for later.

LesserAbe ,

Good lord, everyone please learn a tiny bit about spacex and the state of the space industry instead of letting your (justified) hatred of Elon do the typing.

LesserAbe ,

You're right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.

I think around here most people agree that billionaires don't earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don't we recognize those people's work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia's soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn't have anything that could launch people into orbit.

Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They're still around and still for the most part suck)

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn't and still doesn't really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn't much of a private market in space.

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.

And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can't speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.

Elon Musk didn't do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I'm concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I'm hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.

LesserAbe ,

Meaning no disrespect, it's clear from your response you're not familiar with space history. And that was my point - a lot of people are jumping in here and making negative comments just because of the Musk association without knowing or caring about the reality.

The space shuttle (the U.S.' s previous manned "reusable" vehicle) was retired in 2011, and the Crew Dragon was ready in about 2020. NASA was not forced to use Soyuz because of a delay in the Crew Dragon, it was because the Space Shuttle had two previous fatal disasters, was way more expensive than planned, and would be even more expensive to keep running. I didn't know this until looking at the wikipedia just now, but early safety estimates put the chance of catastrophic failure and death of the crew between 1 in 100 to as low as 1 in 100,000. After those two disasters they re-evaluated and put the risk as high as 1 in 9.

NASA was willing to take a chance on other contracts for commercial vehicles because it had no other options. It awarded contracts both to SpaceX and ULA. The first is doing dozens of uncrewed launches per year and has flown 12 crewed missions. The other is doing like 3 launches per year, has yet to fly Starliner with a crew, and costs more per launch.

The space shuttle vehicle itself was re-usable. The "external tank" was discarded and not re-used. The solid rocket boosters would fall into the ocean, and then would have to be recovered, examined and refurbished. Those tanks/boosters represented a huge portion of the cost. While the space shuttle was slightly more re-usable, other rocket launches would be single use. What SpaceX did that no one else had before was a controlled vertical landing of the booster. In other words, it landed under power and standing up. That's very difficult, and a game changer since it skipped the recovery step, and they didn't require the time and cost of examination / refurbishment the way the space shuttle components did.

What is it you want to say about Artemis?

LesserAbe ,

Please see my other comment in this same thread. It's not like Tesla or Twitter where they're clearing slipping and releasing bad product. Look at the actual accomplishments!

As much as we on lemmy might look down on consumers of conservative news, I'm really surprised by how similarly reflexive and uninformed a lot of the comments here are.

LesserAbe ,

You wouldn't say this if you were following the industry at all. Please see my other comment in this thread. SpaceX is dominating, for good reason, and seemingly in spite of musk.

LesserAbe ,

Hmm sensing similarities to that other thread where the gen z person was saying millennials always complain about them. What if some predictable percentage of people regardless of the time they were born are assholes?

LesserAbe ,

I'm a millennial too. You're right, there were definitely people saying we suck, aren't hard workers, it's our own fault for not doing well financially, etc. I'm just saying that wasn't all the boomers in the same way all millennials aren't giving gen z shit. But those sorts of claims drive engagement, from upset people in both demographics, so that's why the narrative keeps popping up.

LesserAbe ,

Joker is claiming he's smoking good weed and Batman disagrees telling him it's low quality. Then Joker goes to clean out the bottom part of the grinder he uses to prepare his weed, which is the part that catches all the tiny weed particles, so it's the most potent part.

Google's call-scanning AI could dial up censorship by default, privacy experts warn (techcrunch.com)

A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They...

LesserAbe ,

"Thin end of the wedge" is a good way to put it.

LesserAbe ,

Trouble is when everybody else uses it, just because you turn it off doesn't mean you won't have issues.

What is the most appropriate way of tracking web traffic?

I have my personal blog, made with Hugo and hosted on GitHub pages. Initially I did not turn on any kind of web tracking / web analytics, because I do not like tracking at all. But I want to make my blog better and to achieve it, I need a feedback loop about traffic. For example, what are the most popular publications, or how...

LesserAbe ,

I was using plausible for one of my projects and had a good experience.

LesserAbe ,

I like "I'll bet he's nice". The synths are really interesting on the album. Can't say it's something I want to listen to all the time though. I appreciate Brian Wilson.

LesserAbe ,

Boooooo to this post

LesserAbe ,

I'm just assuming the gallows were added later

ajsadauskas , to Fuck Cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.

Here's a funny-because-it's-true take on Transurban and the poor tax it imposes, from Punter's Politics:

https://youtu.be/FlKBakPAtiw?si=G39_0GcJzSB0SSA8

@fuck_cars

LesserAbe ,

I don't like when government funded projects are sold to private corporations. I like government funded infrastructure though.

LesserAbe ,

Yeah what the heck? How does this guy use electric for regular things, let alone a car?

LesserAbe ,

This is a lot of who cares shit, but Aubrey is Drake's real name

LesserAbe ,

Then he wouldn't get nearly as many views. Or have articles written about him

LesserAbe ,

My understanding is the premise of world coin is to provide identity verification somehow, but I don't get how is it supposed to work?

Also how does it benefit the network to have scanned irises for people who don't care about world coin or understand how it works?

LesserAbe ,

I didn't say it was good or I support it. I'm trying to understand it. Which is usually an important step to effectively combat something.

LesserAbe ,

Stupid question, but am I right in thinking that osmc won't support streaming services like Netflix/Hulu/Max?

LesserAbe ,

If my car started playing music automatically I think I'd keep it on. But seems like poor form to waste time actually putting music on. I assume every second counts

LesserAbe ,

Here's the Wikipedia article for anyone catching up like me.

LesserAbe ,

Torn. This is clearly a cool idea, and it would save a lot of work (which I would immediately offset with all the work putting it together) But then it will be that much easier to keep a traditional lawn going, which I'd love to get away from over the long term.

LesserAbe ,

Of course don't let me dissuade you. My wife would much prefer a robo mower with "normal" lawn over a no-lawn solution

LesserAbe ,

Open your third eye

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