The Lesser of Two Genocides
Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org Posts 2Comments 190Joined 2 yr. ago
Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org
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2
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190
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2 yr. ago
Personally, I don't think the reporting requirements are all that burdensome (especially for an organization that receives less than $50k on donations per year). Most of the requirements are just good governance/administration, that it seems like they're doing anyway (the monthly Beehaw post outlining costs/receipts).
A formal board of directors or trustees that meets once a month? I'm pretty sure they already have regular meetings. Minutes? Yeah, someone just needs to send out an email summarizing who attended and what was decided or voted on in that meeting.
Annual filings? Seems like a straightforward transfer of the information they're already putting in the monthly posts to fill out the IRS's PDFs.
As for employment stuff, they simply don't need to have employees. If it's all volunteer officers and board members, with a few contracted vendors here and there, they just need a bank account (which can be free for nonprofits).
It'll cost a little bit more in overhead, not least of which is a donation payment processor, but I don't see it as being more administratively burdensome than what they're already doing.
It’s missing some significant niches
It's missing some pretty mainstream interests, as well. Some of my favorite parts of reddit from the before times related to sports, television, music, etc., and there just isn't a critical mass on any lemmy community to really get that robust dialogue going.
Video encoding has several tradeoffs:
- Bitrate
- Resolution/frame rate
- Perceived quality
- Computational complexity of encoding
- Computational complexity of decoding
The cell phone encoding chips for video encoding on device make sacrifices to preserve speed of encoding and preserve battery life (higher computational complexity costs more processing cycles and tends to use more power). So it's simpler encoding, in exchange for inefficient bitrate compression.
YouTube (and all the social media sites) have huge server farms with highly specialized encoding chips for making the videos more efficient with bitrate for quality. That makes sense because videos designed to be watched millions of times could benefit from even a very slight improvement of bitrate in exchange for a one-time cost of complex encoding. It's also why YouTube tends not to convert to AV1 (very efficient in bitrate for quality, but computationally complex to encode) until a video has a few hundred views, because it's not clear whether that tradeoff is worth it until they know a lot of people will be watching it.
Netflix customizes even further for a per-video basis and looks for even more specialized tricks on a scene-by-scene basis, because every single one of its videos only needs to be encoded once for each quality/format but will be watched millions of times.
In other words, it's like any other engineering problem. The engineers choose different tradeoffs based on context, which means that the cell phone applies a different set of tradeoffs compared to the social media site's server farm.
I'm going to come at this from my own ethical and moral framework, and try to explain myself well enough to allow you to either agree or clearly see where we disagree.
I've always been of the mindset that if you have a good product, shockingly little marketing is required.
Marketing creates value in an ethical way when it helps match supply to demand, and reduces search friction for mutually beneficial transactions. Those mutually beneficial transactions distribute resources in a way that increases the overall utility in a society.
Thus, ethical marketing is still useful in an economy or specific markets where searching is difficult or costly. Plenty of useful products languish on the vine, and need consumer discovery in order to succeed.
As an example, some of my favorite restaurants I've ever eaten at have been forced to throw away food when there has been insufficient dining volume to use all those ingredients. Sometimes it's happened enough that the restaurant fails as a business. And restaurants as an industry are terrible with getting their product known to the public. So there's probably some benefit there in the act of marketing, advertising, and sales for those restaurants.
If you have your own ethical guideposts on which industries produce products that suffer from that problem (good product that
insufficient people know about, where producers are struggling), maybe focusing in on those fields/industries could be productive.
The concept discussed in the article is much more interesting than the headline suggests. It's about recapturing waste heat in wastewater, which primarily relates to the energy in hot shower water and other hot water poured down drains.
I read the headline to be about the organic compounds in human waste and potentially burning them for the chemical energy in those compounds.
Or maybe it was just me.
While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing
I'd argue it's an outright falsehood. "Slowdown" implies that sales are going down. They're actually going up, but the pace of acceleration has gone down. The subtitle in the article here:
Fewer people are buying electric cars — the slowdown hints at a problem at the heart of America's EV push.
This is literally false. More people than ever are buying electric cars.
What has actually happened is that the EV market went from supply-constrained (where manufacturers were building them as fast as they could and selling each one they built to waitlisted customers) to some models becoming demand-constrained (where manufacturers are building them faster than they can sell them).
This is due to a number of things, only some of which apply to the industry as a whole. First, there are some models that just aren't really that heavily desired by the public, at the price points they're being sold at. The Ford F-150 is a pretty good example, where Ford misinterpreted the demand from people who signed up on the waitlist, and then chose to prioritize the highest priced trim levels (rather than the entry level F-150 Lightning). So even if people are interested in the entry-level $50,000 F-150 Lightning still have to wait (and oh, by the way, Ford is raising the price to $55,000) while the $90,000 models pile up in dealer lots.
Second, dealers are actively sabotaging EV sales. Everyone I know who has tried to buy an EV from a traditional dealer has been steered towards a hybrid or a traditional ICE vehicle, and sales staff seem to be intentionally ignorant about the EV models sold by their dealership. The EV maintenance model is a threat to dealer business models, where service/maintenance is a very important part of their revenue, so the incentives of the dealer aren't lined up with the incentives of the manufacturer.
Third, the traditional automakers released their EVs into some headwinds, because interest rates have increased, and Tesla had the profit margins to simply be able to drop prices in a way to make the newest non-Tesla EVs seem like a bad deal in comparison. The average Tesla transaction dropped from $65k in October 2022 to $50k in October 2023, with big price cuts on almost all of its models.
So electric vehicle sales are up. The difficulties that some manufacturers have even in this climate of sales going up is, in many cases, specific to those makes and those models.
This comment basically demonstrates the weakness of these AI driven summarizes in their current state. It doesn't tell who is who or why each fact offered is relevant to the larger story. A good summary strips out the details but preserves the high level summary information, while giving context as necessary. This generated summary kinda does the opposite, by going down a largely irrelevant rabbit hole of how he was caught, and who he was affiliated with.
The real, actual TL;DR:
Cameron Ortis, former intelligence chief of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, has been convicted of leaking state secrets to three foreigners and attempting to leak state secrets to a fourth.
Ortis did not deny leaking the secrets but raised a defense that the leaks were part of a legitimate intelligence operation, and that he was leaking the secrets to entice foreign subjects into using communications platforms monitored by Canadian intelligence and its "Five Eyes" partners (intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand). The operators of those platforms deny working with western intelligence.
Ad-riddled blogspam, probably written by some AI.
There's literally nothing in this post that isn't better covered by a more reputable site.
Do we know that for sure? What if the triggering event was secret dealings between Altman and Nadella?
I have no idea how likely that is, but the original messaging around Altman's firing seemed to leave open the possibility that this was about conflicts of interest. The messaging since seems to have contradicted that, though, so who knows.
I would choose a larger screen over that marginal difference in dpi every day of the week.
Yes, but you're not addressing my point that the price for the hardware isn't actually bad, and that people who complain would often just prefer to buy hardware with lower specs for a lower price.
The simple fact is that if you were to try to build a MacBook killer and try to compete on Apple's own turf by matching specs, you'd find that the entry level Apple devices are basically the same price as other laptops you could configure with similar specs, because Apple's baseline/entry level has a pretty powerful CPU/GPU and high resolution displays. So the appropriate response is not that they overcharge for what they give, but that they make choices that are more expensive for the consumer, which is a subtle difference that I've been trying to explain throughout this thread.
You cannot compare an app that runs on two different OS.
Why not? Half of the software I use is available on both Linux and MacOS, and frankly a substantial amount of what most people do is in browser anyway. If the software runs better on one device over another, that's a real world difference that can be measured. If you'd prefer to use Passmark or whatever other benchmark you'd like you use, you'll still see be able to compare specific CPUs.
This is a £1400 laptop from scan V’s £1500 macbook air currently.
Ah, I see where some of the disconnect is. I'm comparing U.S. prices, where identical Apple hardware is significantly cheaper (that 15" Macbook Air starts at $1300 in the U.S., or £1058).
And I can't help but notice you've chosen a laptop with a worse screen (larger panel with lower resolution). Like I said, once you actually start looking at High DPI screens on laptops you'll find that Apple's prices are actually pretty cheap. 15 inch laptops with at least 2600 pixels of horizontal resolution generally start at higher prices. It's fair to say you don't need that kind of screen resolution, but the price for a device with those specs is going to be higher.
The CPU benchmarks on that laptop's CPU are also slightly behind the 15" Macbook Air, too, even held back by not having fans for managing thermals.
There's a huge market for new computers that have lower prices and lower performance than Apple's cheapest models. That doesn't mean that Apple's cheapest models are a bad price for what they are, as Dell and Lenovo have plenty of models that are roughly around Apple's price range, unless and until you start adding memory and storage. Thus, the backwards engineered pricing formula is that it's a pretty low price for the CPU/GPU, and a very high price for the Storage/Memory.
All of the PC components can be upgraded at the cost of the part + labour.
Well, that's becoming less common. Lots of motherboards are now relying on soldered RAM, and a few have started relying on soldered SSDs, too.
Except the boot process on a non apple PC is open software.
For the most part, it isn't. The typical laptop you buy from the major manufacturers (Lenovo, HP, Dell) have closed-source firmware. They all end up supporting the open UEFI standard, but the implementation is usually closed source. Having the ability to flash new firmware that is mostly open source but with closed source binary blobs (like coreboot) or fully open source (like libreboot) gets closer to the hardware at startup, but still sits on proprietary implementations.
There's some movement to open source more and more of this process, but it's not quite there yet. AMD has the OpenSIL project and has publicly committed to open sourcing a functional firmware for those chips by 2026.
Asahi uses the open source m1n1 bootloader to load a U-boot to load desktop Linux bootloaders like GRUB (which generally expect UEFI compatibility), as described here:
- The SecureROM inside the M1 SoC starts up on cold boot, and loads iBoot1 from NOR flash
- iBoot1 reads the boot configuration in the internal SSD, validates the system boot policy, and chooses an “OS” to boot – for us, Asahi Linux / m1n1 will look like an OS partition to iBoot1.
- iBoot2, which is the “OS loader” and needs to reside in the OS partition being booted to, loads firmware for internal devices, sets up the Apple Device Tree, and boots a Mach-O kernel (or in our case, m1n1).
- m1n1 parses the ADT, sets up more devices and makes things Linux-like, sets up an FDT (Flattened Device Tree, the binary devicetree format), then boots U-Boot.
- U-Boot, which will have drivers for the internal SSD, reads its configuration and the next stage, and provides UEFI services – including forwarding the devicetree from m1n1.
- GRUB, booting as a standard UEFI application from a disk partition, works like GRUB on any PC. This is what allows distributions to manage kernels the way we are used to, with grub-mkconfig and /etc/default/grub and friends.
- Finally, the Linux kernel is booted, with the devicetree that was passed all the way from m1n1 providing it with the information it needs to work.
If you compare the role of iBoot (proprietary Apple code) to the closed source firmware in the typical Dell/HP/Acer/Asus/Lenovo booting Linux, you'll see that it's basically just line drawing at a slightly later stage, where closed-source code hands off to open-source code. No matter how you slice it, it's not virtualization, unless you want to take the position that most laptops can only run virtualized OSes.
I think you mean that Apple uses its own memory more effectively then a windows PC does.
No, I mean that when you spec out a base model Macbook Air at $1,199 and compare to similarly specced Windows laptops, whose CPUs/GPUs can deliver comparable performance on benchmarks, and a similar quality display built into the laptop, the Macbook Air is usually cheaper. The Windows laptops tend to become cheaper when you're comparing Apple to non-Apple at higher memory and storage (roughly 16GB/1TB), but the base model Macbooks do compare favorably on price.
Just wanted to say though that it's a bit unfair to compare Iraq to this.
I agree, but a key difference is simply the fact that Gazans aren't allowed to leave, and power/water/food was cut before evacuations. A ground invasion in that context has to be understood with that heightened responsibility towards civilians.
As for the Afghanistan war, I think that rural versus dense urban settlement is also fundamentally different, and difficult to compare. Most of the controversy around civilian deaths in Afghanistan focus on mistargeted aerial bombardment, which I agree matches the initial operations in Gaza. But as the shift turns over to ground forces, Fallujah is probably the comparison I think matches most closely.
Can you run that outside of a virtual box?
It's not virtualization. It's actually booted and runs on bare metal, same as the way Windows runs on a normal Windows computer: a proprietary closed UEFI firmware handles the boot process but boots an OS from the "hard drive" portion of non-volatile storage (usually an SSD on Windows machines). Whether you run Linux or Windows, that boot process starts the same.
Asahi Linux is configured so that Apple's firmware loads a Linux bootloader instead of booting MacOS.
And wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to just build your own PC rather than pay the premium for the apple logo?
Apple's base configurations are generally cheaper than similarly specced competitors, because their CPU/GPUs are so much cheaper than similar Intel/AMD/Nvidia chips. The expense comes from exorbitant prices for additional memory or storage, and the fact that they simply refuse to use cheaper display tech even in their cheapest laptops. The entry level laptop has a 13 inch 2560x1600 screen, which compares favorably to the highest end displays available on Thinkpads and Dells.
If you're already going to buy a laptop with a high quality HiDPI display, and are looking for high performance from your CPU/GPU, it takes a decent amount of storage/memory for a Macbook to overtake a similarly specced competitor in price.
Peter Mansoor (a U.S. Army Colonel who was a big part of the strategic shift in Iraq around 2006 to a counterinsurgency doctrine) has written a bunch about the "clear, hold, build" strategy where U.S. troops took territory with a promise they would stay long enough to rebuild it and peacefully hand it over to the local government partners. You can find some of his writing published through the university where he teaches and publishes.
Counterinsurgency (also known as COIN in military circles) was a shift in emphasis, compared to the prior 3 years or so, where the civilian population was seen as partners and a "territory" of sorts to try to win. There was a lot of talk of "hearts and minds" being a key component to winning the war, because foreign occupiers would never have the same level of local knowledge as the actual locals, and having the general population on your side meant that insurgents couldn't hide in the community.
It didn't actually work out that way all the time (and frankly, my opinion is that the strategy utterly failed in Afghanistan, even if Iraq eventually stabilized). But that was the doctrine and that was the core strategy pursued by U.S. troops at least from 2006 onward. Civilians mattered, not just in that harming them should be avoided even while pursuing military objectives, but civilian well-being actually counted as a primary military objective in itself.
But even before COIN became the big buzzword in the U.S. military, the strategy did still emphasize the need to take responsibility for the well being of civilians in a war zone. Colin Powell famously warned George W. Bush of what Thomas Friedman would call the "Pottery Barn Rule" where "if you break it, you own it," in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Powell was clear that he was specifically referring to the 26 million residents of Iraq looking to the United States in what would govern Iraq after the "regime change." It was always understood, even among the most hawkish strategists in the U.S., that invasion carried a responsibility of rebuilding.
I'm not in any way an expert on Gaza, but from my casual observations it sure does seem like the Israeli military doesn't put anywhere near the same priority of making sure that civilians aren't unnecessarily harmed in their military operations.
I don't think that's right.
The way we operated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had much, much more consideration to the humanitarian toll on civilians, compared to how Israel is currently running their military operation. Even before either invasion, too, the US military knew there was going to be complex and difficult "nation building" afterward.
Take, for example, the way the US and UK troops cleared out Fallujah: leafleting and warning of the assault and specifically letting the civilian population leave before aggressive bombardment. There was controversy about whether military aged males were improperly identified as combatants, but women and children made it out.
The controversy about a cease fire in Gaza is exactly that: letting civilians avoid the places where fighting is happening. The US devoted resources to making that possible, but Israel isn't protecting those goals to the same degree or manner.
The equity is merely an estimate; it’s no longer a traded company so a public valuation is not applicable.
Even for private companies, though, the valuation matters for all sorts of events that might happen in the meantime: employees with equity still might be forced to sell if they quit their job, so that value ends up actually supporting real transactions trading equity for cash, income tax will look to the fair value at the time of vesting (or grant, in some cases).
And the debt is secured by the $19B valuation, so it’s not in addition to the equity; the company is “worth” $19B but caries a debt burden of $13B making it’s liquidation value $6B
I don't think this is right. In a typical leveraged buyout, the debt is secured by the assets of the company itself, not by the equity in the company. In other words, the money is owed by Twitter Inc. (and secured by what Twitter owns), not by Twitter's shareholders (and not secured by the shares themselves).
The old owners got $44 billion. $13 billion came from lenders, not new shareholders. New shareholders agreed to the deal because it allowed them to pony up less money for 100% ownership of the corporation, but the corporation itself is now more burdened with debt. The enterprise value, however, is shareholder equity plus debt, so the enterprise value itself doesn't change with the debt. That's why I added the total debt to the total valuation of the equity.
If the equity is worth $19 billion, and the debt is worth $13 billion, that's a drop of $44 billion to $32 billion. Still hilarious, although not as dramatic.
That's a driver for Apple hardware running in a non-Apple OS. That's different from tricking an Apple OS into running non-Apple hardware.
I don't think it's correct to describe the populist message as overwhelmingly successful. Sanders didn't win. Trump won once and lost once (and in fact lost the popular vote both times). We can trace back a bunch of other populists who failed, too.
The nuts and bolts of elections and campaigns tend to reward coalition builders. Populists with no establishment allies tend not to do well (note that Obama courted the popularity of the masses at the same time that he was locking up endorsements from the Democratic Party's old guard, including Biden, Byrd, Kennedy, and Dodd).
Humans tend to sort themselves into coalitions, led by organizations. Popularity is a feedback loop, and the fickle public can and does change their collective mind over whether someone is beloved or not.