Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GA
Posts
1
Comments
644
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Coal companies are literally going bankrupt as coal plants get decommissioned. When it comes to actual political power, the fossil fuel industry you want to watch out for is oil and gas, not coal.

    Mine all the coal you want. If you don't have anyone willing to buy from you, at a price that covers the cost of extraction, you will fail.

    So even though the coal companies' bankruptcies are getting them out of their cleanup and decommissioning obligations, the root cause of that is that coal just isn't competitive as an energy source.

  • until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware

    The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here's some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.

    And author should compare winter moths

    There's also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it's just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.

    Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.

  • The problem is that we're not getting rid of the other stuff

    We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it's still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.

    The progress we're making might be slower than many of us would like, but we're also at a tipping point where we're making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that's the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won't want to.

  • Realistically, I would grieve the loss of my children, who would never be born if I didn't line things up just right to cause them to happen again. I'd spend more time with my parents, who are getting along in the years, and I'd make the most of my time with them while they're healthy and happy.

    There are a few specifics where I'd try to get some loved ones out of trouble before some critical tipping point that would later cause a bunch of heartache and stress.

    There are general things about money and politics I'd probably do differently, knowing about how stocks have performed and what not, but that's not super interesting to me, because I'm mostly content in my personal life (including my career) and wouldn't want to upset that balance by doing anything too different from what brought me here.

  • Well they can pay compensation to people who do work for them: employee salaries, contractor work, etc. So the nonprofit structure might prevent them from paying dividends or stock buybacks or other ways of transferring directly to shareholders in their capacity as shareholders, but nonprofit structure alone isn't a guarantee that the organization won't steer excess cash into someone's pocket.

    No reason to believe this is true of this non-profit, but that's the reason why it's important to look at the books of nonprofits that you donate to.

  • I've been a general skeptic of exactly how much the power and performance to power stats are attributable to the ARM instruction set or architecture versus the fact that Apple just locks up TSMC's latest and greatest node for a year before everyone else. AMD's CPUs are still x86_64 but achieve similar performance per watt as the Apple silicon on the same node and similar TDPs.

    So if it turns out that TSMC has the secret sauce, then maybe we don't need to move laptops over to ARM at all.

  • Don't expect me to pay 2 grand for a laptop with no external USB or HDMI ports

    HDMI is a trash standard and we should move everyone to Displayport at a minimum, or Thunderbolt. But also, all the MacBook Pros have HDMI.

    I was even more frustrated by how bad the built in trackpad

    Weird. I think Apple's trackpad is head and shoulders better than anyone else's.

  • Yes, but the tokens are more than just a stream of letters, and aren't saved in the form of words. The information itself is organized into conceptual proximity to other concepts (and distinct from the text itself), and weighted in a way consistent with its training.

    That's why these models can use analogies and metaphors in a persuasive way, in certain contexts. Mix concepts that the training data has never been shown before, and these LLMs can still output something consistent with those concepts.

    Anthropic played around with their own model, emphasizing or deemphasizng particular concepts to observe some unexpected behavior.

    And we'd have trouble saying whether a model "knows" something if we don't have a robust definition of when and whether a human brain "knows" something.

  • I don't think this question really makes sense.

    DNS is centralized in that there is a root zone that determines who is the canonical authority for each top level domain like .com or .world (and the registrar for each top level domain controls who controls each domain under them). But it's also decentralized in the sense that everyone who controls a domain can assign any subdomains below that, and that anyone can choose to override the name resolving with their own local DNS server (or even a hosts file saved on the device).

    The court case here is trying to override the official domain ownership records at specific DNS providers. The problem is that the intermediaries are being ordered by the courts not to follow the central authority.

    Federation wouldn't fit this model: we still want DNS to be canonical where everyone in the world agrees which domain resolves to which IP addresses.

  • They already got the ISP DNS resolvers.

    This particular step, that this article is about, is targeting people who knew enough to switch from their ISP's DNS resolver to one of these ISP-agnostic DNS providers. So they're targeting the people who do, and probably not going to be particularly effective at it.

  • Voyager 2 went with a different trajectory specifically to fly by the outer planets. Voyager 1 went with a more aggressive gravity assist from both Jupiter and Saturn to gain the speed necessary to leave the solar system. So it's not only that it takes decades to get that far, but also the launch window of when different planets are aligned to make the mission feasible.

  • How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals? That's one heck of a durable power source.

    It's literally decaying plutonium-238. And because it decays, it's putting out less power than when it started. They've shut down certain operations to conserve power, and obviously prioritize things like communication back to earth.

  • So then they decide to hold Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress which is the only escalation they have in this position.

    Also, Merrick Garland is the head of the DOJ, and only the DOJ can prosecute contempt of Congress as a crime. So if Congress says that DOJ is acting in contempt of Congress, they're asking DOJ to prosecute itself.

  • It's just a type of injury. Injuries themselves don't give you a right to sue, you have to be injured by someone else doing something wrong.

    Can I sue for blindness? Yes, if someone caused my blindness in a way that they'd be liable for. Same with other injuries like broken bones or lost employment or embarrassment or paralysis.

    So if someone drives drunk and hits you with their car, paralyzing you and causing loss of enjoyment of life, you can sue them and would have to prove liability (they caused your injury in a way that causes them to have to pay for it) and damages (the amount of money they owe you based on how injured you are). Something like loss of enjoyment of life would be part of the second part of the analysis.

  • I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this (I worked in cybersecurity in 2000's but was only entry level, and changed careers before cloud/mobile made things way more complicated), but the general point still seems true: security requires conscious design that discourages poor configuration by client IT, and makes bad practices unviable by not only end users, but also the sysadmins who manage the actual IT resources. Then, things should be limited in impact.

    In other words, the manufacturer doesn't get to wash their whole hands of this thing if their design makes it easy for clients to screw up. In this case, it does sound like these systems were deployed by clients that didn't have a solid understanding of the relationships between on-prem AD and ADFS and didn't know how to configure them securely, that's also a significant documentation/education issue that Microsoft owns some responsibility for.

    (Plus in the case of the Solarwinds hack, there were a few other Microsoft vulnerabilities exploited to get to the point where the hackers could traverse the system looking for keys/certificates.)

    So I don't think this particular dude was warning about a non-vulnerability, and it sounds like the "security boundary" response he met with internally is similar to how you're responding to this report.