GamingChairModel @ GamingChairModel @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I read the article as criticism of the lack of defense in depth, where compromise of a specific server gives access to keys that give near-untraceable access to all servers. Yes, Solarwinds fucked up by putting their keys in a place where someone could access it, but Golden SAML is the technique that makes a breach worse.

I can see an argument for artists choosing to use chaotic processes they can't really control.

Setting up a canvas and paints and brushes in a particular arrangement in the woods, and letting migratory animals and weather put their mark on the work, and then see what results. That could be art.

And if that can be art, then I guess chaotic, unpredictable AI models can output something that can be art, too.

"Biblically accurate models"

Traditionally they've been banned because they don't do well in crash testing, as they don't have crumple zones or airbags. Here's some testing from 2010 by the insurance industry arguing that they shouldn't be on highways.

They don't pass US federal crash tests, probably because of the lack of crumple zone, so they can't be imported until they're 25 years old. Which doesn't make them any safer, but I guess rules are rules:

Because the trucks don’t meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, they’re legal to import only 25 years after having been manufactured. Then, it’s up to each state to decide whether to allow them on public roads.

Even if my needs were met I'd still spend a lot of my time achieving wants. Not just stuff I can buy or pay for, but things that bring me satisfaction and contentment. So I'd probably still have a job, just with a little flexibility towards prioritizing job satisfaction over pure pay.

I made an alt on each of the big instances, because I wasn't sure which one I wanted to use long term. Then I just kinda stuck with them, each following slightly different topics, and therefore having different opportunities to participate in discussions.

Yes, but I don't think the CHIPS Act was aimed at the not-so-cutting-edge processes and getting those reshored onto US soil. The US already has a bunch, and the strategic value of those supply chains are less critical to national interests.

Fi has two different, incompatible options for how to sync your messages to a computer or other device that isn't your primary phone with your SIM (or e-SIM): the so-called "option 1" is RCS compatible, but treats your phone as the canonical device that has the primary copy of all messages, voicemails, etc. "Option 2" is device agnostic, where all messages and voicemails live on the cloud, and your phone (and all other devices) merely syncs with that primary copy in the cloud.

If your phone breaks or dies or is lost/stolen, Option 2 keeps chugging along with all your logged in devices, but the dead phone is the single point of failure for Option 1.

Ideally there would be a device agnostic way to access RCS through your account, but every implementation seems to require a specific SIM.

I think that it's foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there's essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We've seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we'll all still be able to interact.

What chips were we making in China? Unless you're counting Taiwan as China, but I'd point out that we're still making the top of the line chips in Taiwan.

When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”.

Windows Vista was so bad that it gets forgotten even in a retrospective about how Windows versions sucked. But yeah, Win7 didn't come out for another few years after that, to rescue the world from Vista.

Targeting the preindustrial level of atmospheric CO2 is such an ambitious target, trying to undo 300 years of emissions. Then again, it's not like we've stopped emitting.

If we instead try to calculate the energy requirements to simply offset the average emissions of that particular year, using this formula of 652 kJ/kg CO2, and average annual CO2 emissions, against the current numbers of about 37 billion tonnes, or 37,000,000,000,000 kg, we have 2.4 x 10^{16 kJ, or 2.4 x 10}19 joules. Which converts to 6.7 x 10^12 kWh, or 6,700 TWh.

Total annual US electricity generation is about 4700 TWh per year.

Global electricity generation is about 25000 TWh per year, about 40% of which is from low or zero carbon sources.

So basically if we've got 6700 TWh of clean energy to spare, it would be more effective to steer that into replacing fossil fuels first, and then once we hit a point of diminishing returns there, explore the much less efficient options of direct capture for excess energy we can't store or transport. Maybe we'll get there in a decade or two, but for now it doesn't make any sense.

Or, if you want something smaller, they have a watch.

they have such a monopoly

The major weakness in their desktop OS market dominance isn't from other desktop OSes. MacOS, ChromeOS, and traditional desktop Linux distros prevent Windows from being a total monopoly, but there's no doubt that Windows has quite a bit of market power.

The real competitive threat to Windows is from people who decide to not use a desktop computer at all. Between tablets and phones, there are a lot of people who no longer feel the need to have a laptop or desktop at all, for personal use.

And on that front, Windows being shittier than phones and tablets will cause people to slow down their upgrade cycle and maybe avoid using a traditional personal computer at all.

For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I've worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000's, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I'm no longer in a technical career field so I haven't kept on top of the latest and greatest.

Scientology with Chinese characteristics

So why don't we do it? FUD.

A consortium of Utah's utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale's modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn't compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.

geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock

I wouldn't sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.

We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free.

Some shifts genuinely are free, though. Wholesale prices for electricity follow a pronounced "duck curve," and drop to near zero (or even negative) in areas where there's a substantial solar base, during the day at certain parts of the year. People will shift their demand for non-time-sensitive consumption (heating, cooling, charging of devices/EVs, batched/scheduled jobs) in response to basic price signals. If a substantial amount of future demand is going to be from data centers performing batched/scheduled jobs, like training AI models or encoding video files, a lot of that demand can be algorithmically shifted.

There are already companies out there intentionally arbitraging the price differences by time of day to invest in large scale storage. That's an expensive activity, that they've determined is worth doing because there's profit to be made at scale.

At household scale, individuals can do that too.

Put another way, we shouldn't talk about current pricing models where every kilowatt hour costs the same as if that arrangement is free.

Plus, the timing of consumption already does naturally tend to follow the timing of solar generation. Most people are more active during the day than at night, and work hours reflect that distribution. Overcapacity in solar can go a long way towards meeting demand when it naturally happens.

Up our storage game, big time

I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.

But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.

Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.

There's a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they'll need to curtail generation during periods where there's more supply than demand.

And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.