Thevenin @ Thevenin @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

On one hand, this follows roughly the same logic as saying wind turbines will use up all the wind.

On the other hand, tidal locking is such a cool premise for a sci-fi dystopia.

Misleading. Useful information, but the definitions are misleading.

• This is based on projections of the remainder of 2023.
• This is based on a 1-year measurement in the middle of an El Niño rather than a 5-year rolling average.
• This assumes a lower holocene optimum than organizations like NOAA use. NOAA is calling this a 1.25°C anomaly.

We haven't hit 1.5°C yet, at least not by the conventional definitions. So the next time you see the IPCC outlining mitigation pathways to keep warming to 1.5°C, please don't go posting this article saying, "we already passed that point lol."

So this just got posted on lemmy.dbzer0. They've got an AI-based CSAM screen up and running with promising initial results. The model was trained using CLIP, which as far as I understand it means they used written descriptions of what CSAM is or is not.

Could something like this work for Beehaw?

Another way to say it is that every movement needs a carrot, a stick, and an ultimatum. The carrot is evangelizing the injustice (MLK), the stick is direct action (Malcolm X), and the ultimatum is an implicit show of force and dedication that demonstrates how many people will resort to the stick if the carrot is not accepted (the mach on Washington).

While I am nearly always in the peaceful outreach camp, I strongly suspect that my efforts will not see fruition until breathless WSJ editorials start describing environmentalists as "dangerous" and "unamerican."

A fork of Lemmy will have all of Lemmy’s problems but now you’re responsible for them instead.

Most of this web dev stuff is out of my area of expertise, but this? I felt this in my soul.

There are three forms of protest. Some are meant to evangelize. Some are meant to enact direct consequences. And some are meant to demonstrate the commitment of supporters.

The history books love to spotlight evangelism, but an effective protest movement needs all three. One is the carrot (MLK), one is the stick (Malcolm X), and one is an ultimatum -- an implicit show of force displaying how many people will wield that stick if the audience doesn't pay attention to the carrot (March on Washington).

While I question the effectiveness of making a traffic jam for people heading to Burning Man, the next time you see a climate protest, I want to encourage you to ask yourself what kind of protest it is, and who is its intended audience.

From 2005 to 2021, US energy grid GHG emissions dropped by ≈40%. At first, this was due to the pivot away from coal, but now it's being driven by renewables. From 2015 to 2021, wind power doubled and solar quadrupled, fueled by the inexorable pull of cheap power. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58860

By my read of the situation, US electricity generation (in isolation) is on-track for the IPCC AR6 C2 and C1 pathways. Other sectors aren't, but electrification can rapidly bring them in line with the energy grid. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-5/

I'm a bit of a broken record on this subject, but we're tantalizingly close to having a way out of this without sending us back to the stone age. The technology is here, the money is here, and we now know what systems are responsible. With the multi-pronged approach of collective and individual action, we can actually do this.

We have the tools, the only thing we lack is the resolve to use them.

I'm not 100% convinced by some of the terrestrial applications for H2, on the economics side.

In my opinion, the aviation industry can handle the cost increases inherent to greener fuel. People fly because it's fast, not because it's cheap. As long as the planes are still fast, there's still a market.

By contrast, people ride the bus because it's cheap. According to Tokyo, H2 busses cost 2.6x as much to operate as diesel. According to Montpellier, H2 busses cost 6.3x as much to run as battery-electric busses (that's including amortization). So while the tech seems like a great fit, the commercial case is weak.

Shipping with semis is a toss-up. H2 can transport more cargo a longer distance than batteries, and I think some people will pay the premium for next-day shipping. But personally... I'd get the cheap-but-slow shipping 90% of the time.

Hydrogen works pretty well for aviation, though there are three main challenges they're still working on: size, materals, and fuel source.

Hydrogen is nice and lightweight, but the tanks and plumbing take up a lot of space, which cuts into cargo volume, basically limiting the range if you want to take passengers with you.

The second issue is that fuel cells currently require quite a lot of platinum, and the PEM electrolysis also requires a lot of PGMs and rare metals like Iridium. The material scientists are working on this, and I figure if they can take the cobalt out of batteries, they can take the platinum out of fuel cells.

The question that comes up the most when talking about hydrogen is where the hydrogen itself comes from. Right now, it's mostly made by steam methane reformation or similar fossil fuel processing, which is nearly as bad for the environment as burning the fossil fuel directly. But there are promising advances in renewable electrolysis (such as taking advantage of peak solar for "free" electricity) which are closing the gap between SMR and renewable H2. It'll never be as cheap as jet fuel, but it's at least economically feasible.

Exactly. It's a niche, but it's a legitimate niche. I needed a "portable desktop" that could run games as well as Solidworks simulations, and a gaming laptop was perfect for me.

It's a Samsung Series 7 Gamer, and it's lasted me 11 years so far (yes, you read that right). If I could go back and do anything differently, I would unplug the battery to preserve it for the rare instances when I actually needed it.

This is gonna be a long one, so buckle up.

The original "71%" report by CDP can be found here. The emissions are counted cumulatively since 1988, and all of the 100 companies are fossil fuel producers.

In the case of gasoline, we know the emissions from the EPA that combustion releases 19.59 lbs CO2/gal and the AFDC recognizes 23.7 lbs CO2/gal as the full lifecycle (including drilling, refining, and shipping). So for gasoline, 82.7% of the emissions are the direct result of burning. For other fuels which require less processing like diesel and coal, that ratio is higher.

So you could argue that those companies only made 12.3% of emissions since 1988, and their customers are responsible for 58.7%.

Should you, though? That is much harder to answer, because asking who is responsible for what means now we've exited the realm of science and entered an ethics discussion.

Let's say a person (let's call him Jeaj Valjeaj) steals a loaf of bread. Crime, obviously. Straight to jail. But let's say he was stealing the loaf of bread to feed a starving family. Now we say he's a good guy. But let's also say Jeaj had the money to buy the bread and stole it anyway. Believe it or not, straight to jail. But let's also say Jeaj had the money but the baker refused to sell to him. Well, now it's getting a little convoluted, but it kind of feels like the baker had it coming.

The throughline in this scenario, the one thing that keeps flipping your opinion, is who has the power. If Mr. Valjeaj is stealing bread for fun, or if he has the money, then he could just not steal. He has the power to change. If the baker is refusing business to a starving family, then the baker is the only one with the power to change. And of course in the original story, society itself holds responsibility for placing Prisoner 24602060451 in a position where he has to choose between the law and his starving family.

So let's bring this conclusion to the question of fossil fuels. Is the consumer responsible for burning fuel, or is the oil company responsible for selling it? It depends on which consumer we're talking about. Some consumers have the power to consume less and simply choose not to. Others do not have that luxury -- they must consume to survive, and so the responsibility lies on the influences that shaped our society in such a way as to force people to choose between the environment and a starving family.

This is the direction most philosophical discussion of environmentalism goes. But in terms of praxis, it is a dead end. We can say the individual is responsible for emissions if they have a reasonable ability to change, but who defines "reasonable?" I can define that limit for myself, but I can't effectively judge someone else. More importantly, how can the consumer truly know the environmental impact of their decisions if the producers are constantly lying through their teeth about it?

I'd also like to take this opportunity to attack the concept of ethical consumerism in general. Even if producers couldn't lie or greenwash their products, whenever a corporation does something unethical, it's typically because the ethical thing would cost more. That's the law of externalities at play. If a producer eliminated environmental damage in their supply chain, their prices would rise, their margins would shrink, and they would not match the breakneck rate of growth of their less ethical competition. Likewise, a consumer who only consumes product made ethically spends more money on fewer products, limiting their influence on the market. It's an uphill battle, unless the suppliers are universally forbidden from making that unethical product, in which case it's a level playing field again.

In short, even in ideal circumstances with full transparency, ethical consumerism can only affect change if there is truly overwhelming demand for ethical product, and if the vast majority of consumers have the power to not consume if the ethical product isn't there.

TL;DR: Yeah, those 100 companies wouldn't make emissions if nobody purchased, and it's important to emphasize personal responsibility, but it's difficult (if not impossible) to hold those consumers responsible in any way that's both effective and fair. Supply side regulation is simpler and more effective, particularly when corporations have as much power as they do.

It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate -- that's why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for "creative activities" as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images

This is the process I was referring to when I said it makes copies. We're on the same page there.

I don't know what the solution to the problem is, and I doubt I'm the right person to propose one. I don't think copyright law applies here, but I'm certainly not arguing that copyright should be expanded to include the statistical matrices used in LLMs and DPMs. I suppose plagiarism law might apply for copying a specific style, but that's not the argument I'm trying to make, either.

The argument I'm trying to make is that while it might be true that artificial minds should have the same rights as human minds, the LLMs and DPMs of today absolutely aren't artificial minds. Allowing them to run amok as if they were is not just unfair to living artists... it could deal irreparable damage to our culture because those LLMs and DPMs of today cannot take up the mantle of the artists they hedge out or pass down their knowledge to the next generation.

It doesn't change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not "a virtual brain" that creates "art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it." What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.

Today's large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don't make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers -- they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They're not striving to make the correct answer. They're just producing the most statistically average output given the input.

Current-gen AI isn't just viewing art, it's storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn't create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person't style, it must make a copy of that person's work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.

None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.

I haven't run many RPG systems, but I've had great success running The Witch is Dead by Grant Howitt as a party game. Because it's one page of rules with a succinct objective, it's easier to learn and more broadly appealing than most card games -- my mom enjoyed it as much as my nephews.

If I were looking for a new one-page RPG, I'd be looking for a few highlights:

• A strong elevator pitch. A one-page RPG needs to communicate a lot of ideas in as few words as possible. The intro to the game needs to set the tone and stakes and create common expectations. Being genre-savvy can help with that; tell your players that they'll be executing a bank heist under the nose of a dragon, and they immediately know what to do and what can go wrong.
• Rules of thumb, not rules of math. I'm sure there are some great crunchy one-page RPGs out there, but that's not really playing to the medium's strengths, in my opinion. In The Witch is Dead, the spells the players can cast are described as "little bits of hedge magic to help around the house," which I really like. It communicates their power and capabilities faster and more comprehensively than saying that Mage Hand can exert 10 lbs of force and move 30 feet per round.
• Good DM tools. Ideally, a one-page RPG should be as easy for the DM to set up as it is for the players to learn. In The Witch is Dead, there are roll tables for the village, the enemy, and the plot twist, which I found very useful. Just as the elevator pitch for the game needs to kickstart the players' imaginations, the setting needs to be a springboard for the DM.

Thank you!

I didn't have purple, so I made a mix of red, white, and blue and used it for both the Bearded and Spined Devils.

Are you suggesting adding a yellow wash to the fireball, or the areas the fireball would light up (such as the arms and chest)?

In Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games like Dungeon World and Monster of the Week, if the player fails a challenge, in addition to the usual consequences, they gain XP.

This makes players feel like their efforts aren't wasted, but it also sets up a cool dynamic: if you only gain XP through failure, then your character will stagnate unless they seek out challenges they could realistically fail.

Artificer: "This is Bixby, and he's my coping mechanism."

Bixby, the construct who sounds like Danny Devito: "That's right, I'm a mechanism and I'm trying to cope."

In electrical engineering, a thevenin equivalent circuit is a small, simplified circuit that mimics the behavior of a large, complicated one for the purposes of calculation.

Whenever I talk on forums, I make effort to distill ideas that are often nuanced and math-heavy into something everyone can relate to. The thought once struck me that I'm making a thevenin equivalent of myself, and the name stuck.