abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I don't have anything against you or your colleagues. You've got every right to strike if that's what you want to do.

But there are millions of people being harmed by the strike. That's a simple fact.

Journalists/etc need to do their job and provide good balanced information on critical issues like this one. FUD like Drew Devalt posted inflames the debate and makes it nearly impossible for reasonable people to figure out what to do about Large Language Models... because like it or not, they exist, and they're not going away.

PS: while I'm not a film writer, I am paid to spend my day typing creative works and my industry is also facing upheaval. I also have friends who work in the film industry, so I'm very aware and sympathetic to the issues.

What are those people doing to you?

There are definitely people who are harmed by FUD like this. For example the current writers strike, which has 11,000 people putting down tools... indefinitely shutting down global movie productions that employ millions of people and leaving them unemployed for who knows how long.

Sure, it's all about capitalism. Nothing good like this could ever come from advances in technology:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425986/how-artificial-intelligence-gave-paralyzed-woman-her-voice-back

ML is a tool and like most tools it has broad use cases. Some of them are very, very, good.

I'm sure there are other things that contribute, but it seems pretty clear the problem is not enough houses are available for people to live in which is a policy problem, not an organised crime problem.

I'm all for this as a soft rule, but so many articles have terrible headlines that it can't be a fixed one.

Also, a lot of the news sites I follow do A/B testing on every title. So every article has two titles.

Excel can't import a CSV file reliably though - and neither can any other spreadsheet software I've ever tested. They have problems with dates, numeric values, etc.

The only reliable way to work with CSV is in a programming language of your choice or a plain text editor.

In a mid 2022 report coal was 26% of Victoria's generation capacity and the majority of that was the Loy Yang power plant (which has six coal generators, four at the A facility and two at the B facility).

From the article, they haven't specified an end date for Loy Yang - what they've done is some kind of deal that guarantees Loy Yang won't shut down if the grid doesn't have an alternative in place yet. That seems fair enough to me? Nobody wants blackouts.

I would expect the six generators at Loy Yang won't all be shut off at the same time. They'll go down one by one as wind/hydro infrastructure improves.

Also - remember "95%" is a moving target. There's ~20GW of wind power and ~8GW of battery power coming online in VIC over the next several years and that only counts major projects, it doesn't count residential solar/batteries which are growing at a rapid clip. VIC will likely their 95% target long before Loy Yang shuts down.

No worries at all (PS: I just edited my comment, with a point I should have made originally).

I'm not jumping on you - I'm just pointing out lemmy.world isn't a total write off. There are about 20k monthly active users on that instance and about 20k of those people are polite, reasonable people who post interesting content.

With any large community like that there's always going to be some people who're problematic, but either the moderators on lemmy.world are deleting them before I see them, or else it's happening on communities I don't subscribe to (probably a mix of both).

I think Beehaw should re-federate lemmy.world as soon as the moderation tools are better. In particular the cross-instance moderation issues should be sorted out. The key to a functioning fediverse is to ensure that everyone across instances can work together to tackle bad content. Many hands make light work.

I don't really care about "growth". Lemmy is a community not a corporation. What I care about is when someone starts an interesting discussion, are there "enough" people who take part in that discussion? I see threads on Beehaw (and even on Lemmy.World) that get zero replies. That sucks.

As I understand it - the biggest segment is men who buy their first bike in their midlife crisis. They buy expensive, large, powerful motorcycles that are difficult to ride and combined with a lack of experience that's basically suicide.

And yeah, when it's a multi-vehicle incident it's still regularly the rider's fault. For example they might crash in a corner and slide across the road into the bullbar of a 4WD coming around the corner in the other direction. Often they're going "too fast" as the police would call it, but realistically the corner could have been navigated safely at the speed they're were travelling... it's just inexperience, combined with the sudden appearance of a scary 4WD coming around the corner, tends to create a momentary panic reaction and the natural reaction is to grab the brakes. Which might serve you well in a car with ABS... but slamming on the brakes hard while leaned over in a corner on a bike will result in a crash every time.

As a rider, I think it should be illegal to ride those bikes until you've got at least 50,000km of experience riding a lighter weight / safer bike. We do (at least in QLD) restrict the type of bike you can ride for the first 12 months, but that's not long enough (I see a lot of new riders who just don't buy a bike their first 12 months after getting a license) and also it's based on power to weight ratio... which is wrong. It should just be based on weight ignoring power. Most accidents happen cornering and braking, and those two have nothing to do with engine power. A lighter bike, however, is much easier to handle when they do start sliding.

I assume you're not an Aussie, since you said mph?

But sure... all over the world there are idiots who ride...

The thing is though, if they weren't on a bike they'd be going even faster and driving even more aggressively behind the wheel of a nice safe truck (safe for the driver anyway).

At least on the bike the risk encourages them to be a little less aggressive and they're less likely to hurt anyone else.

lemmy.world is just hot garbage imo

I'm on Lemmy.world every day and I've never seen any of that. I don't doubt it exists, but it's definitely not a problem on any of the communities I'm subscribed to.

If you have the roof space, a solar HWS could be the go,

Nah, it's better to have panels that produce electricity so they can only heat water when they need to and sell power to the grid the rest of the day (which will be most of the day).

I bought an expensive induction stove secondhand (so it was cheap), cost a few hundred bucks to get it wired in since at full power they generate a ridiculous amount of heat and a conventional electric cooktop/oven circuit won't cut it.

It boils water much faster than a gas stove - it's not even close. It also changes temperature quicker than gas (which has residual heat in all the metal), and the temperature can go extremely low too. The lowest setting is basically the same as if you held the pot in your hands - it will eventually heat up to body temperature. Pretty awesome for keeping food warm after it's finished cooking.

The temperature changes much more quickly than gas, and it's easy to clean, and you can use the cooktop as part of your kitchen bench when you're not cooking. I love induction.

Electric hot water heater is great - costs basically nothing to heat during the day (it's on a timer, only heats when the sun is high, so even on an overcast day the panels produce enough power to heat the water). There's an override switch to make it heat outside of hours if we have family visiting and need more hot water overnight. Before we had solar, the hot water heater was about a third of our electricity bill. Now it's basically non-existent. We use a lot more hot water now, for washing laundry/etc.

but only if we get it right.

If we don't get it right, I'll buy a battery, hook it up to the panels/inverter I already have, and go off grid entirely.

What if instead of increasing demand, the government increased supply?

Eh - I don't think this will drive demand up much. 600,000 homes were bought last year in Australia. This scheme is only available to 10k buyers per year.

Also, it's not a new scheme, it's a modification to an existing one. I bought my home a few years ago under it... the modified scheme is a little more generous but I don't think it will move the needle on house prices, but for those 10k lucky families per year it will definitely move the needle.

Owning our own home has been life changing for us.

Also - it could be argued that raising the value of homes will increase supply. It'll incentivise more people to build, and therefore more homes will be built.

In any car built in the last ~20 years, you can monitor your real time consumption either on the dashboard or else by hooking up your phone into the mechanic's diagnostics port (there are cheap bluetooth dongles).

In general, fuel consumption is infinite when the engine is running while you're not moving. At very low speeds economy is terrible and as you increase speed fuel efficiency improves until the sweet spot which is usually at about 60km/h. That sweet spot is fairly wide - up to around 80km/h in most cars and then it starts getting bad again.

It's different for every car - but as a rule of thumb if your car uses X amount of fuel at 60-80km/h, then it probably uses about twice that much fuel at 20km/h and 130km/h.

HOWEVER that 130km/h number assumes the car hasn't been modified. If you've installed a roof rack for example then it could be more like triple the consumption you had at 80km/h! Low speed would be less affected by modifications.

Ultimately the only number that matters is the number for your car, so why not measure it? Modern cars use a computer to calculate the fuel injection speed and it's possible to monitor that number.

It was enough to make me try Bing... which lasted all of about ten seconds (one search) before I ran screaming for the hills back to Duck Duck Go.

So no, I don't think this can make people use Bing - that product has so many problems I'm not sure it will ever be good enough.

Having said that - ChatGPT is really good at interpreting a user search term and equally good at understanding the contents of an arbitrary webpage. It's a perfect tool to build a search engine around, and I can't wait for someone more competent than Bing to do just that.

No you've got it backwards.

Robots.txt absolutely stops Google from scraping your site.

But they can still learn enough by scraping other sites that link to yours to build a concrete picture of the contents of your website and they will use that info to populate search results that link to you.

If you don't want to appear in search results, then you need to tell Google which pages to hide, and to tell them that you have to allow them to scrape your site.

My advice is avoid tablets entirely. Even the best ones are not even remotely as good as paper.

Lots of people recommending the Supernote A5 X... I haven't tried it, but a quick search says it has "15-20ms" of latency. I have an iPad (which I don't consider usable for notes*) and it has 7ms latency which is too high in my opinion.

If you really must have your notes in digital form... try Whitelines paper notebooks. Their main feature is light grey paper with white lines, but more importantly they have subtle locator code on the four corners of the page, and Whitelines has a free phone app that uses those locator codes to perfectly sort out the perspective when you take a photo of the page to digitise it. That system works a lot better than regular edge detection other apps use, and also the white lines work better than grey or blue lines.

Officeworks has Whitelines notebooks. They're available in various sizes and the same price as any other premium notebook (not as cheap as the Officeworks house brand... but it's also better paper than that brand).

(* my iPad Mini is used as a portable web browser for situations where my phone is too small and my laptop is too big- which is a situation I find myself in regularly as part of my job.... I have tired using it for notes and definitely don't recommend it for that - a phone is definitely better than an iPad for note taking)