dgmib @ dgmib @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Trucks and SUVs are getting heavier to skirt emissions controls.

In 2010 the Obama administration passed laws tightening emissions control requirements for new vehicles. But the laws were written to allow emissions as a factor of vehicle size, larger vehicles were allowed to have more emissions.

Unfortunately, the plan backfired. Instead of reducing emissions, vehicle manufacturers just started making vehicles bigger.

It isn’t primarily the fragile egos that are driving sales of these vehicular monstrosities. It’s corporate profits and greed. Manufacturers aren’t making smaller models because they don’t make as much money on them, not because there isn’t a market for them.

AI is a genie that can’t be put back into its bottle.

Now that it exists you can make it go away with laws. If you tried, at best all you’d do is push it to sketchy servers hosted outside of the jurisdiction of whatever laws you passed.

AI is making it easier than it was before to (ab)use someone by creating a nude (or worse) with their face. That is a genuine problem, it existed before AI, and it’s getting worse.

I’m not saying you have like it, but if you think laws will make that unavailable you’re dreaming.

I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.

I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.

There’s a problem with the “if it’s medically necessary” part.

All the states that have banned abortions have some sort of exemption for if it’s necessary to save the mom’s life but patients are still dying because doctors risk prison time if they make that decision and the state disagrees on if it was necessary. So patients clearly needing medically necessary abortions aren’t getting them early when they’re low risk, they’re getting them when they’re close to death and the surgery is high risk.

You’re right that circumcisions usually aren’t necessary. But there are medical benefits to the procedure and it is a valid treatment for some medical conditions like phimosis which can lead to serious infections.

Reducing medically unnecessary circumstances is a problem to fix with education not legislation.

We need to let parents and doctors still make informed medical decisions without the state interfering.

The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.

Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.

Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.

If a website using home realm discovery adds anything more than one extra press of the enter key or mouse click of an ‘ok’ button, get a better password manager.

If you’re annoyed by that one extra click that’s fair. Click counts matter.

It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

This has several benefits:

1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.
2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.
3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn't work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.

Not judging, just genuinely curious, why do you not want an EV as a daily driver?

If it was just about monetizing scraping for AI models, they could have easily had different pricing for AI uses than they did for 3rd party apps.

If it was about the lost revenue from the lack of ads on third party apps, they only needed to give existing 3rd party apps a longer period of time to transition their business models. 3rd party app users would have been paying way more than Reddit was losing from the lack of ads.

No Reddit wanted to kill off the third party apps. They used the AI scraping as an excuse to shut them down. They wanted to force people onto their shitty app.

I don’t know what their actual reasoning for that is, but there’re basically two possibilities I can think of:

1. Their executive team and board of directors is ridiculously incompetent.
2. Their shitty 1st party app is harvesting significantly more data about you than the 3rd party apps did, and they can sell that data for more than the $2-5 per user per month they would be getting if they gave the 3rd party apps time to transition to a paid business model.

When was the last time anyone read the T&Cs of a social media website?

They basically all have a clause to the effect that you grant them a permanent, irrevocable license do whatever they want with anything you post.

You might still own the copyright to any content you produce, but by posting you’re granting them permission to do basically anything with it, including reselling it.

Don’t need to involve a blockchain to make cryptographically provable authenticity. Just a digital signature.

The only thing a hash in a blockchain would add is proof the video existed at the time the hash was added to the blockchain. I can think of cases where that would be beneficial too, but it wouldn’t make sense to put a hash of every video on a public blockchain.

Not sure if this is what you were going for, but I had a high school teacher named Mr. Student.

And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.

The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.

Only the very rich lose.

The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.

Which one are you?

The economics of Bitcoin mining are a bit weird in that it impossible to make it more energy efficient.

The system auto adjusts the computational complexity of mining bitcoin so that it always costs a little less than one bitcoin to mine a bitcoin, and at scale the only variable expense is electricity so as the price of bitcoin goes up, so does the amount of money that must be spent on electricity.

Current 6.25 Bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes. So globally about $2 million must be spent on electricity every hour.

In a little over 2 months the block reward cuts in half to only 3.125 bitcoin every 10 minutes. That will have the side effect of reducing the money spent on electricity for mining bitcoin so long as the price of bitcoin remains the same.

Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.

This is good to see.

Each of these four reactors at the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant generate more electricity in a year than all the solar farms in Canada combined.

We can’t build enough additional solar or wind capacity to replace them in any reasonable timeframe.

It is not quite as sketchy as it sounds, but it’s still bad.

The medications in question are specially medications such as biologics that have unusual requirements like needing to be administered via infusion in a clinic by a nurse, or ultra expensive medications that are 10,000$+ per dose that insurance companies don’t want mishandled and need to be discarded. All stuff that you wouldn’t normally be able to stock at your corner pharmacy.

The pharmacists need special training on these medications, by limiting it to a particular chain, in theory they can ensure better care (which in theory saves insurance companies on claims on medications that were improperly delivered.).

But still, there’re several specialty pharmacy chains that deal with these medications, patients should have the right to choose where they get their medication.

It is not quite as sketchy as it sounds, but it’s still bad.

The medications in question are specially medications such as biologics that have unusual requirements like needing to be administered via infusion in a clinic by a nurse, or ultra expensive medications that are 10,000$+ per dose. Stuff you wouldn’t normally be able to stock at your corner pharmacy.

But still, patients should have the right to choose where they get their medication.

The challenge with green hydrogen is it needs to be created using green electricity. If the electricity isn’t green you’re still burning fossil fuels to create it. Creating hydrogen from fossil fuel generated electricity and then burning it is less efficient than just burning fossil fuels directly and results in a net increase not decrease in carbon emissions.

As we build additional green electricity generation, it’s currently more impactful to use that to lower grid demand on fossil fuel generated electricity than to use it make green hydrogen. If it’s used to make green hydrogen instead, we’re only delaying the day we finally eliminate fossil fuel electricity generation, which again benefits the fossil fuel industry.

Only at some point in the future, when we’ve completely eliminated fossil fuels from the electric grid, and have created an excess of green electricity generation does green hydrogen even become possible to create.

And even assuming we can achieve that some day. It’s less efficient to use electricity to create hydrogen to power vehicle than to use batteries. Anything that can be converted to connect to the grid directly or run on batteries is better doing that than running on hydrogen.

It’s not completely crazy… there are some potential use cases for green hydrogen that would make sense in some theoretical future where there’s an abundance of green electricity generation, allowing replacing of fossil fuels where more direct forms of electrification isn’t viable. Aircraft in particular come to mind here since hydrogen stores much more energy per kg than batteries, which are currently too heavy to be viable in aircraft.

But almost all promotion of hydrogen today, including green hydrogen, is either more greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry or the work of well meaning idealists that have unwittingly become their shills.

Green Hydrogen is not a solution for the vast majority of things it gets presented as a solution to.

You’re trying to take a prescriptivist position on the meaning of the word “homophobia”, defining it as meaning “fear of homosexuality or homosexuals”.

But English doesn’t work that way. English words are defined descriptively not prescriptively. The definition of a word is changed to match how people use the word. When a word is commonly used with a new meaning the people who make dictionaries will change the definition to match how the word is used.

Homophobia can describe a fear or homosexuality, but it’s more commonly used to describe hostility or discrimination against homosexuals.

And as a result the Oxford English Dictionary now defines homophobia as “Hostility towards, prejudice against, or (less commonly) fear of homosexual people or homosexuality.”

Most words that end in -phobia do generally just describe a fear. But when we’re talking about a class of people, words ending in -phobia (e.g transphobia, Islamophobia, etc) we tend to use the hate, prejudice, and hostility meaning instead.

It doesn’t matter that “phobias” were at one time exclusively just irrational fears. If the majority of English speakers use the word to describe hate, that’s its meaning.

If anything, we now need a new word to describe “fear of homosexuality without prejudice towards homosexuals”. Because homophobia already means, to use your words, “a hatred of gay people”.