Sonori @ sonori @beehaw.org

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12

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424

Joined

2 yr. ago

Why would a program that outputs sudorandom strings based on how often they appeared after the string before excel at basic physics, even if it did have most of the text side of the internet fed into it to determine how often string b follows string a? It’s a miracle of programing and self reinforcement that it can form a sentence at all.

I mean, their reserves have been holding steady for the last two winters, and the US has already picked up so much slack that it’s now the worlds largest exporter of natural gas. Even more export capacity on top of current capacity, to be completed years from now, isn’t that bad for Europe, especially when their demand is expected to drop from now on as the rate at which they adopt renewables continues to increase.

The extra capacity is primarily aimed at lowering the export prices in industrializing nations in Africa and South America so natural gas can get back to some semblance of cost parity with currently cheaper and more reliable solar. Bad for US gas companies yes, Europe, probably not.

Ya, I only watch the train wreck out of curiosity, but if you we’re wondering why so many people who were pushing NFTs suddenly pivoted to a tect genorator, it was just a case of following the more successful grifter as he moved from marketing one hype based product to another. But hey, at least a subscription service to a program that predicts the next most likely word in the sentence after being fed the entire internet is nominally more concrete than skimming a lot of the top of selling vast sets of poor people’s biometrics to security agencies.

Honestly, I thought it was from a specific source when I made that comment but I just checked that source and it wasn’t mentioned there so I guess I don’t actually know where I heard it. I do remember that it came out in a comment by one of the board members as to what had happened a while after the dust settled.

Did everyone just forget that Altman was the cryptobro behind worldcoin, ie that thing that got banned in every poor African country it launched in because of ethics and general damage to the public? Like, we knew he was a shitty person since long before openai was a household name.

Also, we do have a pretty good idea of what Altman did that worried the board of directors, namely when trying to get someone he didn’t like removed he met with every board member one on one and then lied to them by saying that everyone else was already on board with his plan and agreed with him. The board members compared notes, realized that he lied to their face, and fired him for said lieing. Given his reputation I don’t see how that should have been new info, but I guess they thought he would be honest with them, if not the public.

The kind that says it’s better to continue doing all the somethings you can and are currently doing than trying to do something that you can’t and which inevitably results in then being able to do nothing because all of your agency’s jurisdiction to have any teeth just got ruled unconstitutional.

Our government is based on checks and balances between a fundamental legislature, judicial, and executive branch working together to achieve results. When conservatives hold the courts, the House, and a tie in the Senate, it’s really silly to expect that just because the figurehead who’s entire job is to do as the conservative legislature demands as the conservative court dictates is somehow going to make vast sweeping changes. Indeed in theory the main thing he should be able to do is veto the dumb stuff congress sends his way, but with the tie and the conservatives childish inability to even draft legislation there’s not much of that.

You want vast sweeping change? Arrange a unfortunate accident for a justice in minecraft or vote in enough Dems and maybe even more than a handful of actual leftists in so that you don’t need two conservatives who run as Democrat’s votes to do even the most basic housekeeping in the Senate and retake the large majority in the House, instead of arguing for the theory of thought that the president should do everything, have all the power, and just trust that never in the future of America will any Republican ever win the electoral college and dissolve everything you’ve built day one by writing the manifesto handed to them by the Heritage Foundation.

Worth noting that with the current US electrical grid an EV produces about half to too thirds of the pollution per mile, and is expected to be down to one third by the time a new electric vehicle bought today reaches the end of its life. Given that cars represent a significant portion of the transportation sectors carbon emissions, which in turn represent theory percent of the US entire emissions, I wouldn’t call halving that inside ten years insignificant, especially as there is no practical alternative that could be implemented on a similar time scale that would be prevented by said EV adoption.

It’s also practically possible to decarbonise electricity, indeed renewables are now cheaper than fossil for new electrical generation even accounting for their intermittence, while it’s not really feasible to do so with oil. While carbon capture is a thing, it hasn’t been able to scale well dispite having been thrown money at for nearly fifty years now and there industries like aviation that can pay a lot more to get first dibs on said fuel.

Lithium is hardly particularly damaging to the environment to mine when compared to most other mining operations, like in the case of the worlds largest lithium producer’s(Australia) the coal mines next door. Cobalt actually isn’t that relevant in mass adoption scenarios as it’s cost means it tends to be completely absent in most adorable mass market EVs which currently tend to use LFP as compared to lithium ion or nickel cadmium.

As for recycling batteries, you just toss them in a industrial scale dielectric bath crusher and treat the output as absurdly high grade lithium-cobalt ore. The reason it has been slow to scale is not technical difficulty but rather a lack of demand, as even the first model S(one of the first properly mass produced EVs) will still have over two hundred of its two hundred and sixty mile range today. Given that one can cross the entire US with only a hundred mile range, there is still a lot more demand for reusing such cars then you get from the batteries scrap value even before considering the demand for cheap large scale batteries for things where that loss of power density doesn’t matter.

After the used and crashed market reaches maturity and we go from being able to just reuse them, recycling will actually become a significant strength of EVs, as a majority of the emissions are in battery mining, and thusly only happen once. We have a 97% capture rate on lead acid car batteries today, and thouse are only worth dozens of dollars in material, not thousands, so I hardly expect any to make their way into landfills in sufficient quantities to compete with the byproducts of even just refining oil on water and soil conditions.

I think it’s the country Melbourne is in that the protesters are trying to get the attention of, in hopes that said countries politicians will in turn pressure their allies to limit support of distant country until distant country changes its policies to be more in line with the ethics and morals the host nation claims to uphold though its foreign policy.

That’s good news, it’s also possible last I heard that it is upside down solar panels are facing east instead of the intended west, which would mean that it might come back up once the sun has moved across the sky in a week or so.

Needs at least another 10% off the corporate tax rate. Biden’s 21% rate(assigned in Trumps signature 2017 tax cuts act)is killing american corporations, unlike the far lower 50% rates during the fifties that oversaw the largest economic boom in American history. /s

It’s funny you didn’t respond to the comment about using weapons that can hit the specific building they were aimed at.

Yes, fighting the people that can actually shoot back is hard, that’s why the military constantly practices and drills doing it. It is however impossible that avoiding the Hamas and only killing random innocent people will ever have an impact on stoping the Hamas from attacking Israel. That is why it was so easy to outlaw collective punishment as a war crime under common article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, because it does not and has never worked to do anything but breed resentment and prolong a conflict.

You know tunnels of any significant length take months to years to construct, right? They also lead back to the places you want to target if you want to actually achieve anything. It also seems to work ok on along the rest of Gaza’s borders, as for some strange reason none of these magically infinite tunnels had crossed that border, or we would have seen them on Oct 7th.

But please, explain how Isreal’s current tactics of avoiding using weapons that can hit Hamas and never engaging any stronghold or trying to capture any Hamas leader without explicitly warning Hamas they are coming hours in advance is magically going to end this war.

Why, it’s almost like the government party that publicly funded the most extreme members of Hamas until 2019 to explicitly foster increased hostility and prevent a two state solution from ending hostilities might just not actually be trying to do what they were forced to say was their goal after October seventh.

Well thoredicaly this is good, in that sending forces with no ties or modive to help eliminate anyone but actual Hamas and who indeed actually have incentive to call out warcrimes, some small team of analysts who are used to the idea that the military might actually want to kill thouse targes and just thouse targets is probably not going to have enough data on Israeli actions to meaningfully act as a check on their actions.

This is why the best way to do actual peacekeeping missions to have a large group of nations working together at all levels, and not just a handful of office workers off in some building in Jerusalem. Of course, if Israel had done that, it would be a lot harder to clear new farmland in what used to be a city.

No. That the Republicans are just populist with no consistent moral or policy positions is too important to just leave unsaid.

I don’t know, maybe use bombs and missiles that have a CAP small enough that there is even a 50% in perfect conditions that they land on the building they were targeted at. You know, the missiles the US has been using since the eighties and which make up a significant portion of the Israeli stockpile, but which arn’t getting used. That way, there would even be a possibility that such rounds migh kill a Hamas soldier and not the family half a block over.

Maybe Israel could prioritize useing snipers to counter fire at the Hamas soldier who just launched a shoulder fired rocket off the roof of an apartment building and ran, instead of blowing up the whole building fifteen minutes after they got into their truck drove off, this might also actually kill some Hamas too.

Maybe Israel could send some of its own ground forces into the hospital or church they are so sure had a tunnel entrance underneath instead of giving everyone an hours warning to flee and then bombing it. You could then even send some of these soldiers into the network to slowly clear if of Hamas, instead of them only needing a half hour to clear the rouble out of the tunnel entrance and continue on completely the same. Yes, I know bunker clearing sucks, but if you want to destroy Hamas, congratulations, this is how you find Hamas. If you don’t go in to their bunkers, there is not even the theoretical possibility that you actually eliminate the Hamas.

Maybe, you could use this little thing called ground penetrating radar to look for tunnels under the border and follow them. Tunnels arn’t exactly able to doge out of the way of a border patrol after all, and militaries are trained on bunker mapping and clearing. This might actually cut them off from resuply, and is a necessary prerequisite for an blockade to actually do anything at all. Again, as might be a theme here, doing so would not only comply with the Geneva convention, but actually have the possibility of killing a Hamas soldier by more than just random chance.

Except Isreal’s actions in Gaza aren’t defending themselves against Hamas, are they? If they were targeting Hamas, half the Israeli munitions would not have been dumb bombs that are not physically accurate enough to target a spasific building. They would not be using their smart weapons to kill over two and a half times as many journalists as have died in Ukraine since that war started in 2014. They would condem the Israeli politicians who call for the elimination of every last Palestinian in Gaza.

The same party that currently holds office in Israel proudly and publicly funded the Hamas until 2019. They knew what the Hamas had planned for over a year, and did nothing, because an attack would be good for the prime minister’s numbers.

If Israel was focused on mearly defending itself, they would not be in front of a UN war crimes tribunal. If Israel was mearly defending itself, it would not be burning though its goodwill with the west. Instead its leaders have chosen to escalate and kill innocent people who have no connection to Hamas, and that has consequences on how much other nations donate to support it.

The first solid state battery was demonstrated in a lab in 1986, the first potentially viable chemistry was demonstrated in a lab in 2011, and Toyota began sinking money into it 2012. They have now spent 13.6 Billion on developing and trying by to scale up solid state batteries over the last twelve years, and are hoping to have a first release in 2027, sixteen years after the initial chemistry was first developed.

Worth noting before you get too excited with the possibilities that this is just at lab scale. Being able to manufacture a few grams of a novel design is no guarantee that you can even make it on the scale of tons, much less do so cost competitivly. Even if it is actually possible it will likely take at least a decade before it starts to be available to the public.

I mention all this because battery tech is an area of massive dramatic investment and rapid research for decades now, and a lot of the news coverage tends to talk up the lab stuff and ignore the boring practicalities of what their talking about, which leads to a lot of the public asking why they’ve been hearing breathless news about how new batteries are going to change the world, but never these miraculous new inventions never make it to the public.

The answer of course is that a lot of them run into practical manufacturing problems or are too expensive to be competitive, and the ones that do make it and are coming out today were the subject of breathless news coverage back in two thousand five, which are now competing against the ninties new perfect future batteries.

It’s also worth noting that the practical effects of such new batteries are unlikely to change much. If you need a battery that can output a massive amount of current you use lead acid. If you need a cheap battery that can last for 8000 charge cycles you use lfp, and if you want millions of charge cycles you use the middle 70% of a lfp battery since degradation only happens on the extremes of its range. If you want very small powerful batteries and fast charge times you use lithium ion.

As a result of this, there are few applications where you can’t already do something becuse the battery tech is the limiting factor. Like being able to recharge an EV in five to ten minutes is great, but it’s not going to suddenly allow EVs to do a bunch of things they couldn’t do with our current fifteen to twenty minute charge times, which themselves arn’t that diffeent than the early 2010s thirty to fourty minute charge times. I mean it is a improvement, and it does help with range anxiety while making long trips more comfortable, but it’s not an massive shift that will change the world forever overnight.

Similarly, having a phone that is 20% thinner or lasts an extra hour is an improvement, but it’s not going to suddenly change how we use phones or comilunicate. These are small incremental improvements, like all new technologies are.

The transistor was the largest technological leap of the twentieth century, and it was invented in the forties but only starred to make its way to industry in the fifties and even then it only began to have an impact in the seventies. Technology takes time to scale up and is almost always an small incremental improvement on what came before.

I feel like the primary problem here is just that detecting pedestrians and figuring out how they are going to is actually one of thouse problems that is just very hard for computers. Obviously it’s not impossible to do at all, but it is difficult to do reliably, especially once one considers the risks of false positives as well as negatives.

It is definitely concerning though that these systems are being pushed and marketed beyond their actual capabilities though. Some proper truth in advertising law might actually help here, and of course in an ideal world this would be an open source project with all the major automakers and academics contributing.

Ya, in all seriousness, it is amazing to me how hard some people are pushing the idea that the US helping stop an far right dictator at the head of an imperial empire from annexing it’s neighbor and systematically destroying its culture is just like the US helping support a far right almost dictator amex its neighbor and systematically destroy its culture.

I get why it happens and why milk toast neoliberals want to equate Israel’s occupation of Gaza with Ukraine’s defense of its own long established borders, but as far as I can tell the ones pushing the idea that both interventions are bad tend to be either isolationists how forgot how that ended last time, or are just starting from everything the US does it bad and working backwards from there.

The best part is from my understanding their new law allows cops to arrest anyone out walking their dog without ID as a possible ‘illegal’ until their family or the cops can break into their houses, shoot the dog, and then maybe find their birth certificate or passport.

That’s right, the same people who freaked out about private companies checking vaccines cards during a pandemic are now raving about how the courts are blocking them from arresting anyone who leaves their house without government permission. But of course, the leopards will know to only eat the brown peoples faces.

May I present the party of ‘small government’ ladies, gentlemen, and others, the party of small government.