Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TH
Posts
11
Comments
602
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • If we're able to make hydrocarbon-synthesis from CO2 efficient.... we're still going to need to source the hydrogen somewhere.

    But if we do that using electrolysis (with renewables), and are able to create more energy efficient CO2 capturing processes, I could see synthetic hydrocarbons as a viable fuel option in the future. The thing is: They're stupidly good at being stable, energy dense, energy carriers. We also have a lot of infrastructure in place to handle hydrocarbons already.

    In principle, synthetic hydrocarbons could be part of a zero-emission cycle, where we capture CO2 and electrolyse hydrogen with renewable energy, and use the hydrocarbons as an energy carrier. But if we go that way, we're definitely going to have to research efficient hydrogen production, and probably storage as well.

  • One of the advantages of hydrogen is that tanks and fuel cells can withstand a large number of "charging cycles" much better than batteries. Additionally, for ships, the amount of energy needed to move is so enormous that I fear we'll have a hard time creating batteries that are feasible for long-distance shipping.

    For short distance ferrying (including large, car carrying ferries) on the other hand, Norway has already implemented quite a few electric stretches. The major issue there is building the infrastructure to charge the ferries.

  • It breaks my heart to see people that are trying to good get hurt or killed by those only trying to turn a profit. I have to wonder, at what point to enough people become so sick of the violence that follows cartels like this that you start getting significant peoples militias set up to protect local communities?

  • One of the beautiful things with the fediverse is that I've just created an alt account on another instance, so I can

    1: Reduce the load on lemmy.world servers

    2: use the alt account if lemmy.world is down

  • I can see why you would say that, but my point is that in any reasonably large group of people there's going to be diversity regarding how often people prefer to be at the office (if ever). It's also well documented that things like training and meetings are much less efficient if people are remote. Together, I think this means that the solution to having as efficient and satisfied employees as possible is to do some coordinating, such that everyone has their needs met.

    I don't think it's realistic to have some companies consisting only of people that prefer to work from home every day, and others where everyone wants to be in the office every day. Flexibility and coordination is key.

  • I absolutely agree that flexibility is the way to go. I also have to admit that a large part of what makes me function better in the office is that my coworkers are there as well. As such, I think a compromise that everyone can be as happy as possible with is the best thing.

    Remember: Some people would prefer to work from home everyday, and function best when the do. People like me would prefer that as many as possible people are in the office as often as possible, and function best when that is the case. The optimum (both regarding satisfaction and productivity) is clearly somewhere in-between.

    That means flexibility is very important, but "full flexibility", i.e. everyone always working from where they would prefer, is probably not the global optimum.

  • I recognise that I'm probably a minority here, but I have a much harder time staying focused at home. At my office I share a room with a couple others, on a floor with a couple dozen more. Pretty much everything I do (outside 1-3 meetings a week) is individual work.

    For me, something about physically "going to work" helps me "switch on" much more. Taking breaks with other people, rather than alone, also helps me structure the breaks, and it's not uncommon that we get good ideas or resolve something that's been bugging someone during a break. Lastly, I really appreciate the option of "just dropping by" when I want to ask someone about something, and the fact that they can do the same to me. In my experience it's never gotten to the point that it happens more than maybe once or twice a day, so it's not really that disturbing either.

  • I've seen reference to research showing pretty much what you're saying: Inadequate pay gives dissatisfied employees, but raising pay above a certain level only gives very short term increase in employee satisfaction. The conclusion was that pay has to be high enough that people feel fairly compensated, but further increasing it has little to no long-term effect.

  • The representation of "real world" is meant to be an exaggeration of real life, both as satire, and to underline issues women face and systematic advantages men receive. I think that part was quite good at doing what it was trying to do, it was funny as well, and Will Ferrell is of course hilarious as CEO.

    What didn't really resonate with me, and kind of rubbed me the wrong way, was later in the movie, when "men" were portrayed as being simultaneously incompetent at everything they do, and at the same time manipulative and power hungry. By all means, it was funny, and got the point through, but I think they went too far in portraying the "bad guys" as both stupid and malicious, but also hard to overcome.

    I think the message of the movie (the way I understood it) would have gotten through in a better way if they had made the resolution less dependent on the "men are dumb" caricature, and played more to "women are strong", they could maybe even have brought in some "men and women can actually function together if they talk to each other".

  • I would argue that it is not the work produced by the AI, but the trained model itself, which infringes on copyright.

    The model cannot be regarded as an artist, but as a product, commercial or otherwise, that has been created by stealing copyrighted work.

  • Of course, once the AI is trained, you can't look at some arbitrary output and determine whether that specific output came due to some specific training data set. In principle, if some of your training data is found to violate copyrights you either have to compensate the copyright holder or re-train the model without that data set.

    Finding out whether a copyrighted work is part of the training data is a matter of going through it, and should be the responsibility of the people training the model. I would like to see a case where it has been shown that a copyrighted dataset has been used to train a model, and those violating the copyright by doing so are held responsible.

  • I've thought about this regarding code as well: An AI is nothing without a training data set, if someone uses licensed code to train an AI, they should definitely be bound by the license. For example: If an AI is trained using copyleft licensed code, the resulting model should also be regarded as copyleft bound. As of now, I suspect this is to a very large degree being ignored.

  • In addition to battery designs that scale better than Li-ion (e.g. redox-flow batteries), I've heard some places are looking at options for "mechanical" storage: When you have energy surplus, pump water back into reservoirs, and generate hydropower when you have a deficit.

    The amount of energy that can be stored in existing reservoirs is massive, so this could make hydropower function as the "buffer" for other renewable energy sources. I think the idea sounds promising, the major issue is that it's less viable (or not viable) for places with flat topology.