It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.

Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

• Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
• Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
• Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.

Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

It also trends much more political than /r/popular. (Low quality liberal bait like “DAE think trump bad???” most of the time, but still). Their explicit goal with their “alternative” feeds was to de-rank the political discussions in favor of 9gag-esque slop.

When a big political event happened, you could go to /r/all and be blasted with tens of discussions about it, or go to /r/popular and watch staged animal rescue videos or whatever.

Now I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy necessarily, but it certainly is yet another major loss for free political speech online.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

I don’t think that’s really fair. There are cranky contradictarians everywhere, but in my experience that feature has been well received even in the AI-skeptic tech circles that are well educated on the matter.

Besides, the technical “concerns” are only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that people complaining about AI often fall back to those concerns because they can’t articulate how most AI fucking sucks to use. It’s an eldtritch version of clippy. It’s inhuman and creepy in an uncanny valley kind of way, half the time it doesn’t even fucking work right and even if it does it’s less efficient than having a competent person (usually me) do the work.

Auto translation or live transcription tools are narrowly-focused tools that just work, don’t get in the way, and don’t try to get me to talk to them like they are a person. Who cares whether it’s an LLM. What matters is that it’s a completely different vibe. It’s useful, out of my way when I don’t need it, and isn’t pretending to have a first name. That’s what I want from my computer. And I haven’t seen significant backlash to that sentiment even in very left-wing tech circles.

Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs

The auto-translation LLM runs locally and works fine. Not quite as good as deepl but perfectly competent. That’s the one “AI” feature which is largely uncontroversial because it’s actually useful, unobtrusive, and privacy-enhancing.

Local LLMs (and related transformer-based models) can work, they just need a narrow focus. Unfortunately they’re not getting much love because cloud chatbots can generate a lot of incoherent bullshit really quickly and that’s a party trick that’s got all the CEOs creaming their pants at the ungrounded fantasy of being just another trillion dollars away from AGI.

I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.

Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.

Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.

GIMP apologists are what Adobe users think FOSS apologists are like. The principled refusal to even consider fundamental UX principles is astounding.

THANK YOU.

I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.

It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.

Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.

It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.

There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

I don’t trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I’m kinda surprised Google didn’t already gift an underage child to Trump so he’d make the problem go away.

However a perfectly viable option that I’m sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google’s former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone’s best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

This wouldn’t be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a “common good” is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
270G	.

I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.

When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?

The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it’s completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.

With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go “uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you’re at it?”.

This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency… on Arch Linux. It’s rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org’s homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?