Humanius

… and the people involved were arrested

Lemmy is still relatively new, and you grow the audience you nurture.

A lack of moderation means that racists, bigots, general assholes, etc, will find an easier time settling on this platform.
And I’ll be honest, if that would be where Lemmy is headed I’m not sticking around to see it turn into that cesspool

I’m personally quite happy with the level of moderation I’m seeing on lemmy.world. It’s not overly heavy handed, but it seems to generally be applied where it makes sense to apply. Essentially the “don’t be a dick” rules of the forum days of old.

I’m assuming he is talking about the biker gang episode, in which case he is probably talking about the F-word (meaning the slur against gay people).
Personally, I think having a filter against slurs is not unreasonable

I like to think that these videos are the only thing keeping Patrick Boyle sane from his career in finance.

His channel is great. I love his dry sense of humour.

People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

I’m just curious to see where it all goes.

Discord and Whatsapp
I’d love to use Signal, but virtually noone in my sphere uses it.

But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

• During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
• During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

• The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
• The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

My read on this is not as much of a cynical one. I believe the point of surveillance is simply to protect the institution of the state.

The goal of the state is ultimately the continued existence of that state. Otherwise there really is not that much purpose to the state. Surveillance is a tool to suppress actors (read: terrorists) who might want to undermine that institution.

In order to determine who benefits from the continued existence of the state, it mostly depends which state you are talking about.
A state like China exists almost solely to benefit those in power, and thus the surveillance state is used to suppress the citizenry. But a Western democracy, while it also to a certain extent protects money and power, also exists to to benefit the general population.

Keys (house, car, bike), phone, wallet,… swiss army knife, handkerchief.
And during the pandemic a fabric face mask.

It all fits in my pockets

Then dependent on the weather I will bring sunglasses or an umbrella.
I check Buienradar (Dutch rain forecast app) to see whether I’m going to need that.

And sometimes, depending on what I will be doing, earbuds

Which can only really be addressed by making it easier / less of a hassle to become a peer.
I for one would love to host a peertube instance, but I keep running into a wall when I try.

I think something that gets overlooked is the ease of use of setting up a Peertube server yourself.

If I want to host my own Mastodon or Lemmy instance it is pretty straightforward, and I can just do so on my unRAID server with a simple ready-made docker container. But when I want to do that for PeerTube, as a novice I somewhat run into a brick wall.

Glad to hear they are finally acknowledging the issue.
It’s time that that loophole gets closed. These dangerous land-boats have no place on our roads.

I suspect that big names like Deadpool and Wolverine will probably still get butts in the seats. But I’m not sure it will change the general burnout I hear people have been having with the superhero movie genre.

Though… I might be a biased. Personally I never really got the appeal of going to see all these superhero movies that were getting released.
A superhero movie every now and then is fun, but I’ve always thought that Marvel was overdoing it quite a bit with the sheer quantity of them.

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.

I also live somewhere that isn’t car-dependent (the Netherlands)
While I would like to see fewer and smaller cars, I don’t particularly mind the current state of things over here.

Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.

To me the idea of “fuck cars” is not so much about cars as a concept, but rather the scurge of car dependency.
You don’t want a society built around cars to the point that you cannot reasonably live your life without one.

That said, even in a perfect situation with ample public transit and walkable/cyclable cities everywhere, there will still be people in situations who need a car to get around. And for those people I’d prefer it if they would be driving around in compacts like this or smaller, rather than some of the cross-overs, SUVs and pickups you see today.

Some people will always need a car, and practical compacts like this would be perfect for that role.