Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @benjhm@scicomm.xyz
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
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  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Regarding the map - an annual average cost is not so meaningful - in higher latitudes solar is not enough in winter - especially where it’s mostly cloudy during the first half of winter. Wind helps the balance but not everywhere, always. Of course, the sophisticated models behind the article know all that, the issue is simplistic presentation. I note “we assume hydrogen is used for seasonal storage” - this may be rather optimistic - how many dark months can that cover?





  • I built personal webpages in the 1990s, and still do it now, I included javascript then, and still do now - to make calculations, show interactive graphics, quantitative stuff about climate change - see for example this model.
    I get your concept, that more websites should be written and hosted by individuals not big tech - but javascript is not the essence of the problem - js is just calculating stuff client-side for efficiency. In theory big tech could still serve up personalised algorithm-driven feeds and targeted advertising, just with server-side page generation (like php) and a few cookies, would waste more bandwidth but no stress to them. Whereas disabling client side calculations would kill what i do, as I can’t as an individual afford to host big calculations on cloud servers (which is also technically harder).


  • I use vscode as I develop this model in Scala3, whose language-server ‘metals’ integrates well with vscode, and when scala3 was new in mid-21 this was the platform they first targeted. But the scala command-line tools do the clever analysis, vscode provides the layout, colours, git integration, search/regex, web-preview etc… Now considering other options (eg zed) as vscode too dependent on potentially unsafe extensions (of which too much choice), also don’t want M$ scraping my code. Long ago when same model was in java I used netbeans, then eclipse. Would prefer a pure-scala toolset.




  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyztoOpen Source@lemmy.mlThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    4 months ago

    I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
    Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.