I’ve been missing an alternative to Facebook that I can use for non-anonymous planning of events and communication in hobby groups etc. and I had never heard of any of the “Facebook-type” federated stuff before!

Now I just need to convince a bunch of people that this is viable to use without being the annoying guy…

I absolutely agree that newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to label someone as a criminal before they have been sentenced. My point is that there’s a difference between reporting indisputable facts about an event, and reporting that those facts make someone a criminal.

Reporting that “Video shows person X shooting person Y”. Is different from reporting “Person X committed murder by shooting person Y”, because in the second case you are reporting that they committed a crime, when they may be acquitted of murder in court for any number of reasons. Reporting that “Person X allegedly shot and killed person Y according to this video” makes it seem like there’s any doubt about whether that happened.

I see the point, but still think it’s a misuse of the word “alleged”. There is no doubt here that the teacher was strangling the kid: That part is on video, and is true whether or not they’re convicted of a crime for it. Whether the strangling was a crime, or whether there were mediating circumstances that make it not a crime is what remains to be determined.

I just think we should be able to separate between “person allegedly committed a crime”, which needs to be proven in court, or “person did XYZ and there is video evidence and multiple independent eyewitnesses accounts of it”, which shouldn’t need to be proven in court.

Exactly! I mean… some reptiles eat eggs, so we could be talking about something that happened before our ancestors had developed the concept of an ass. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that eating eggs may be as old a concept as eggs themselves. In that case, the first egg-eaters evolved alongside the first egg-layers, and were eating proto-eggs before even the modern egg existed.

Imagine if zebras started evolving very tough placentas over time, and the foals started lying around in them for a couple days before popping out: Lions would keep eating newborn zebras, and no single lion generation would notice that they were slightly different from 1000 years prior. Give that development a million years or whatever and you now have egg-laying zebras and egg-eating lions!

I would go even further: Our primitive ancestors likely descended from proto-humans that descended from primates that were already foraging eggs. Some modern apes and other mammals eat eggs as well, we’ve likely been eating eggs since hundreds of thousands of years before the first human evolved.

In a sense, that line of though is interesting: When we think of “observing other animals eating something, and then deciding to eat it”, we’re almost implicitly forgetting that we are descendants of exactly those types of animals, that “just know” what is safe to eat, and that some of the knowledge we have about food is potentially passed down from even before the first primates evolved.

I have to admit: If you (semi-)regularly use floating point comparisons in programming, I don’t know why you would ever expect 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 to return true. It’s common practice to check abs(a - b) < tol, where tol is some small number, to the point that common unit-testing libraries have built-in methods like assertEqual(a, b, tol) specifically for checking whether floats are “equal”.

Well, yes. That’s the thing: If you give up, you drown, if you keep going parallel, you never know when the tide might turn. If you’re 24 (that’s how I interpret your previous comment), you’ve only had the option of voting in one presidential election so far. In that election, progressives completed the monumental task of voting out an incumbent proto-facist. And for all of Bidens flaws, there can’t be much doubt that a lot has been heading in the right direction. Of course, there’s still a huge task ahead, but the previous election shows that Trump can be kept out of office, and the past three years show that things can get better.

Step 1: Forgiving student loans, Step 2: Working to reform the system.

Step 1: Pardon certain drug-related crimes, Step 2: Work to reform drug laws.

Step 1: Massive infrastructure investments, Step 2: More investment in public goods

Step 1: EO’s to protect reproductive rights, Step 2: Legislation to do the same.

My point is this: Biden has shown that he is working to make progress, and that he can actually get stuff done. The problem is that there’s a whole lot that needs doing, much more than anyone can do in two terms. We need to keep getting the best option into office, and we need to spend the next four years to ensure that the best option next time is better than Biden is now. If Trump gets four years, I fear that we’ll have a near impossible job.

I have no idea about the differences in tolerances and reliability between “army grade” and “consumer grade” weapons, but I know that the MG3 is renowned for being extremely reliable in military context.

I’ve never even thought about trying a bump stock, but the idea that some of the energy that “should” be going into properly chambering the round instead goes to simulating automating fire, and that it therefore increases the risk of a misfeed or jam makes a lot of sense.

a lot of people aren’t receiving the housing they prepaid for.

the hell world of trying to find a place to live in the US.

Your propaganda

I’ll just leave this here for you to think about.

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.

There’s a comment on another post with this article doing the math on this, and it seems like the net emissions (when you account for efficiencies) actually favour steam-reforming + fuel cells.

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?

The Spanish Inquisition

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.

Removed by mod

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.

At first I was wondering why you were downvoted, then I read your second paragraph.