Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it’s probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.

IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I’m getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).

If we’re doing short stories, I have two recommendations:

• Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.

We actually reserve frequency bands specifically for radioastronomy. No devices can get licensing to transmit on those bands, and anything passing regulations shouldn’t (usually) interfere with it. The bands are chose specifically because their use in detecting certain astrological features.

I don’t understand how SPAV fixes gerrymandering in this case. It seems like the re-weighting operation is meant for a pool of identical ballots. When you have district-level elections that differ between ballots, how is this meant to work?

Edit: Ooooh you meant for selecting the redistricting committee, not for running the elections. Gotcha, makes sense now.

The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.

The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.

I think it’s what they’ve been calling “statistics”.

As the article points out, TSA is using this tech to improve efficiency. Every request for manual verification breaks their flow, requires an agent to come address you, and eats more time. At the very least, you ought not to scan in the hopes that TSA metrics look poor enough they decide this tech isn’t practical to use.

I haven’t read it either. There is however a If Books Could Kill episode about it that is very worth listening to.

I’m curious what issue you see with that? It seems like the project is only accepting unrestricted donations, but is there something suspicious about shopify that makes it’s involvement concerning (I don’t know much about them)?

It’s only double counted in a situation where you’re actually counting both sides. This is a Canadian study published by a Canadian outlet about the impacts of Canadian policy.

They’re not trying to balance the books, so to speak, they’re evaluating transactions on a single account.

404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.

I first heard a full breakdown of the environmental regulatory aspects of SpaceX’s operations in Tech Wont Save Us ep. 186 from September of last year. Definitely worth the listen (every episode of that show is worth the listen, in fact).

Right concept, except you’re off in scale. A MULT instruction would exist in both RISC and CISC processors.

The big difference is that CISC tries to provide instructions to perform much more sophisticated subroutines. This video is a fun look at some of the most absurd ones, to give you an idea.

The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

Ah, yes. The famously singular “westerners” who all 100% agreed with every foreign affairs policy of their government over the past century.

Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.

I’m just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.

There is an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.

Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/

Spin up c/notquitetheonion?

Errrrm… No. Don’t get your philosophy from LessWrong.

Here’s the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:

Like “agent”, “simulation” is a generic term referring to a deep and inevitable idea: that what we think of as the real can be run virtually on machines, “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”

This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:

A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.

If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.