Everything old is new again. Sounds a lot like certain sects of Christianity. They say you need to accept Jesus to go to heaven, otherwise you go to hell, for all eternity. But what about all the people who had no opportunity to even learn who Jesus is? “Oh, they get a pass”, the evangelists say when confronted with this obvious injustice. So then aren’t you condemning entire countries and cultures to hell by spreading “the word”?

Both are ridiculous.

Okay. Good for China?

This seems like a really weird way to say “EU countries aren’t investing enough into green tech”.

For all the talk of regulating AI, I think the only meaningful regulation is very simple: hold the people implementing it accountable.

You want to use AI instead of a real certified professional? Go nuts. Let it write your legal contracts, file your taxes, diagnose your patients. But be prepared to get sued into oblivion when it makes a mistake that real professionals spend years of expensive training learning to avoid. Let the insurance industry do the risk assessment and see how unviable it is to replace human experts when there’s human accountability.

How so? Perhaps I’m misremembering, but they were born on Earth and raised among humans, right? Does that not say something about the human culture of their time?

It was presented as exceptional in-universe, from Adira’s perspective. The fact that Adira felt weird about it at all paints the culture they grew up in as backwards.

The problem I had with that scene (and the whole series, really, especially season 3) was that it framed human culture of the future as being generally oppressive and backwards. Acceptance shouldn’t be portrayed as radical or exceptional. It should be normal and taken for granted among humans in the future. Like in TOS, Uhura’s role was a big deal for viewers specifically because it was not a big deal for the characters. They just showed us a better future, where a black woman in a respected professional position was normal.

Discovery didn’t show us a better future. It showed us a shitty future with a handful of decent people in it. This is just one example, but it’s one that stuck in my mind as well.

Anyone know what charging protocol they use for 80W? This article and the official web site do not specify. Is it USB-PD? SuperVOOC? I’m not really familiar with Vivo specifically.

If it’s USB-PD then that means you could use a typical laptop charger. If it’s VOOC, then it’s unlikely you’ll have any compatible chargers.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn’t mean consumers can’t or shouldn’t take action on their own, of course – just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.

Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers’ fault for buying it, the corporations’ fault for being completely amoral, or the government’s fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.

Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.

That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.

We really do need to reduce car usage, but that’s not something that’s easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We’ve spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there’s no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn’t walkable and bikeable, and I don’t ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren’t enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree – there’s a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.

The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but it’s really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that’s not viable, and we don’t have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It’s a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.

On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We’ve chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we’re so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It’s hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.

This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg

You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don’t appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we’re merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.

So yeah, it’s true that “more is being done now than ever before”, but we’re operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It’s easy to grow in proportional terms when you’re tiny to begin with.

On the one hand, I’m not even running 4K yet, and it is vanishingly unlikely that I will own a >4K display within the lifetime of my PS5, so this makes no difference to me.

On the other hand, I would like to see blatant false advertising punished every time it happens. “Nobody really cares” isn’t much of an excuse when they clearly thought people cared enough to put it prominently on the box. Being able to play high-end video 10 years down the line is a legitimate selling point for a gaming console that doubles as media box.

Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.

Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

Am I out of touch with Qualcomm’s increasingly confusing naming schemes, or is that awfully expensive for a 7sG2?

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Pulaski had interesting dynamics with almost every other character. I think she was written very well, especially for such a short tenure. Crusher was largely neglected by the writers.

LLM summary:

• Clear-air turbulence, which is invisible and unpredictable, is becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change.
• Studies have found a 55% increase in severe clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic since 1979, with similar increases over the continental USA.
• The warming climate is strengthening wind shear in the jet streams, which is a major driver of increased clear-air turbulence.
• Convection caused by rising heat, particularly over oceans, is disrupting the fast-moving jet streams and leading to more turbulence.
• Climate models project a doubling or tripling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades if climate change continues as expected.
• The increase in turbulence poses safety risks, as demonstrated by a 2024 Singapore Airlines incident that injured 83 passengers and resulted in one fatality.
• Passengers are advised to keep their seatbelts fastened even when the seatbelt sign is off, as turbulence can strike suddenly and unexpectedly.
• The FAA has documented 163 serious turbulence injuries to passengers and crew between 2009 and 2022.
• The jet streams, which commercial airliners fly through, can both help and hinder flights by pushing them across the Atlantic or slowing them down.
• Rising greenhouse gas levels, which are the highest in at least 800,000 years, are the primary driver behind the warming climate and resulting increase in turbulence.

If I had a massive spider infestation, yeah, I’d want to investigate. But fruit flies and mosquitoes come and go often enough anyway. Presumably enough to sustain one or two spiders.

Had a bit of a gnat (I guess?) problem last summer because they’re small enough to get through my window screens. Made me crazy, but even then I don’t think they were actually nesting in my home.

I’d love to switch to AntennaPod, but I haven’t figured out how to sync across platforms. I’ve heard of Gpodder, but I guess I’d need to host my own instance? Gpodder.net just gives me errors when I try to sign up, and from a quick web search it seems like this has been normal for quite a while now.

I wish I could just save all my metadata to a standard file format, sync those files any way I want, and have all my clients use that. But I don’t think that’s possible with any existing podcast clients. :/

Can’t get lower-maintenance than a spider.

I don’t think I could date an arachnophobe. No way I’m killing or evicting my bathroom spider! We’re bros.

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It’s a very broad term that’s been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it’s hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.