I don't know whether or not an entire month is the right timeframe, but I definitely agree with the principle of counting to ten before you speak. I've already made at least one discussion worse by failing to consider my tone. If my ideas are worth sharing now, they'll be worth sharing when the moratorium is over, and they'll only gain nuance by being left in the oven for longer.

They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we'd be better off with Trump, that's on you. Own it.

Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He's promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn't. Maybe now they'll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That's a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.

Gambling with someone's life to make a political point does not make you their ally.

I'd believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.

I don't have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would "rewite" itself to evade detection.

They noted that they'd never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.

There appear to be some logical leaps and conclusion-shopping going on here, so I'm going to try to identify them systematically.

Capitalization of pronouns in the English language is used to denote divinity or royalty. If I refer to Jehovah with a small-h "he," I haven't misgendered him, I have blasphemed. I don't intentionally misgender people (even fictional ones), but I regularly blaspheme gods. I'm an atheist, it's what we do.

Being a man doesn't make one part of the patriarchy and doesn't confer superiority. Being divine ipso-facto makes you superior -- both socially and inherently. As I reject the notion that some people are inherently superior to all others, I blaspheme cult leaders who claim to be gods, demigods, or incarnations thereof, and I refuse to give reverence to prophets and monarchs who claim proximity to the divine. I believe this makes the world a better, less exploitative place.

I also see capitalized pronouns used (infrequently) in BDSM. Specifically, it is how some subs refer to their doms when in some extreme forms of 24/7 power exchange relationship. That's okay, but as with other BDSM activities, power exchange never includes people who didn't consent to be part of it, and consent is never obligatory. Doms who attempt to extend their authority beyond the confines of a scene are swiftly ridiculed or ostracized for consent violation.

So for anyone to make the claim that capitalized pronouns should be respected by everyone, they must first make the case that divinity is a gender. Second, they must make the case that associating with the divine does not denote inherent superiority. Third, they must make the case that compulsory use of capitalized pronouns is not compulsory submission that would violate consent.

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don't get me wrong, but they're not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

I will say this about Biden: the dude's downright sneaky. It seems to be his administration's main strategy to publicly walk back a major agenda point, let right-wingers celebrate, and then after the media hype (and potential for right-wing backlash) dies out, quietly split it up into smaller programs that get pushed further than the original agenda ever could.

• He blocked the rail strike, but then went back and ensured the unions got their sick leave anyway.
• He approved historic oil projects, but then went back and curtailed more oil production than he ever approved.
• He let Senator Manchin gut EV tax credits, but then spread that money out in the IRA and IIJA with green infrastructure funding so comprehensive that it has international attention.
• He's been criticized for being soft on China's military (by the right) and emissions (by the left), but the CHIPS Act and FABS Act and ban(s) on chip and tooling exports have all but eliminated China's greatest source of geopolitical leverage: their nascent monopoly on electronics.
• The SCOTUS struck down student loan forgiveness, but Biden went back and forgave more, this time splitting it into multiple smaller programs that are harder to stop.

So yeah, it seems on-brand that the Biden administration would push for LNG exports after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and then go back later and curtail them instead.

I always like to say everyone should have a zombie survival plan. Is there any possibility of zombies? No. But there's a lot of overlap between prepping for the exciting, fictional disaster and boring, real-world natural disasters.

• Having a fireaxe in your trunk might not let you chop off zombie heads, but it'll sure be useful for clearing road debris after a hurricane.
• Having a bug-out-bag with important documents and bottled water is also great for wildfire preparedness, even if that bag also has a spiky leather jacket in it.

I encourage people to have a civil war plan. Do I expect we'll have one? Not really, it wouldn't be a two-sided conflict. But we can expect to see domestic terrorism (see also: insurrection) and potentially police riots (the police enacting organized violence as they did in 2020). If you're ready for a civil war, you're ready for the more mundane breakdowns we're more likely to see.

• Knowing first aid and how to treat a gunshot wound might not find use on a battlefield, but it could easily save someone's life in a mass shooting or isolated hate crime.
• Having ad-hoc or peer-to-peer communications is useful during riots and power outages.
• If you can move ordinance discreetly across state lines, you'll probably find the skillset applies to moving red state refugees as well.
• Building a network of people you trust to band together when SHTF? Brother, you just invented a mutual aid network.

So yeah, if you feel anxious about the possibility of a civil war (or zombies), channel that energy into prepping for it, and you'll find that even if your predictions were wrong, your effort will not go to waste.

So let me get this straight. VW's US sales (EVs in particular) have failed to meet expectations because people don't like their overdependence on buggy, outsourced software.

...and VW's response is to outsource even more software while incorporating a technology base known for being unreliable.

Fashion accessories. For most fashion (not workwear), the expensive stuff is made from the same material and in the same factories as the cheap stuff, they just market it harder.

Body wash. It's watered-down soap. Just buy a bar of soap.

Amazon Prime. Amazon used to be space-age Sears. Now it's just Aliexpress. Fake reviews and bribery are rampant, dangerously nonfunctional products get top recommendations, used and broken products get resold as new while untouched returns get thrown into landfills, Amazon Basics violates IP, and they're putting ads in Prime Video now.

Microwaves and space heaters. The boxes may try to convince you otherwise, but the amount of heat these devices can deliver is bottlenecked by the power outlet. Every 1100W microwave is just as effective as the others. If you're paying more, it's for looks and for features you'll never use like popcorn mode.

Electronics, for most people. Most people won't get more use out of a new $1500 phone than a last-gen model from the same manufacturer for $500. Do you really want a $200 smart coffee maker, or a $20 dumb coffee maker with a $10 plug-in timer?

Software. Obligatory FOSS plug. I don't blame people for sticking to what's familiar, but if you have the time and energy to spare tinkering, most software out there has a good free or open-source equivalent these days. At least for personal use. In my use case, LibreOffice beats Microsoft Word, Photopea beats Photoshop, and Google Sheets beats Excel.

Hydrogen works pretty well for aviation, though there are three main challenges they're still working on: size, materals, and fuel source.

Hydrogen is nice and lightweight, but the tanks and plumbing take up a lot of space, which cuts into cargo volume, basically limiting the range if you want to take passengers with you.

The second issue is that fuel cells currently require quite a lot of platinum, and the PEM electrolysis also requires a lot of PGMs and rare metals like Iridium. The material scientists are working on this, and I figure if they can take the cobalt out of batteries, they can take the platinum out of fuel cells.

The question that comes up the most when talking about hydrogen is where the hydrogen itself comes from. Right now, it's mostly made by steam methane reformation or similar fossil fuel processing, which is nearly as bad for the environment as burning the fossil fuel directly. But there are promising advances in renewable electrolysis (such as taking advantage of peak solar for "free" electricity) which are closing the gap between SMR and renewable H2. It'll never be as cheap as jet fuel, but it's at least economically feasible.

It doesn't change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not "a virtual brain" that creates "art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it." What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.

Today's large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don't make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers -- they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They're not striving to make the correct answer. They're just producing the most statistically average output given the input.

Current-gen AI isn't just viewing art, it's storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn't create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person't style, it must make a copy of that person's work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.

None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.