[-] sonori@beehaw.org 3 points 3 days ago

The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.

So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

You realize that natural gas distribution networks don’t exist everywhere and that even in the highly built up US they tend to only serve cities, towns, and nearby suburbs, right? Everywhere else uses propane or electric.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 3 points 5 days ago

You should probably go tell the millions of commercial kitchens in places that don’t have natural gas that they don’t exist then.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 3 points 6 days ago

Of course there is an alternative, as the article is arguing implicitly, you ban mining and other unsightly industrial activities in rich areas with strong environmental and safety laws, and outsource it to poor nations without the political leverage to strongly regulate mining companies. This objectively results in far, far more environmental damage, but that environmental damage is contained to highly populated areas full of poor people you don’t have to think about.

I really wish more environmentalists were pushing for potentially environmentally hazardous processes to be moved to areas with strong regulation and environmental protection laws, instead of just pushing them onto poor people, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be so (purposely) disconnected from the industrial processes necessary to make everything from wind turbines and trains down to the food that appears on the shelves that they view the mining and manufacturing of these things as completely unconnected to these things themselves appearing in their lives.

36
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by sonori@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

A detailed three hour video essay by Tantacrul on the rise, and soon after numerous privacy and foreign influence scandals, within one of the largest tech companies in the world, and how a website where you could talk with old classmates brought about everything from a vast decline in mental health to ethnic cleansing.

64
submitted 4 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

Evidently the joints on the flaps still need a little work into not letting gases through, but it seemed to still have enough actuation to keep the spacecraft stable until the engines took over for the landing burn.

24
submitted 5 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

A detailed discussion of the Shuttle program as well as some ethics in airspace.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 61 points 6 months ago

Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.

On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 40 points 7 months ago

Minecraft, you can only pretend to have gotten away for so long before the block game calls again.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 43 points 7 months ago

Yes, but at the end of the day SpaceX is the work of tens of thousands of people, not just the guy who provides a pile of money in exchange for constantly forcing the engineering teams to do stupid stuff if they can’t explain why not at an eighth grade level.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 60 points 9 months ago

How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.

For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.

78
submitted 9 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
  • A video about disposable vapes, and how addiction became the goal of every single company on the planet.
32
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

It’s their first ever attempt to launch a Vulcan, and their launching an lunar lander. Window opens at 1:53 AM EST. Here’s to hoping for a successful launch.

Edit:

Liftoff at 47:40.

We saw a successful launch, translunar injection, and the Peregrine lander successfully powered on before detaching from the Centaur upper stage, which proceeded to relight its engines and complete a burn into a solar orbit at part of its memorial mission.

The lunar landing attempt is expected to be on Feb 23, and it is expected to remain operational on the surface of the moon for at least ten days.

According to NASA, “-Scientific instruments will study the lunar exosphere, thermal properties of the lunar regolith, hydrogen abundances in the soil at the landing site, magnetic fields, and conduct radiation environment monitoring.”

More on Vulcan and its history.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 44 points 10 months ago

While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing, I take issue with it citing Norway’s 89% EV sales as insufficient becuse only 20% of vehicles on the road are EVs yet.

Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.

While I also agree that simply replacing every ICE with an EV isn’t enough on its own and that trollybuses and other electric mass transit need to be part of the solution, it’s not a question of one or the other. If we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we need to be doing both and a whole lot more beside, especially when it comes to cleaning up industry.

We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with. We need solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate clean power in the first place. We need heat pumps and geothermal to turn that into the heating and cooling necessary to keep people safe in a world with increasing dangerous temperatures.

We need trollybuses, metros, and high speed intercity rail to electrify the transport of people. We need denser housing in our cities and EVs in our rural areas and service and delivery vehicles. We need overhead cantanarys to electrify our railroads. We need green hydrogen to decarbonize farming, steel marking and a thousand other processes. We need net zero bio and synthetic fuels for ships and aircraft. We even need carbon capture and sequestration to deal with the industrial processes that can’t otherwise be decarbonated.

Any framing that expects a single one of these to solve the problem on its own ignores the things it can’t cover. Our current actions are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, that is not a sign we should roll back one in favor of another, it is a sign that we need to be pushing increasing the scale of all of the above.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 110 points 11 months ago

TLDR: A bunch of ride sharing companies sprouted up in the 2010s built around no frills EVs they leased to employees and then most of them consolidated or went out of business a few years later, leaving parking lots of used vehicles. Expect them to be auctioned off to either be recycled or hopefully sold on to lower wage nations.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 47 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.

One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.

Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.

30
submitted 11 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

I don’t think that this has been posted yet, but if not here’s the summary.

https://youtu.be/O3F8aTBLLx0?si=GPVB2xtC5wwnSC6V

Just the highlights.

view more: next ›

sonori

joined 1 year ago