[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 34 points 4 months ago

This is "the gadget," an implosion type nuclear bomb detonated in the trinity test, the first nuclear bomb test on earth (that we know of, heh).

It's shown partially assembled inside the 100-foot test tower where it would eventually be detonated.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 29 points 10 months ago

Nah, that's mostly stock options, so it doesn't come out of the revenue. His cash salary was only a couple hundred thousand.

It's probably better from a tax point of view. Plus he's planning to cash out big on his own IPO, so he prefers the stock.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 30 points 10 months ago

Nowadays, trees absorb CO2 and produce oxygen, and when they die and rot the opposite happens, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.

However, during the carboniferous period, when plants first developed the ability to produce lignin (i.e. wood, essentially) there was not yet any bacteria or fungus that could break this material down. The result is that when trees died they would kinda just lay there. For 50 million years, trees absorbed CO2 and then toppled over and piled on the ground and in water. Most of the world was swamp and rainforest. Millions of years of plant growth all dying and laying on top of each other

So much CO2 was turned into oxygen that O2 levels were 15% higher compared to today. This allowed some truly large lifeforms to develop: trees 150 feet tall, dragonflies with wings 13 inches long, millipedes the size of a car.

The trapping of so much CO2 led to a reverse greenhouse effect, cooling the planet, and eventually an ice age. The forest systems collapsed from the climate change (we think) killing about 10% of all life on earth. Eventually a species of fungus developed the ability to eat lignin, and cleaned up the dead trees that remained on the surface within a few generations. The millions of years of tree material that sank into the bogs eventually turned into coal.

Now we're digging all that good stuff back up and are burning it, yay!

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 33 points 10 months ago

In this case, it redirects to Google's general privacy policy that covers all their services. Anyway Google's calculator stores a history of all the calculations you did in your account somewhere. So I guess it needs to have a policy stating what they do with that data.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 32 points 1 year ago

VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They've had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.

Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian's production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they're hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 33 points 1 year ago

Yes they do. That's why they're asking the general public to snitch on themselves.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 29 points 1 year ago

It would be pretty funny if GPT starts putting licence notices under its answers because that's what people do in its training data.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 35 points 1 year ago

I was curious because of how unashamedly propagandist this article is. So I clicked on the author link. It seems this is the only article he's ever written for this website (I hesitate to call it a news outlet). Also, it says he's a former republican political consultant now working for the Lincoln Project. That's apparently the name of a moderate republican PAC that is trying to fight Trumpism.

So why would a political news website outright publish propaganda from a PAC without any commentary? I've never heard of the new republic before, but they seem to be an otherwise unremarkable progressive political magazine. I couldn't say whether the new republic is getting paid by the PAC to publish this, or whether they just took it because it generally aligns with their own stated political views. I will say that, although it is mentioned at the bottom that the author currently works for the Lincoln Project, I had to really look for that. it also wasn't clear to me at first this was a PAC. So in my opinion, proper journalistic ethical standards are not being upheld here.

Given the article's origins, it's pretty safe to say none of this is genuine. These are moderate republicans who hate Trump, trying desperately to destroy Trumpism. If they truly believed their own article they'd be democrats. And if you're here wondering if the article is worth reading, I'd say it is practically fully content-free. It's all just hopium.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 28 points 1 year ago

I don't get this article, it's clearly got a bone to pick with self-checkout and seems to be contradicting itself in the process:

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. [...] In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice

Okay, so even given the myriad of poor implementations out there, a majority of people prefer it. But then at the end:

Simply, "customers hate it".

Oh really? Because your quoted survey seems to say the opposite. And then there's stuff like this:

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same.

This is too light on data. Even a luxurious 1 cashier per 2 self-checkout stations will result in large cost savings for a business where employee costs are a significant fraction of total expenses. Especially in low margin businesses like grocery stores, removing even small amounts of overhead makes a big difference. Just because stores are adding a few employees back, doesn't mean cost-savings are completely negated.

Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Surprise, a large nation did not completely get rid of cashiers! The number is meaningless without more context: did the number of cashiers go down? What about average cashiers per store? Where is the data?

My point is, maybe companies just went too hard on the cost-cutting and are trying to find the right balance. What is the best ratio of self-checkout to classic cashier checkout? What is the right amount of self-checkout assistants? How do we make checking out yourself a good user experience? All of these things are still being experimented with. What does seem to be clear is that self-checkout has become near ubiquitous, and therefore it is most certainly not a "spectacular failure" by any definition.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 37 points 2 years ago

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don't do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven't done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they've added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they're adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building... the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it's not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you're free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 28 points 2 years ago

They are worse on the environment then gasoline cars due to the rare earth materials needed to make a EV and it is harsher on the environment when it comes to dispose a EV once they reach end of life.

While it's typically true that making an EV car has more environmental impact than an ICE vehicle, this is more than compensated for by the emissions while driving, says also the EPA. Additionally, new LFP batteries are taking over the EV market and do not require rare earth minerals.

And all a EV car does is demand energy from a power plant which are either using coal or natural gas for the most part. The only "green" efficient power plant option out there is nuclear but no one wants to go nuclear.

Yes, let's just ignore hydro, solar and wind power altogether. Renewable sources are currently almost 25% of US electricity production (more than coal) and growing rapidly. Also, even if you charge the EV with energy from a coal power plant, it's still better than a gasoline car. The reason is efficiency. Power plants are more efficient at getting energy from fuel than a car engine, and electrical engines are more efficiently converting energy to motion.

If your concered about the climate and want to take that into account when getting a new vehicle. I always tell people to buy a used vehicle since it already exists and by driving a used car

This is not bad advice, but even better would be to buy a used EV.

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sushibowl

joined 2 years ago