The fanaticism and fatalism produce some interesting parallels

Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.

Reading this in Sam Reich’s voice.

Even if it wasn’t, you could just convert it to .jpg if you felt strongly about it. Not as though there’s a compatibility issue.

The complaint people are having is with resizing/manipulation after download. They want these enormous uncompressed files floating around on every website, in the off chance they plan to download it and manipulate it. 99.9% of the web needs to be full of megabyte sized image files for the 0.1% y’all want to play with.

Don’t forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky_(The_Simpsons)

I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.

Renewables and batteries have their own problems.

Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.

Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.

Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.

Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.

Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).

We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.

But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.

I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.

Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.

One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.

Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.

As a Texas resident with a few friends in who are professional teachers… oof. I’m so sorry to hear this story has a sad ending.

User: “Please give me the three fastest routes, with each answer weighted by different criteria”

Computer: “Okay, here you go.”

User: “Two of these are slower than the third, you stupid piece of shit, I hate you.”

you tankies are on the margins of society

It’s funny to see a police officer in an MRAP drive down my street, while a guy on the internet insists my problem is that I’m too much of a militant.

we are the ones hiding and protecting our fragile views…

Why else invoke admins and mods to protect you?

We just want to skip the second hand embarrassment

If you’re feeling shame because you hear someone assert that genocide is bad, that’s not second-hand. That’s your conscience screaming at you.

Based and Hygiene Pilled

Just because I’m not seeing these comments and posts doesn’t mean other people aren’t. And if they’re seeing it, then they’ll get seduced by the evil tankie mind-control rays. That means I’ve got to start blocking them, too.

Pretty soon, I’ll be in this shrinking walled garden of fewer and fewer people who say things I approve of. And then what?! I might begin to question my own self-righteousness or engage in some degree of critical reflection of views. That’ll be it. They’ll have gotten to me, too!

The whole Lemmy.world community needs to be severed from any instance of heresy. Otherwise, my personal views might be put at risk.

By a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Somewhere in Moscow, there’s a big red phone that connects to its counterpart in Beijing, where Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discuss the latest attempts to influence an indie reddit spin-off with an elaborate network of Markov Chain LLMs producing comments like “I wish y’all wouldn’t be so nakedly racist towards people from other countries.”

Electrolytes. They’re what plants crave.

Its not my job to teach you. I suggest you do your own research.

The funny thing to me is that it’s still basically machine learning, the same tech that we’ve had since the mid 2000s, it’s just we have fancier hardware now.

So much of the modern Microsoft/ChatGPT project is effectively brute-forcing intelligence from accumulated raw data. That’s why they need phenomenal amounts of electricity, processing power, and physical space to make the project work.

There are other - arguably better, but definitely more sophisticated - approaches to developing genetic algorithms and machine learning techniques. If any of them prove out, they have the potential to render a great deal of Microsoft’s original investment worthless by doing what Microsoft is doing far faster and more efficiently than the Sam Altman “Give me all the electricity and money to hit the AI problem with a very big hammer” solution.

Should note that a lot of the Microsoft Recall project revolves around capturing human interactions on the computer in real time continuously, with the hope of training a GPT-5 model that can do basic office tasks automagically.

Will it work? To some degree, maybe. It’ll definitely spit out some convincing looking gibberish.

But the promise is to increasingly automate away office and professional labor.

Libraries provide a host of public services beyond “warehouse for books”. A big part of our digital archives come from library digitization programs. And knowing how to sort, store, and distribute this information is a vital piece of library science.

Losing libraries means losing the tools we use to organize information on a national scale.

the cure for my depression is cocaine or meth

Adding short bursts of mania to my episodes of depression, because nothing improves my overall mood than a huge rush of endorphins followed by a sharp crash and an aching emptiness.