Such errors can be caught and auto-fixed for now, because LLMs haven't yet rotted the code that catches and auto-fixes errors. If slop makes it into your compiler etc., I wouldn't count on that being true in the future.
However, you could generate the static HTML easily and then publish it on those platforms, which is what many people do today (probably not often using SSI).
Without looking carefully, I can't tell which ones are generative AI / boiling the oceans to bullshit you; it's possible that some of these are legit uses of machine learning, which existed before ChatGPT and will hopefully continue to exist in the future. But I bet it's all ethically questionable bullshit.
Forerunner AI jumps out as a likely ethical black hole, based on its one line description "Copilot for aerospace engineers making rockets, munitions, satellites." On top of code theft, water use, emissions, and the many other horrors of Copilot and its ilk, we can also add war profiteering.
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
You'll never obtain universal agreement for a mine, because there will always be a contingent for whom the correct number of mines is zero. They'll never put it that way, of course. But the decision process they exhibit is "new mine? no", and the consequence of realizing those preferences would be zero new mines.
Fortunately, checking to make sure the entire Internet does not have a website disagreeing with the decision to start a mine, is not part of the process by which mining is started.
On the topic of interpolation, I wonder if other areas along the trail of the Yellowstone hotspot might be easier/better sources of lithium. I suspect Nevada makes access easier than areas in the Snake river plain. But some of those areas might be more amenable to Lithium mining with less of an impact.
I specifically went out of my way on a trip a couple years ago to check out Thacker Pass to see where this planned Lithium mine was going. Unfortunately there was thick smoke followed a significant thunderstorm as a front came through and I didn't get to explore much.
We are in a crisis of climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss. Thacker Pass is critical wildlife habitat for threatened, endangered, and endemic species including the greater sage-grouse, pronghorn, Lahontan cutthroat trout, and golden eagles. Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, is sacred to regional Native American tribes.
It’s too late to prevent Phase 1 of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, but there are opportunities to help prevent Phase 2. More broadly, we hope to protect the rest of McDermitt Caldera from Southern Oregon down to Thacker Pass from catastrophic lithium mining.
But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor.
Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.
> almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants
I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...
Like a child wanting two incompatible things.
And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.
Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"
And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.
That list is only scale (e.g. 40 Gigatons saved by onshore wind or utility solar by 2050) and even on that measure EVs do pretty well at 10 Gigatons.
But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.
These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:
> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.
> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Frankly, these articles are obviously written from a very left-wing perspective with essentially no relevance on the American political stage.
None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.
> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.
“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.
The leftism exemplified by this blog post resembles actual leftism. Unfortunately, it only really exists in the confinement zone of social media, and isn't allowed anywhere near the political stage.
What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.
Sure, the people winning elections aren't part of the capital-L Left but that doesn't mean the capital-L Left isn't an important political force even in America.
It's because there are people with unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests of corporations would be left.
The core argument is that attempts to convert the Linux kernel to Rust are burning out the people putting in that work. The choice might not be between Rust in Linux or a new kernel, but between burned out devs failing to put Rust in Linux or a new Linux-compatible kernel written from scratch in Rust.
I think this will happen sooner than we think. Lots of not-old people with a lot of talents out there and who doesn't like "get off my lawn" culture of the Kernel.
They key aspect will be importing was has gone wrong in the Rust and kernel community cultures.
There is no such thing as a Linux-compatible kernel. There's only Linux. Linux is not even compatible with itself, it's only compatible with its major version number.
The argument may have been 'go pound sand', that's what it means.
I'd say that isn't true. The Linux version number is somewhat arbitrary, and does not denote incompatibility. And from the view of userspace, the Linux ABI is rather backwards compatible.
Also, WSL1 and some BSDs are examples of Linux compatibility.
Yes, the driver interface may or may not change, nobody knows where and when. That's a feature of the Linux versioning scheme and driver HAL policy. You can roll your own userspace-Linux-compatible kernel and it's going to be a toy until you develop drivers for it, which won't ever happen.
> Also, WSL1 and some BSDs are examples of Linux compatibility.
Yes, and they suffer from either performance or lack of drivers, hence WSL2 running a real Linux with some dark magic to share hardware and network, sort of. Surely you don't mean this as an argument in favor of rolling your own Linux-compatible kernel?
Linux is not semantically versioned and has the same versioning policy as Chrome or Firefox: all version updates are minor updates and we just increment the version whenever we like. This is because of Linux's strict no-breaking-UAPI policy.
If I considered adopting a Lirust (yes I just invented that name, feel free to seal :D ) as an engineer, I would want everything user facing not to break. If that promise is held then I think a hypothetical Lirust would be highly successful.
I would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without federation + account portability, there would be no easy offramp when they failed.
You could say the same of almost all corporate social media, and I am phasing them all out too.
It could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation.
For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.
Narrator: It could not have helped, it would have mostly just made them even more burnt out, because they (as they said in the post) were already on call effectively 7 days a week and have been since the site started.
> the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point
Who cares? When an IRC channel, or phpbb forum I use closes down, or an RSS feed I used to read goes dark -- I do not think about the wonderful IRC protocol and how ossified it is or about the sanctity of DNS. And these things happen regardless of what the underlying technology stack are. I think "It really sucks that my community and the people on it are gone now." A domain that doesn't resolve and an empty mastodon instance are effectively the same.
The users who use the platform are why the platform is valuable, not because it uses some dumb particular tech stack.
This comes down to a question of what kind of service you want.
If you want a way to "access more users and content", you can already make an account on a Fediverse instance and access those users and content there. What does Cohost offer by being yet another instance with custom software?
If the vast majority of the content I'm accessing is from other instances/services, why would I pay Cohost money for the privilege of having them act as an intermediary?
One specific problem with federation/decentralization is that you've now decentralized moderation and given up control over your service's culture entirely. This has some upsides and some downsides, but it again puts you into a weird position: If your moderation and culture position are identical to Mastodon's, why do you need to exist? If you're just another Mastodon instance, why would anyone give you money?
When I post on HN or Twitter or Tumblr or Cohost, I at least have a good sense of how the service is moderated, what the rules are, etc. When I post on decentralized services, at any point I can discover that oh, this random instance defederated the one I was unlucky enough to sign up on, so half of my mutuals can't see my posts anymore. Don't worry, you can just migrate your account to a different instance with different rules, and hope IT doesn't get defederated! And because each instance has different rules and culture, you get to look forward to people from other instances complaining that you aren't complying with their rules. It's messy! It's not fun!
Of course the rules on those services I mentioned aren't necessarily going to suit everyone's tastes. But I think that's good - a social media service doesn't need to be For Everyone to be successful, and being For Nobody is a horrible outcome.
At the end of the day I see the appeal of defederation but it simply doesn't make sense as a way to spend your engineering dollars if your goal is to be profitable. It Doesn't Make You Money.
I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported by donations from the community. I have not put my own money in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to run it.
But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network:
I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity.
Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now.
I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.
Do you think it's a fair assessment to say then you are making the same argument I mentioned in the other thread: very few people think that the service of a social media account is actually worth anything, and that this should only be treated as a hobby?
Follow up question: if everyone treats social media alternatives as a hobby, do you think that it has a chance of being a viable alternative to the Big Tech platforms?
I think the profit motive is literally destroying the world given the climate crisis, as well as destroying everything good or useful about the Internet. So I think figuring out how to do things without the profit motive is the only way forward, as impossible as that might seem. Surviving capitalism with that attitude may be challenging, but we don't have a future under capitalism anyway.
I think that if the value of social media comes from the network effects, then it's not a question of whether you can find some core of users who consider it more than a hobby. (Ugh, you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?!) For social media to reach its maximum value, it has to reach literally everyone, and at that point you're talking about something that ought to be a government service, like the postal service. For smaller networks that are less focused on reach, maybe hobbyists are the ideal providers.
It's amazing how we can get two people to accidentally take the same action while fundamentally disagreeing on everything else.
Short version:
- Capitalism is not the problem. Corporations that can take their profits in one department and use their vast resources to drive loss leaders is the problem. Break down big corporations into smaller ones that need to compete, and I can bet that we wouldn't see pointless growth and needless consumption.
- "do you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?" No, I want the service to be run by professionals who can make a living out of it. The people running the service need not to participate in it. Like email or phone service, you don't expect to be free and you don't expect to be talking with the service provider daily. It should be a simple utility.
- "Public funding" is magical thinking repeated by people who don't understand basic economics: specially if you are "against growth" (like your comment about the climate crisis seem to suggest) then where is the Government going to get the resources to pay for developers?
It's improbably hilarious how you basically don't deviate from personal attacks and strawmen at any point in your post.
You don't provide a foundation for the counters to the arguments the GP makes (f.e. you propose smaller corporations wouldn't have "pointless growth and consumption", without substantiating how you feel such a thing is possible with capitalism as described and commonly understood).
You call "public funding" magical thinking, but in the point right before that you mention something should be "a simple utility". Those are publically funded.
And of course we should not forget these are strawmen and/or personal attacks. This is not a respectable post that adds to the discussion, it's one that distracts and makes everything categorically worse.
Where do you live that your electricity is public funded? Your water? Your phone/internet? Heating for your home?
Even on places where these things are run by public companies, they are not public funded. It's not like Governments give these for free and and/or come out of any government budget.
You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.
I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account.
Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon.
Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services.
To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.
> To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web.
Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with.
For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets.
I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out.
The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.
Hey thanks so much for trying! Sorry about the issues, I will take a better look tomorrow (1am now in Germany), but a quick look in my admin panel and I don't see any new user sign up. Did you get to the "set up auto pay" page without logging in?
No rush! The crazy thing is it looks like I already had an account (!) but hadn’t signed up for anything. So I actually must have found your site in my search somehow, then maybe I hit the same payment issue? My username on your site is jyc.
I miss the JPEG-XL art page, which once read: "JXL art is a form of procedural image generation that exploits the powerful meta-adaptive context model of JXL to produce interesting-looking images that are tiny jxl files." Sadly the page on the Internet Archive doesn't seem to have any of the JXL files, some of which looked pretty cool: https://web.archive.org/web/20210521120114/https://jpegxl.in...
We should concede that its probably hard to do one's job properly, if one "has" to take on the second job of organizing a gangstalking crew or assassins.
How can we fault them for improperly leading Boeing workforce with these extra tasks? /s
