On the Internet there are people into ‘edc’ (everyday carry) but that’s really just ‘I like bags and nice things but I’m not a girly girl I’m a mannnnnn’ acronym
@evan Mostly the latter. For example, of you identify as Palestinian you might simply be displaying affinity or loyalty to your place/people. Distinct from political or financial commitment to driving Israelis into the sea or supporting Hamas violence against civilians. Or not - the symbols alone don't say.
Seattle Times has a new report on how Boeing's current challenges can be traced to prioritizing shareholders over everything for 25 years, slashing costs and outsourcing key work, weakening unions, and pressuring suppliers, leading to loss of its core competency.
A federal judge today threw out the entirety of X's lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He ruled that the suit's clear motivation was to "punish" critical research and "dissuade" others from criticizing X or researching its harms, and dismissed it under California's strong anti-SLAPP laws.
The irony of Wordpress, the self-described guardian of the open web, causing anyone who gives a shit to pull down their old Tumblrs and blogs to avoid getting sucked into the AI bullshit machine, is really something.
@fraying Is there a way for a content platform to responsibly deal with #ai training aggregators like they do with #search engines? Act as an agent (getting permission and consent) to licence material on creator's behalf? Give authors granular controls? Pass revenue to creators? #wordpress
I honestly wonder why anyone in Hollywood will ever want to work with Warner Bros ever again if you can put years into making a movie then they just delete it for the tax benefits.
Also if it’s financially better for your studio to delete movies than release them, shut it down.
@carnage4life Can filmmakers negotiate M&A-style deal breakup fees on a scale that takes the sting out of a cancellation? or that deters deletion? Or that stipulates the works go into the public domain instead of a bitbucket?
Now is a great time to say Biden is a Great President. Responding boldly and effectively to historically hard challenges inherited from T and new ones, despite obstruction, #Biden delivered. This essay lists some of those quietly heroic accomplishments. #politics#uspolitics#bid
I keep discovering new amazing things about Apple Vision Pro. I hesitated to buy this because I thought I'd regret it, but it's increasingly unlikely I'll return it. It's such a game changer. Naysayers are all wrong or will be in 1-2 years.
@danielpunkass the demos don't seem to exploit the possibilities. Lots of 2D frames inserted into a 3D world, almost skeumorphic? Not much 3d native presentation + 3d affordances with direct manipulation interactions. Need less Tetris, more Jenga.
Somewhere in here is a new force multiplier that shows an exponentially better way of thinking about a class of problem. A first VisiCalc or browser or FPS to show the way.
Nuclear power was sold to the world as a safe, clean, and economically viable source of electricity. We were told that it would be "too cheap to meter"1. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power will have to admit that hasn't come to pass. Construction costs for nuclear power stations are dwarfed only by their decommissioning costs. Yes, politics and regulation conspire to increase the price - but nuclear hasn't made electricity particularly cheap. Indeed, we mostly seem to be paying more than ever for our power.
Well, not quite.
On Christmas Eve, my electricity company emailed me to say that I would have several hours of free electricity. They would charge me £0.00 per kWh. More than that, at a few specific times they would pay me for my electricity use!
Most factories and heavy industrial plants weren't running the day before Christmas. UK power usage spikes when everyone boils a kettle at the end of a football match or other similar event - but there was nothing so momentous happening at 3AM. So supply outstripped demand.
Anyone with a smart-meter could have been paid to charge their car, run their tumble dryer, or stay up until the wee hours playing on their console.
It wasn't mined uranium which gave us power which literally had to be given away; about 62% of the electricity came from wind.
At this point, the nuclear lobby will start whinging about subsidies (both nukes and renewables are generously subsidised) and how wind can't provide a base load (which is fair). But although sticking a bunch of turbines in costal waters is an engineering marvel - it's pretty cheap compared to building and maintaining a nuclear power station.
Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.
Because home appliances are increasingly efficient, domestic energy use is falling - it's down 19% since 2010. Electricity use by domestic properties was about 96.2 TWh in 2022 and 135 TWh was generated by renewables.
Yes, electricity is fungible, but you can convincingly make the case that every home in the UK was powered by renewables.
Solar panels don't work at night, and wind-turbines don't work when there's no wind. We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. That might be nuclear, or fossil fuels, or it might be storage from the excess power from renewables.
Sadly, the world is still filled with war, famine, and disease. But, for a few moments on a winter's evening, wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.
If you want to move to a time-of-day electricity tariff, you can join Octopus Energy - if you use that link, we both get £50 bill credit.
There is a lot of contention about that phrase. It was (probably) about the future prospects of nuclear fusion - but it became attached to nuclear fission. You can read more at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission↩
We need a new word to describe the constant fear of leaving entire tech platforms and starting again every six months because they decided posting Swastikas doesn't violate their TOS
@Daojoan The fear or anxiety invoke fragility and precarious feelings, insecurity and peril. The thing we fear is being forced to leave home, leave friends, abandon the meaningful debris of living, the wealth of memory and history rooted in this place, in these affordances.
Of having to grieve and live with loss. To muster the energy and courage to rebuild with illusions of safety -- that let us trust strangers and make them friends -- torn from us. It's the life of virtual homelessness.
@Daojoan Of taking temporary shelter without hope for settling. Of renting forever instead of owning. Of feeling deeply that you are subject to corporate vagaries and chaotic human forces beyond your influence, let alone your control. Powerless. Unrooted. Living in online precarity. Living with hypervigilance of landlords evicting and mobs attacking and lies displacing reality.
I don't understand the people who told me I would get more conservative with age. The more powerful I become, the more angry I get at the people who abuse their power and the more aware I become of the ways in which systemic oppression functions.
