megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

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megopie,

some are talking about this like it’s going to be the straw that breaks the camels back and suddenly everyone will flock to a Linux distro, but, realistically, most market share is based on what companies use for work stations, and companies ain’t gonna change unless it starts to seriously impact productivity or it cost them more.

For personal/freelance-work computers, some people will just suck it up because of inertia. Of those who just can’t stand it… most will probably buy a mac next time they get a computer. There will probably be an increase in Linux usership, but it’s probably gonna be a 5-1% change in market share, depending on how fucked 11 ends up being as time goes on.

Probably the biggest increase in market share will be from schools adopting chrome books or the like.

megopie,

The website formally known as twitter runs face first in to the results of chasing another tech hype train built on sound technology being applied way too broadly, and operating in unsustainable and dubiously legal ways.

megopie,

so the NHS is really fucking bad about trans healthcare for a lot of reasons. The process is unusually bureaucratic even for the NHS and hyper gate kept, like they will just deny care based on single answers to weird questions. Without a really good doctor who is willing to go to bat for you and stick it out and who understands this very specific process in the NHS, you probably will never actually be able to get care.

Partially this is due to NHS being underfunded and partially because people in positions of power have worked to make trans healthcare as difficult as possible to get in England.

megopie,

The most space efficient parking space is one outside the urban center at a bus stop or train station. Having parking inside urban areas just creates more traffic by making it possible for more personal cars to enter the city. The issue of parking and traffic in cities can only be solved by a paradigm shift away from trying to accommodate cars in dense urban environments.

megopie,

the problem with flying cars is that most people can barely be trusted to operate a 60MPH vehicle in 2 dimensions, 100MPH vehicles in 3 dimensions is a recipe for a disaster. Pilots licenses are difficult to get for a very good reason.

We should be trying to get large personal vehicles out of cities and towns as much as practical, not introducing new types that are even more dangerous.

megopie,

People who make the information fed in to the automatic plagiarism machine suing the automatic plagiarism machine company.

Wild to me how far this has gotten before some institutional actors realized that this “amazing new technology” is only financially viable if they don’t have to pay a fair price for the training data.

U.K. banks raising mortgage interest rates…cause inflation hasn’t fallen as much as expected. Can anyone do an ELI5 as to why?

As the title says, numerous banks in the U.K., maybe across the world, are raising interest rates on mortgages, and the given reason is cause inflation hasn’t fallen as much as expected. Can anyone give me a basic inflation, other than greed, as to why they’d do this?

megopie, (edited )

not really relevant to money lent to them by the government. Fractional reserve is in reference to people who have deposited savings in a bank, they still have to have money to lend it out, they cannot print new money, only the government can do that.

megopie,

new money enters the economy from government loans to banks, banks then lend that money on to consumers and businesses. The interest rate charge is effectively the price, by raising the price they’re hoping to decrease the amount of new money entering the economy, which is thought by many to be the main cause of inflation.

Normally new loans/investment creates growth in the economy, so there are more goods and services for that money to be spent on, so prices don’t go up, or at least go up more slowly than new money is entering the economy. But lately, despite new money entering the economy, supply for goods and services has not grown quickly enough (or even shrunk), so more money is competing for the fixed amount of stuff, so prices have gone up (inflation). They only really have one tool they’re willing to use to address the issue, how “expensive”(interest rates) new loans are.

megopie,

I mean, maybe not the mini disk specifically, but yah, a cartridge system for CDs would have been better.

Mini disks are super cool but they’re a lot more materially demanding than a CD, CDs being just aluminum and plastic, where as a minidisc has some truly wacky elements in it’s make up to get the magneto optical and curie point to work.

megopie,

The mini disk was a truly weird system. Half way between a cassette and a CD. CD used a laser to to reflect off bumps(or dyes in some varieties) on the disk to get a signal, and a cassette would use a metal head to detect magnetization along the tape to get a signal.

The mini disk used a laser to read the magnetization around the disk. Essentially the magnetism would change the polarity of the light as it bounced off, and by measuring what the polarity of the reflected light is, the device got the signal.

Writing to the disk was also wild, as unlike the cassette, the magnetic field of the disk couldn’t just be changed by putting it next to a strong magnet like. Instead, it had to be heated up before the magnetism could be changed, this heating was done with the laser, and was very precise compared to a cassette’s method. This meaning way more information could be squeezed on to the disk than on a cassette.

megopie,

That is also for NG plants is the bigger win TBH, coal is such a minor part of power generation in the US these days. Methane powered NG plants also have a worse heating effect as, although it produces less CO2 per BTU, it also has between 5-12% leak rate with in the supply chain, depending on who you ask, and that methane has about 40 times the GHG power as co2.

megopie,

Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.

Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.

Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.

megopie,

The fact that he is so vulnerable to the furthest off the rails of his party makes him useful. That they’re keeping him in the position means they can get him to support legislation they want.

To just toss him aside after one vote would mean no further leaders would be willing to rely on them and go against the most absurd.

Think of it like a new coalition in government.

The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns (www.smh.com.au)

Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....

megopie,

It’s wild because we don’t need to. We can use extant technologies with established supply chains, it just requires us to move past minor hang ups.

Battery electric cars/trains/buses are unnecessary. Trains and busses can use overhead/3rd rail electrification, most personal trips can be done safely and easily using an E-bike (much smaller batteries that can be produced en mass with existing supply chains) and cars should be reduced in usage outside of particularly rural areas where they truly are a necessity (which is a tiny portion of the overall population).

For the power grid… WE HAVE NUCLEAR POWER! IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION! The only thing holding it back is massive amounts of red tape put in place due to fear mongering funded by the gas and coal industries.

megopie,

It is cheaper when you’re just talking about the actual construction, operation, and externalized elements of the fuel cycle. The reason they are so expensive is the massive difficulties and delays that come from getting the projects approved and the constant legal challenges to shut down construction once approved. If construction is delayed by an injunction, you still have to pay all the specialist until construction starts again.

Solar is only particularly cheap if the power goes directly in to the grid and doesn’t need to stored. Including the cost of grid scale storage bloats the price to be uncompetitive with natural gas.

megopie, (edited )

This is a serious issue with the Democratic Party right now, they’re relying on metrics and measurements that do not properly reflect the realities of the average voter. It goes beyond just misreading economic numbers, they are struggling to even understand what voters will respond positively to in general.

Many of the questions they ask in polls are somewhat obtuse and don’t touch on what voters think the issue is. They ask “how important is X to you” but be it, immigration, environment, healthcare, or guns. All that question does is tell the party how much to talk about certain issues, not how the voters want them to be addressed or treated.

Decision makers with in the party apparatus have a strategy of working with in narratives that are accepted by the voters they’re trying to court. Narratives crafted and popularized by traditional media/news/journalistic sources. Ideally these narratives would be crafted to best reflect reality, a difficult task that requires a lot of talent and large dedicated staffs. Right now though narratives are being crafted by under staffed, underfunded teams, at the behest of powerful moneyed interests who are keeping news sources afloat; revenues from digital distribution having failed to match that of old print and cable distribution. These same interests provide the bulk of funding for political campaigns.

So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing, in a shallow effort to control public opinion, making the public increasingly distrustful over time of these traditional news sources. The party relies on these narratives to communicate with voters. They also takes ques on what policy to support based on how the voters identify with the narratives and what the campaign donors want. But increasingly voters do not identify with the narratives at all, so the party is left speaking past voters trying to speak to narratives that voters ether haven’t seen or are baffled by.

megopie,

There are many different metrics that can be used, in politics and campaigns we’ve focused on one set for a while now because it generally gave us an accurate idea of how people were going to feel. If it no longer accurately predicts that, then we need a new set for political discussions.

This is not a case of online spaces filtering experience, nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy. To turn around and tell people their wrong for not liking the state of the economy because one set of metrics looks good is tone def at best and political suicide at worst.

megopie,

The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts. If you pick small parts of the graph and focus on fluctuations that support your argument you can make it look good but if you map it all the way back to the end of lock down, the trend is clear.

There are also other metrics beyond the consumer confidence index, such as Gallup’s economic confidence index which shows the same over all downward trend.

This is just the reality the number show, people are not happy with the sate of the economy and they don’t expect it to get better. Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.

megopie,

It’s worse now than ever though, many managers have been steeped in tech optimism their whole working careers. The failures of “revolutionary new systems” have been forgotten about while the success of other things are lauded.

They’ve been primed to jump on any new “innovation” and at the same time B2B marketing has started adopting some of the most manipulative practices that used to be only used on consumers. They’ve crafted a narrative that shapes discourse so the main objections that appear are irrelevant to the actual issues managers might run in to.

Stuff like “but what if it is TOO good?!” and “what if the wrong people get their hands on this AMAZINGLY POWERFUL new tech?!”

Instead of “but does this actually understand anything or is it just giving output that looks correct?” or “ Wait, so, how was this training data obtained? Will there be legal issues from deliverables made with this?”

The average manager has been primed by the zeitgeist to ask the sales rep the kinds of questions they want to answer.

megopie,

Dutch babies are generally made with more a batter than a dough. Kind of like pancakes or Yorkshire pudding.

megopie,

Doing better than trump is a low damn bar.

megopie,

I do not think any but a slim minority on here seriously believes that Trump is preferable, but being better than trump does not make one immune to criticism and doesn’t entitle Biden to enthusiastic support from people who didn’t want him as the candidate in the first place and only settled on him in the primaries as a compromise.

If a second trump term is as bad as we fear, then the democratic establishment should probably work harder to speak to the concerns of disaffected voters. A failure to make real commitments to pursue significant policy changes is tantamount to voting for trump at this point.

megopie,

It’s probably not a data mining machine for china, they’ve done a fair bit to divest them selves from china at this point. If the CCP wanted to data mine Americans they can just buy that information from data brokers.

I suspect the main reason so many establishment politicians are terrified of it is because of how it suggest content.

Because there is very little direct user input on what it shows, It tends to spin people off in to communities and places people wouldn’t normally end up in. Trends there also tend to spread fast and unpredictably, most people won’t know about a trend until it shows up in their feed, making it difficult to monitor by a third party.

It can really throw a wrench in political messaging when you can’t be sure what narratives and ideas your constituents have been exposed to. These issues come from social media generally, but most big social media platforms are a lot less volatile in the trends, are easier to monitor, and are less likely to send people off in to spaces that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.

megopie,

Yah, this is very much politicians being terrified of how much TikTok undermines the narratives they want to play to.

Haitian PM tenders resignation after Jamaica talks (www.reuters.com)

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry has resigned as head of the Caribbean nation, the leader of a regional body said on Monday, an unelected role the 74-year-old neurosurgeon has held since the 2021 assassination of the country's last president."We acknowledge his resignation upon the establishment of transitional presidential...

megopie,

It’s probably gonna get a lot worse from here. The nations got a long history of this, and a long history of foreign powers intervening and making the situation worse.

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