theluddite

theluddite, 9 months ago

At this point they’ve stripped off the mask along with the rest of their clothes and are laughing bare-assed all the way to the bank.

theluddite, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I know this is just a meme, but I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn’t build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).

David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.

This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.

theluddite, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.

But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.

It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.

The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.

theluddite, 10 months ago

I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.

theluddite, 10 months ago

I developed something like this, so maybe I can answer. It was a browser extension that let people bypass the old twitter login wall. It had many thousands of users until Twitter started walling themselves off this summer.

I was inspired to make it in the most American way possible – someone I know was in a school that got locked down due to a shooter threat (ended up being a false alarm). The police and news agencies were live-tweeting the updates, and their partner didn’t have a twitter and couldn’t read them without making a fucking account that very moment, wondering if their partner was even alive. I directed them to nitter, but they’re not very into tech, and replacing the URL was just intimidating for them at the moment.

I found the whole experience so grotesque that that very evening I made an extension that lets you press a button to dismiss the login modal and keep scrolling (just a few css changes, or about 30 lines of code).

My two cents: Though I don’t personally use it, the fact is Twitter does have a lot of valuable stuff on it. Same goes for other large platforms – google results are now worthless without adding “reddit” to the search, for example. These companies are bad, but there’s so, so many things to care about, and people can’t care about all of them. Tactically, that makes consumer-driven change very difficult.

I’m not sure what kind of organizing we need to start doing to take back the internet from these big platforms, but whatever it is, I think it has to reckon with our past mistake of giving a few companies ownership of most of the internet, which means it has to go beyond just stopping to use them. These few platforms have the last 10 years of the internet currently walled-off, and they plan on charging rent on that forever. That’s shitty. We should try to stop them from doing that, if we can.

theluddite, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I get the point they’re making, and I agree with most of the piece, but I’m not sure I’d frame it as Musk’s “mistakes,” because he literally won the game. He became the richest person on earth. By our society’s standards, that’s like the very definition of success.

Our economy is like quidditch. There are all these rules for complicated gameplay, but it doesn’t actually matter, because catching the snitch is the entire game. Musk is very, very bad at all the parts of the economy except for being a charlatan and a liar, which is capitalism’s version of the seeker. Somehow, he’s very good at that, and so he wins, even though he has literally no idea how to do anything else.

edit: fix typo!

edit2: since this struck a chord, here’s my theory of Elon Musk. Tl;dr: I think his success comes from offering magical technical solutions to our political and social problems, allowing us to continue living an untenable status quo.

theluddite, 10 months ago

Haha thank you. Tbh I’m not much of a Harry Potter fan, so I’m not really sure where that came from.

theluddite, 10 months ago

I literally have no idea what the rules are so any further meaning is purely a happy coincidence for which I can’t take credit.

theluddite, 10 months ago

I’m so, so glad to see Cybersyn getting some attention. Modern technologists have fully internalized capitalism. Beyond it, they have no vision or dream. Cyberneticians like Stafford Beer are the complete opposite – they dreamt big dreams. Personally, I’m super cybenetics-pilled (and cybersyn-pilled), but you don’t have to be to recognize how much bigger and better their dreams were 50 years ago than Silicon Valley’s are today.

theluddite, 10 months ago

Well, that was like 2 paragraphs and didn’t really make much of a point.

If that left you wanting, I wrote a much longer thing about this exact topic: The Crucible of Mediocrity: Lessons from the Physical World for the AI-Generated Internet

theluddite, 10 months ago

Humans are capable of assessing and addressing the obstruction; meanwhile these cars are permanently disabled without outside assistance.

theluddite, 10 months ago

here ya go archive.md/njotZ

theluddite, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

When executed correctly, vertical farming can yield as much produce as traditional farming methods in urban areas and smaller spaces. Additionally, vertical farmers gain the added benefit of consistent, year-round production without the uncertainties of climate or pests, all while utilizing 90 percent less energy and 98 percent less water than a traditional farm. Although it can’t be a replacement for more traditional methods, vertical farming provides fresh produce in areas that have little food production or access to healthy foods.

… 90% less energy? I’d love to see a citation on how on earth that is possible. This is a puff piece taken entirely from a few companies, taking their claims as truth. I’m not saying vertical farms don’t have their place, but how can they use 90% less energy while having to operate grow lights.

Vertical farms seem to have a lot of hype, and consequently I’ve seen mounting criticism. Lowtech magazine had a piece about how a solar paneled vertical farm actually uses more space than a regular one, if you account for solar panels, and are only cost effective because of fossil fuels.

edit: the link earlier in that sentence goes to a press release from IDTechEx, which does “independent market research.” These are marketing agencies who put out “reports” as self-marketing, hoping to be hired by companies to make more rosy reports on how great their industries are. It’s capitalist cargo-cult science, but even they seem to outright contradict the smithsonian magazine claim:

On a larger scale, vertical farms may prove more profitable in different geographical regions. Vertical farms can reduce water usage significantly over conventional agriculture, and the high degree of control over the growing environment allows them to grow crops in extreme climates – where such crops may not otherwise be able to grow. In return, vertical farms demand more energy to carry out growing operations [emphasis added]. To maximize their potential, vertical farms would ideally be located in regions of water scarcity, such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, or in areas with extreme climates, such as in Scandinavian countries, where the low amounts of sunlight and high costs of regulating greenhouse environments single out vertical farms as an optimal solution. The amount of agricultural land available is also an important factor – regions looking to increase food security and reduce reliance on imports while facing challenges in acquiring sufficient agricultural land would find vertical farms to be ideal. A particularly prominent example of such a country is Singapore, which has demonstrated much interest in vertical farming over the last few years.

[V]ertical farms are very energy intensive [emphasis added], and it is important to ensure the facilities chosen can support these energy loads. In addition, the ergonomics of the facility is also important; should the layout not be given proper consideration, this can impede workers and decrease worker efficiency. As labor costs are typically among the largest sources of expenditure for a vertical farm, improving labor efficiency to reduce these costs is of paramount importance.

I call shenanigans on the energy usage claim. There’s no way it’s possible.

theluddite, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

No, it’s not even close. According to that link I posted, growing 1m2 of wheat costs 2,577 kilowatt-hours of electricity. 1 gallon of gasoline has 33.7 kilowatt-hours. That single 1m2 of wheat used the energy equivalent of 76 gallons of gasoline, and that is for a single pound of flour. LEDs are efficient, but vertical farms require extraordinary amounts of them to be on 24/7, whereas a single farm can use one tractor.

You can just look up how much fuel farms use. The general rule of thumb for cereal crops is 2 gallons per acre per season, and that includes planting, the maintenance, and the harvesting. Multiple that out, and you get that vertical farms use 157,827x more energy. That is 5 orders of magnitude. To put that in perspective, the distance across the US vs the distance to the moon is only two orders magnitude difference.

edit: In case you don’t believe lowtech magazine, here’s another source. ifarm.fi/…/how-much-electricity-does-a-vertical-f…

It claims that vertical farms use 57.35 kWh per square meter per month for the lowest possible energy consumption crop, lettuce. This is an astounding amount of energy. That is 1.5 gallons of gasoline per month per square meter for lettuce. If you want to grow strawberries, it almost triples. That still comes out to 3-4 orders of magnitude, depending on the crop.

theluddite, 10 months ago

Yet another example of how capitalism uses computers backwards.

theluddite, 10 months ago

Capitalists have become so good at using clever accounting techniques to evade tax collectors and regulators that they are now using them in the hopes that they can trick the earth itself.

theluddite, 10 months ago

It will never cease to amaze me how obsessed with and addicted to Twitter these journalists are. When Elmo trolled NPR by labeling them “state-affiliated media,” NPR itself ran indignant and breathless coverage of it for days – they just couldn’t help themselves.

theluddite, 10 months ago

It didn’t really occur to me to consider an interpretation of “emissions” that excludes CO2. Had they stuck with the word “pollutant,” then sure, but what they said was “emissions.”

There’s probably some reasonable interpretation of these findings that’s productive and useful, but I think whoever wrote this is playing a bit fast and loose.