• Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 hours ago

    That the various new and inventive grid scale energy storage solutions people are trying out won’t end up being better than just building big chemical batteries. Sodium Ion will probably be good enough and cheap enough.

  • whaleross@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    USA will keep being a warmongering nation as long there are no wars that hit American soil and civilians.

    • ZombieChicken@reddthat.com
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      6 hours ago

      There was a report written decades ago claiming that the US economy will collapse if military spending stops or slows. Some people might really believe that.

    • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      why do you think an attack on US soil would stop the country from being warmongers? wouldn’t it have the opposite effect?

      • whaleross@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Because I think in America war is something distant that happens on TV like entertainment, sports and politics and people that haven’t lost family don’t understand the scale of real suffering happening.

        Countries that have experienced war at home generally try to avoid it at any cost, with a select exceptions as always.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    16 hours ago

    Israel had a larger hand in Benghazi than is being let on and Israeli intelligence provided Republicans with a lot of intel regarding the attack as Obama was starting to rift with Israel on how to handle the Middle East.

  • bizarroland@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    I have a hunch that there’s something fucky with passkeys, and it’s gonna turn out to be a security and or privacy nightmare in the near future.

    • barryamelton@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      The something fucky is that is just centralized public-private key pairs. There’s no need for centralizing that under corporarions. Actually, you lose one of the big featues of public key cryptography.

      It’s just a power grab from corpos

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    I have a hunch that world leaders know the planet is fucked and are secretly generating all this chaos so nobody finds out they’re making all these underground arks for them and their families.

    once disaster strikes if you’re not on the list, you’re pretty much dead.

    • architect@thelemmy.club
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      44 minutes ago

      Yea this is mine for the most part. They’ve got a list and everyone else is marked for dead. It’s probably what palantir is really for.

      Also i think they are giving out money to the worst people to act as useful idiots because they know that the dollar will be useless soon, too. They aren’t on the list, either, they just think they are.

      They think they are saving the world and we are all the bad guys.

  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 hours ago

    If the Trump administration doesn’t kill the ADA law changes regarding digital accessibility set to go into effect soon, Adobe is going to leverage the law to kill off the PDF format for the web in an effort to get people to pay for a subscription-based content management system.

    Adobe doesn’t own the PDF standard. They gave it to the International Standards Organization in 2008. Acrobat’s accessibility checker has never been updated to newer standards, even as the federal government has moved to require compliance with WCAG 2.1 (a web standard). Their checker does partial WCAG 2.0 and PDF/UA, which was released in 2008. The ISO is working on PDF 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with PDF/UA, nor will files compliant with WCAG be able to meet the PDF 2.0 spec.
    Which means that Acrobat (or InDesign) won’t be able to make files that can be legally shared online by many organizations. Adobe will leverage their near monopoly to steer designers into cloud products integrated into their publishing software as a means up fill the niche vacated by PDFs.

  • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    That the reason imperial Europe had such a huge and lasting impact on the world was because Europe was playing on a harder difficulty than everyone else.

    Europe was functionally foodless when it comes to agricultural with next to no edible plants native to the region, most of their crop foods were imported from Eurasia. Boar were as lethal as the wolves and the wolves besieged cities. The living conditions were functional perfect petri dishes that bred so many massive plagues that they accidentally biowarfared the Americas, they literally didn’t consider the diseases they had as bad enough to leave those guys home. The history of constant warfare in Europe had them so invested in finding new ways to kill each other that they hit the iron age while the Americas were still in stone age despite being an older population.

    In contrast, we’re finding out that all the “wasted land” in the US used to be curated foraging gardens. Whole forests regularly maintained by the natives to provide food year round with minimal labor for an exponentially larger population. The great planes tribes maintained a migratory lifestyle that was far less work than the farming efforts we use now. Conflict was frequent, but never to the level that needed technological advancements like Europe.

    So when Europeans finally got out of their squalid hell hole, anyone not on their level, which was really just china, was solidly out classed. What was india going to do? They were solidly in the bronze age and fighting an enemy that’s very arival might kill villages with disease alone and they never had to fight an enemy that could host long distance supply lines over seas which meant a counter offense could only ever push them out of the area but never back to the source in a way that could prevent them coming back. Like trying to play volleyball but your opponents can be on both sides of the net and you can’t. The Americas were even worse off, the Technological disparity made the fight entirely one sides.

    Finally, Europe took this “git gud” mentality as proof that they were superior in every way, so they implemented their way of life everywhere they went. Those forage gardens were knocked over and burned to grow fields of low nutritional grains because that’s what worked in Europe. The European diet was pushed everywhere despite the local diet being better in most cases. The European work ethic became the standard with no realization that it was born out of desperately struggling to survive and adaptation to any other location would have greatly improved their quality of life.

    And all of it still lasts to this day. Half of the things we classify as weeds are edible foods that were dietary staples. Our work life balance, sleep schedule, housing styles, land distribution, hierarchy, are all descendant of feudalism. The whole reason for the midwest dust bowl was because they tried to force Europeans farming tactics into the region with no consideration for the difference between regions.

    Of course, I’m not a historian. It’s just a hunch. I’m a fan of history and it was an interesting comparison to see how closely the European exceptionalism mindset aligned with the souls like git gud attitude that a specific subset of gamers developed at the height of their popularity.

    • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      This was a fascinating read. As someone with a strong disdain for European ideals (love the socialism, hate how they got there) I was ready to raise my pitchfork at fhe start but this… this makes sense. Europeans have a scarcity mindset and when they came to places that didnt need that as much they turned into the seagulls from finding nemo. And as a result they decimated my people and millions of other peoples across the globe like mine who seemed to have shit better figured out socially.

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Honestly, having been learning a lot about Indigenous cultures in the Americas lately, even European socialism can be seen as done the hard way. Most of the north American tribes had a culture of meeting the needs of everyone. Native Mexicans had a social welfare system that effectively made care for the young and infirm a community activity.

        • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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          17 hours ago

          Who could’ve known that community resources actually benefitted the community? What a radical and crazy idea it would never work

          /s

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      16 hours ago

      Between Europeans and the Americans, the Americans lacked pack animals and a region which could create bronze. Also, due to the European exposure to pack animals and other reasons, lethal diseases went mainly from Europeans to the Americans instead of the other way around. It also isn’t a good sign when a foreign civilization has the technology to show up at your shores while your civilization doesn’t.

      Between Europe and the rest of the Old World, Europe wasn’t able to colonize the rest of the old world until after the Industrial Revolution started. The Industrial Revolution started in Europe mainly due to increased state competition compared to other parts of the world and higher labor costs making capital investments worth it.

  • anothermember@feddit.uk
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    16 hours ago

    I’m not crazy and I’ve never heard of it as a conspiracy theory but personally I’m not 100% convinced about Labrador, Canada. The only pictures I can find of the place are either pictures of scenery that could be anywhere, extremely generic, or low-resolution aerial shots of settlements, nothing that concretely convinces me it exists. I know it’s remote and sparsely populated, but there are more remote, less populated places that I can get normal pictures showing daily life a lot more easily.

      • anothermember@feddit.uk
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        15 hours ago

        That’s pretty typical of the pictures I can find; nothing that shows any culture or lifestyle that couldn’t be mocked up in a moment.

        Compare, for example, an image search for Tristan da Cunha (a far more remote, less populated, and less visitable place than Labrador) with one for Labrador, Canada. Most of the images you get back from the Labrador search featuring buildings will actually be of Newfoundland because of search engine algorithms these days so discard those. The Tristan da Cunha pictures show people and life, even if they’re mainly of tourists, but the Labrador pictures are all like that one at best.

  • muxika@piefed.muxika.org
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    16 hours ago

    TL; DR: some people are just animals that believe in nothing.

    Idea: what most divides us from other animals isn’t thinking, consciousness, or the ability to create tools to adapt. It’s belief. Not in a higher power, but in existential drive. I think it shows a level of intelligence that sets us apart as a species.

    Hunch: some people are too stupid for this, and are closer to other animals than they are to us. They don’t believe in anything. Decisions are made by instinct and self preservation above all.

    I’d imagine that, if you were to analyze their genes, they might have traits from “another branch of the family tree.”

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    That putting lead in gasoline decades ago fucked human progress and we’d have achieved much more by now if not for that.

    • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
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      16 hours ago

      Fun fact: The guy who invented leaded gasoline later went on to invent fridges that use CFCs as coolant (Thomas Midgley Jr). Probably the person who single-handedly had the worst impact on the environment in all of history.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        13 hours ago

        He got polio and was bedridden, and he came up with this hoist system of pulleys and ropes to move himself around with, which went wrong and strangled him. So at least his death was sufficiently hilarious.

      • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        Too many people asked “can we do this thing?” when they should have been asking “should we do this thing?”

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    The reason it feels like we’re slaves no matter how much technology improves is incredibly simple, but invisible: money can’t be created unless an equal amount of debt is also created.

    This mathematically ensures that life is a game of musical chairs at all times. Interest serves to model the missing chairs.

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    20 hours ago

    That if you’re amazed by how good/smart LLMs are, it’s because you’re well below average. LLMs are still incredibly stupid and bad at things.

    • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      I’m required to use LLMs for work (we have metrics and I’ve been told I should use AI daily) and while every once in a while they are useful (i.e. getting examples for stuff that has inadequate documentation) 99% of the time they just piss me off. The output and results are seldom what I want and rather than spend the time to direct it to do what I want I’d often rather just do the work myself. Furthermore when my coworkers send me PRs that are obviously AI the code quality is pretty shit and usually doesnt actually accomplish what we need in a way that makes sense. As someone who has invested a lot of time in improving my coding ability and knowledge I see AI code and it makes me whince.

        • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          Ah it’s fine my boss told me that interacting with the AI is enough and that he doesnt care if I’m just asking it the weather. It’s a large publicly traded company and the AI push is coming from a lot higher up the change so sadly theres not much i could do to affect the situation.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Popular take here on Lemmy for sure., but just doesn’t really say much. They are as capable as they are. There are objective measurements. A qualitative statement about smart or good just isn’t that useful. If you aren’t impressed by the technology, fine.

      For me, I think the field is interesting. But I won’t let my hatred of billionaires or worker subjugation cloud my judgement about interesting technologies. There is a difference between “This is going to be bad and exploitative” and burying one’s head in the sand and repeating the “they aren’t good” trope.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        16 hours ago

        I’m not just repeating it. That is my first hand judgment of their abilities.

        I am a professional software developer, and I have been told by way too many people that these models are amazing at writing code, and yet every time I’ve seen the code they write, it has been unimpressive at best and absolute dog shit at worst. I was writing better code as a college sophomore.

        It makes sense though. They’re trained on everyone’s code, and the vast majority of code available for them to steal is absolute dog shit.

        The developers who look at their code and don’t see any problems are developers who themselves write dog shit code.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          You’re just objectively wrong. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can see their raw objective scores across numerous software engineering metrics.

          I’m a programmer that’s been in the business for decades. That doesn’t make me any more correct than you. I have seen it write some impressive things at impressive speeds. If you haven’t that’s fine. You just haven’t seen it work then. But it doesn’t matter what I have seen or what you’ve seen. What matters are data, and the data are clear when it comes to ability.

          Not ability per unit water consumed, dollar spent, or per unit power consumed, but ability nevertheless.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            16 hours ago

            It does write code that usually works, but it makes absolutely rookie mistakes that are like worse than junior engineer level. If that impresses you, then so be it, but in my 28 years of writing code, I’ve never been less impressed by something with as much hype as AI agents have.

      • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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        17 hours ago

        imo, llm doing well and being good would be worse situation that what is currently going on.

        Imagine how much more power billionaires would get over everything? They could up the prices and people would just have to accept it because they soon couldnt live without llm, they could influence people by manipulating the hidden prompt, they could just threaten to cut off anyone they want, have access to any system their llm is connected to. The current censorship could be extended to anything they like too. And people would just lap all that up and call anyone speaking against it a conspiracy theorist or whatever.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          I agree what all that. Fuck billionaires. Off with their heads. That doesn’t change the performance characteristics of current transformers.

    • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
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      19 hours ago

      I would say if you can’t see how smart they are you’re lower on the curve. Both can be correct.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        14 hours ago

        Yeah, that’s basically what I said. When you can see how smart they are, they’re unimpressive. ;)

  • gigastasio@sh.itjust.works
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    23 hours ago

    I have long suspected - and I don’t know where real music historians stand on this - that a few of the pieces of music attributed to Mozart were actually written by his sister.