FaceDeer

I’m Canadian. I would say that I don’t think much about it in terms of current events, I haven’t heard much in the news about it in recent years. And my assumption from that is that’s probably a good sign. There used to be a steady stream of bad news, and “no news” lies along the path in between “bad news” and “good news.”

I did see a video recently about Iraq’s plans for a giant new port facility on that little tidbit of Persian Gulf shoreline it has and road/rail link from it up through to Turkey, and thence onward into Europe. It sounded like a very optimistic development if it can be seen through to fruition, opening an alternative trade corridor to the Suez Canal. Anything that diversifies a country’s economy is a good thing, and anything that removes single points of failure in global shipping networks is also a good thing. I can’t imagine the Houthi obstruction of the Red Sea would still be a problem by the time that route opens up but at least it’ll be an option if something like it happens again.

Could it perhaps be that online communities are in bubbles that focus primarily on his failures and downvote into oblivion any mention of successes he might have had?

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No, it must be the money that’s wrong.

No, it’s opt-in. If you do nothing you won’t have it.

They’re not “pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not”, they’re explicitly making it opt-in. They gave a fuck about their users’ complaints and made a bunch of modifications to it.

You may still not like it, but give them some credit.

If you simply don’t want to engage in a discussion with him, then that’s fine, you should let him know that you’re not interested in talking about it. You don’t have to justify your choices to him, if you want to use a particular browser then that’s fine and if he spontaneously decides he needs to “talk you out of it” then that’s a dick move. Tell him that you don’t want to debate the subject and it’s no skin off of his nose so he shouldn’t try to engage you in one.

But if you’re asking “how can I convince him that he’s wrong”, well that is engaging in the debate. And if you’re going to engage in a debate you should try to be as open about it as you’d like your debate opponent to be in turn. Have you considered that perhaps he has some valid points and is not taking that position just to be contrarian?

Personally, I find that it’s pretty much impossible to talk someone with a strongly-held position out of that position. The value of Internet debates with people like that is that lots of spectators who don’t have such strongly-held positions may be watching, but when it’s a one-on-one situation it’s likely to be a futile and frustrating effort with no benefit. So I would advise going with the “don’t bother engaging” route. But of course, if you feel strongly that you want to engage, I can’t change your mind on that and won’t try. It’s your time to spend.

Decay turns carbon into carbon dioxide, a gas. Unless it’s injected into deep geological structures it doesn’t stay underground.

Roots rot too. Otherwise the ground underneath forests would have hundreds of meters of accumulated root mass built up over the millennia.

No, by this logic one just needs to take into account how long is required before you consider something “sequestration.” Ocean sediment, for example, stays down there for hundreds of millions of years before subduction and vulcanism might bring the carbon back up. So it’s not permanent but it’s certainly permanent enough.

Trees last for a couple of decades. And once a forest is established they turn over continuously, so the forest as a whole emits as much carbon as it takes in. As we see here with the boreal forests in the article, the carbon comes back out into the atmosphere quite easily. I personally wouldn’t consider it a very good “sequestration” method.

If you really want to use trees for carbon sequestration, a good approach might be setting up big tree farms and then sinking the harvested wood into anoxic lakes. That’d take the carbon out of circulation for a long enough time that future generations can figure out what to do with it afterward.

Forests in general shouldn’t be seen as a way to “sequester” carbon, trees are just temporary storage for it. They’re nice to have, of course, and serve many benefits. But not that one.

A surprise, to be sure. But a welcome one.

Russia kidnapped a ton of Ukrainian children and distributed them throughout Russia. So Ukraine needs to occupy that territory to protect the Ukrainians living there, clearly.

I should note, there are cryptocurrencies that also don’t use proof of work. Ethereum, the second-largest, switched away from proof of work two and a half years ago.

I’m saying they can do it. If you don’t have a sample then you can’t do it and the question of “rights” is entirely moot.

If you do have a sample, then questions of rights and enforcement and whatnot can be addressed. “What jurisdiction are you in?” Is an important first question for that. But if you don’t have a sample then we never get to that step.

Do you have any samples of his voice?

Proof-of-work has inherent centralization pressures due to economy of scale. You get more profit per hash per second of mining power when you’ve got a bigger mining operation. That’s not the case for proof-of-stake.

Seems like lemmy.ml is really collapsing in on itself. Overall not good for the general health of the fediverse.

I’d argue that a biased overly-centralized instance like that collapsing in on itself is good for the general health of the Fediverse.

there needs to be some kind of accountability/ redress if open & free communities are going to be a long term project.

The redress is having lots of servers to switch to, much like how on Reddit the redress was “start your own subreddit if the one you’re on is moderated poorly.” I can’t imagine any system that would let you “take control” of some other instance without that being ridiculously abusable.

Shush, this is an opportunity for people to dump on Microsoft, if you take it from them they’ll turn on you.

The Ukrainians are busy sinking ships in the Black Sea, I’d rather let them focus on that. So I’d rather see Putin send his stuff off to a remote theatre and then have it destroyed by others out there.

Not necessarily. Curation can also be done by AIs, at least in part.

As a concrete example, NVIDIA’s Nemotron-4 is a system specifically intended for generating “synthetic” training data for other LLMs. It consists of two separate LLMs; Nemotron-4 Instruct, which generates text, and Nemotron-4 Reward, which evaluates the outputs of Instruct to determine whether they’re good to train on.

Humans can still be in that loop, but they don’t necessarily have to be. And the AI can help them in that role so that it’s not necessarily a huge task.

It means that even if AI is having more environmental impact right now, there’s no reason to say “you can’t improve it that much.” Maybe you can improve it. As I said previously, a lot of research is being done on exactly that - methods to train and run AIs much more cheaply than it has so far. I see developments along those lines being discussed all the time in AI forums such as /r/localllama.

Much like with blockchains, though, it’s really popular to hate AI and “they waste enormous amounts of electricity” is an easy way to justify that. So news of such developments doesn’t spread easily.