stupendousyappi · HackerTrans

stupendousyappi

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stupendousyappi

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I don't blame them for using a different config language, k8s style YAML sucks, which is why half of the k8s ecosystem is tools to generate it for you. And I believe Agent and Alloy are meant to be installable outside k8s as well. I do think it would have been less confusing to just call this product Agent 3.0 instead of Alloy, but I'm not too concerned about naming decisions.

stupendousyappi

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Wow, I wish I'd discovered this about 12 hours ago. I just built a new PC yesterday and started installing and configuring Silverblue today, and basically everything I spent this afternoon on is automated by this project. Getting VSCode devcontainers working with Silverblue + Distrobox in particular would have saved me some time. Since I'm not particularly invested in my Silverblue setup yet, I'm installing this now.

stupendousyappi

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

This is how I feel about Vlad's statement on their Discord that he wants to provide email services. That strikes me as a big project in terms of both development and operations, somewhat contrary to their privacy focus, and not something that their users are asking for (on Discord, I'd say that most commenters said they were unlikely to use it any time soon, switching would be too much of a hassle). And while I subscribe to Kagi and love the search product, they're still a tiny company with no long term track record, and far from what I would feel comfortable trusting with my email, which IMO is much more sensitive than my search history. Meanwhile, although Kagi Search already reliably beats Google IMO, there's still a ton of stuff they could do to improve their main product.

stupendousyappi

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Bamboo grows faster in compatible climates.

stupendousyappi

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

The benefits described sound contradictory to me. If you're removing enough heat to reduce the likelihood of Yellowstone erupting, you're removing enough to reduce the power output of the plant. Perhaps there's way to balance those two outcomes, but I know that other geothermal plants have sucked their heat reservoirs dry over decades of use. I suppose you could do a better job of matching the rate of heat extraction of the rate of natural regeneration, but I imagine that would enormously reduce the potential output of the plant, and that's not an issue this paper addresses.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Only if the employees are already accurately sorted by value.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I'm reminded of George RR Martin's quote (spoken by Varys) that "Power resides where men believe it resides." Over time technology makes it easier for small numbers of people to control larger numbers, and eventually I expect AI to bring that principle to its logical conclusion, but for now, Varys's observation remains the foundation of modern society in most places.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Orcas are almost certainly several different species as well, but they remain officially classified as one until scientists agree on how to divide them up.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I've read that the the Hawaiian islands disrupted ocean swells in ways that Polynesians could detect even 1000+ miles away. In addition, the Hawaiian islands are huge and lush, and dumped a large amount of plant debris into the water, some of which Polynesian sailors would occasionally notice while at sea. I'm skeptical that those signs would have been noticable all the way from the Marquessas islands, but the Marquessas Polynesians were likely ranging 1000+ into the ocean themselves, which evidently was enough for them to deduce the existence of large islands in the general direction of Hawaii long before they discovered it. Evidently according to oral tradition, the discoverers of Hawaii arrived equipped with plants, animals and other gear to establish a new settlement- they knew the islands were there before anyone set foot on them.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I assume these are all currently non-standard APIs that Firefox will nonetheless be expected to implement? Does Firefox ever force work on the Blink team, or it is it only ever the other way around?

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

IMO, if that's true, it's horrifying. I think there's a great risk that AGI will lead to the extinction or near extinction of the human race.

stupendousyappi

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

They may be doing it to stun the animal.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

What is the browser extension incident you're referring to? Can you provide a link to an article or previous HN discussion?

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

I believe they switch to Hebrew letters.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

That's based on two very cautious geoengineering approaches that have virtually no negative side effects. If governments were willing to consider other geoengineering approaches, I think that number could be driven down significantly. My favorite candidate is ocean-wave-based olivine weathering, as proposed by Project Vesta. They think that, at scale, that approach could get costs down to $21/ton, plus reduce ocean acidification more effectively too. But it's more complicated and could have some negative effects, such as putting a lot of poisonous heavy metals like nickel in the ocean. But because politicians hate ever having to say that they're knowingly causing any problem, those avenues get starved of research funding, as we see here. But I think that, within 50 years, we're probably going to find a scalable CO2 removal approach for less than half the target cost of this program, and that basically could solve global warming, but because of political cowardice it's discovered 30 years later than it could have been.

Everyone wants to do emission reduction first and delay geoengineering as long as possible, when we should be doing the opposite. Even if the financial cost appears much smaller, it's clear now that large scale emission reduction is politically very expensive. Emission reduction is the clean, ideal solution that we don't have the ability to scalably implement yet. Geoengineering should be temporary quick and dirty approach we use to buy time, creating some problems that last decades in exchange for time to implement a solution for a problem that lasts for millennia. Assuming that cheap geoengineering techniques whose negative side effects are bounded in space and time can be found, but I think that they can.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Google certainly didn't support Amazon forking Android into FireOS. I believe that was just about when Google began migrating tons of APIs from the Android OS to Google Play Services.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Over the very long term, I see no reason to think that higher CO2 levels are fundamentally worse for life than pre-industrial levels. In general, plants are the foundation of the food chain, and higher CO2 levels are better for them. In addition, life depends on liquid water, and given that surface temperatures are generally closer to the freezing point of water than the boiling point, I could see how higher temperatures might increase the amount of land and ocean surface hospitable to life. The problem is the transition period, during which most things go extinct until evolution can slowly regenerate the lost diversity over 10+ million years.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

There are several others. I'm not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that the most significant potential negative feedback loop by far is the potential for increased cloud cover from increased humidity. It's evidently the most difficult aspect of global warming to model, although climate scientists are making continuous progress. In addition, the marginal radiative forcing of CO2 decreases with its concentration, which means both that increases in emissions do less harm as things get worse, and that reductions in emissions do less good.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Noah Smith has an article on Substack arguing that economists have largely failed to produce useful research on climate change, in part because of a preoccupation with carbon taxes to the exclusion of other research topics. The article is subscription only (edit: not true, see reply below), but his four big points are these:

* First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic. A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000 total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate change.

* Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap, with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is partly because economists don't collaborate with other researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate change.

* The most important model for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most important of which is that, due to discounting of future economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for recent technology advances on that front.

* Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are, especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this never, ever actually happens.

I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are pursuing alternatives to taxes too.

stupendousyappi

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Then hope the UK government approves the ARM acquisition.