What's missing is the fact that the public opinion regarding climate change is evolving really fast as well. In my country, not even a few years ago, people who didn't eat meat or didn't take the plane because of ecological reasons were really rare and seen as extremists. Today, it's more and more widespread and socially accepted.
Stepping out of fossil fuels means a great deal of industrial and civilizational change, which takes a lot of time. But things do change.
In these days, what we need is for people to take action (from voting and raising their voices in the media, to working on how to live in a sustainable way as a civilization), and promote a positive message that others will follow. Depression-inducing articles like this one risks to prevent people from believing in a decent future, and thus persuade them to stop caring and acting for a better world.
Not only the buttons but also a lot of parts which are electric when they really don't have to.
My brother, who has three kids, tried out a SUV which had an electric hatchback, where you have to trigger the trunk closing with a button. With a manual hatchback he could fill all the luggage in the trunk and just slam the door, without any problem. But now the electric hatchback would not close if the car felt there was a luggage in the way.
In the end they had to remove the luggage, close the trunk and fill the trunk from the side doors.
It is interesting to keep these numbers in mind, but these facts are not sufficient to think correctly about climate.
The earth is a dynamic system, and the rate of temperature growth is as much, if not more, important than temperature average here. A car going from 100 to 0 kmph in 15 seconds is definitely not the same as a car going from 100 to 0 kmph in 0.1 seconds in terms of damage.
the temperature rises described in the article (e.g. during the eocene) are about a few degrees every few hundreds of thousands of years. Flore and fauna had time to evolve.
Today we are talking about 4 degrees in less than a hundred years. That's more than thousand times faster.
When using a tool like Sentry, you might want to logger.exception(e) instead of a string error message, that way the whole stack trace with helpful debugging information (local variables...) is included in Sentry.
Become a volunteer as a first-aid responder. You will learn and practice how to react in a lot of unusual situations (kids choking, burns, wounds, people fainting...), learn more about healthcare-related subjects, and live incredibly unusual experiences. It's a highly rewarding skillset.
When I hear people talking about programming as an art, I usually assume that the decisions they make about their code tend to be about how elegant and beautiful it is, not efficient and valuable. It's fun and satisfying to write elegant code, but your company hired you to produce value, not art.
I've been looking for something like this ! Definitely interested (will you open source it?)
I'm doing this manually using Stylus for facebook and twitter. It's unbelievable how healthier it made my consumption of these sites. I couldn't find stylus for mobile firefox though...
Mandatory mention [0] of the amazing talk of Uncle Bob "The Future of Programming", and his timeline of programming since Turing. Fascinating conference
I have a much better experience of Facebook since a few weeks by adding #stream_pagelet{ display: None } in Stylus for the homepage.
No news feed. No passive content consumption. Still got pages, events, groups, messages etc. Can still use the website in an active/socializing way (looking for specific things, seeing relevant friends' notifications and invitations) but without being caught by the feed each time I come to check my notifications. Think I'll do the same with pretty much every social network. Content feeds are the worst.
It is true that the earth has already been warmer. We're reaching points that humans are never seen, though.
Second, the problem here is not only the total temperature variation but the speed at which the temperature is changing.
Think of the difference between a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 8 seconds, and a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 0.3 seconds. Not really endearing.
I would add it doesn't take into account imported emissions - when a country emits CO2 to produce things that other countries buy. I'm not really sure who is responsible then.
It's a think tank working on handling the climate crisis with excellent, pragmatic, efficiency-focused studies, without ideologies or dogma. They have recently been known to put some numbers on the CO2 emissions caused by the digital industry, that is less visible but very real (4 percent of total emissions, 4x more than air travel!)
They have Jean-Marc Jancovici in the management, who also founded Carbone 4 - a consulting firm working on enabling companies to make their transition to a carbon-neutral world. He's an original figure among ecologists in France because he pleads in favor of nuclear energy in France, to avoid emitting CO2 (it's mainly thanks to nuclear energy that France emits 7 times less CO2 for the same amount of electricity produced compared to the OECD). I highly recommend
his conferences.
I think the goal of the argument is to explain the following : the reason an exponentially growing and empowered AI entity is dangerous is exactly the same reason current big tech monopolies are dangerous and have to be regulated. The discussion about strong AI is interesting but misses the essential debate that is about current AI-powered megacompanies.
I'm tired to read articles written inside "Opinions" sections.(not that I necessarily disagree with it, you guys are explaining how this article is right or wrong better than me).
I would really like (not intended at HN, it's a general crisis in my life) to read more articles about politics that are neutral and factually oriented. It seems like 90% of the political content I read twists facts and build cheap, cherry-picked arguments to push for their opinions without any scientifical / logical humility (Discussing hypotheses, advancing honest counter arguments...). I am yet to find political writers / journalists raising questions without already knowing the answers to them. Real thinking instead of outrage porn (as another commenter wrote ; I like that expression)
Stepping out of fossil fuels means a great deal of industrial and civilizational change, which takes a lot of time. But things do change.
In these days, what we need is for people to take action (from voting and raising their voices in the media, to working on how to live in a sustainable way as a civilization), and promote a positive message that others will follow. Depression-inducing articles like this one risks to prevent people from believing in a decent future, and thus persuade them to stop caring and acting for a better world.