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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Nothing that high level. Different systems are running independently, some may be redundant to each other in case one fails. But run something long enough especially in extreme conditions and things can drift from the baselines. If a power off and on regularly prevents that it’s a lot easier than trying to chase down gremlins that could be different each time they pop up for different reasons.

    Even NASA I believe has done such resets from Apollo through the unmanned probes from time to time. Mentioning Windows, the newest versions don’t really do this baseline reset if you just shut them down, even if you disable the hibernate/sleep modes, while a restart does.




  • The 6 foot distancing that wasn’t really ever followed well was a compromise to keep things open for the economy while pretending we’re doing something. What amazes me is how there wasn’t any mandate to require air filtration at key points in places with crowds - like a Corsi-Rosenthal box, the DIY stores could have had these in the front with a how-to-build and they would have made tons of profit while supplies lasted. I guess 6-foot stickers and signage was easier and cheaper. Remember when some stores tried to go further and enforce one way aisles?


  • The sell of the paper is a new fuel storage medium. The positive part is that creating a fuel from existing carbon sources means (hopefully) less petroleum pumped out of the ground to contribute more carbon. The negative is that it leans more to that than the permanent sequestering, and I can’t seem to pick out a net energy use anywhere, but basic physics tells us it will take more energy to do the process in entirety, even if most of it results in large scale storage. I doubt that happens because removal of carbon vs. putting into a new form to be used is like burying money. Which leads to something I’ve noticed pop up only in the past month or so…a new term added. “Carbon capture, utililization, and storage”. CCS has already been very heavily into the production of carbon products to support their efforts, after all they have to make a profit, right? The only real storage done is a product to inject into the ground to help retrieve more oil. Again, they aren’t going to just bury the money, that’s foolhardy for a business.

    Sorry for more negativity in the thread. Just calling a spade a spade. Those who don’t like the feeling that gives can just ignore it and focus on the new science that will save us.





  • It’s not AGI that’s terrifying, but how people are so willing to let anything take over their control. LLMs are “just” predictive text generation with a lot of extras to make things come out really convincing sometimes, and yet so many individuals and companies basically handed over the keys without even second guessing its answers.

    These past few years have shown how if (and it’s a big if) AGI/ASI comes along, we are so screwed, because we can’t even handle dumber tools well. LLMs in the hands of willing idiots can be a disaster itself, and it’s possible we’re already there.





  • There’s no question I wrote the couple of things I’ve done for work to automate things, but I swear every time I have to revisit the code after a long while it’s all new again, often wondering what the hell was I thinking. I like to tell myself that since I’m improving the code each time I review it, each new change must be better overall code. Ha. But it works…



  • There is existing, and there is being effective for the advertised job. Carbon capture certainly exists in different forms and makes sense as an addon to an existing emitter. It’s hyped to be a lot more than what it does, even used to excuse more emissions growth, and that’s the snake oil being talked about. In the end the only true “solution” is to reduce the actual production of emissions, something that the overall world is not will to do. And I put solution in quotes because we’re decades behind on action that would be meaningful, having exponentially increased the pollution since then. We’d have to do far more than just stop emissions to fix anything.