matlag

Am I the only one who thinks that you could really please a lot of gamers by just taking old popular games with updated graphics, music, sounds and release as they were?

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI drops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.

Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.

Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…

This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.

Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.

So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-gnu-social-and-the-early-fediverse

Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.

Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?

By the time countries that could have built nuclear power plants would complete them, they will have collectively burnt enough coal and gas to doom humankind.

So: indeed, the world leaders didn’t try seriously.

I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”

10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!

No, we had cotton before we had 1billion cows, and it was working fine. We had corn before we had 1 billion cows and we were doing fine.

And other regions in the world have crops and never needed mega-herds of cows to deal with by-products.

We don’t need more cars because of all the oil we extract. If we don’t need oil, we’ll stop extracting oil. That’s not speculation.

Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we’ll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?

That’s the same reasoning.

Today we grow megatons of corn,… for different things, including feeding livestocks.

Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we’ll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.

We don’t have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!

Just how many times did you copy-paste that comment?! Are you a bot or a lobbyist by any chance?

You think that we started producing some grains, and one day we realized we had too much by-products and one smart guy said: “let’s start a cows herd so that they’ll eat these”. Sounds legit. Especially if you consider that eating beef the way we do is very recent in human history, and still inexistent in many parts of the world. Poor folks must be buried under the by-products…

So, since I don’t think farmers are total morons, I would rather imagine they would produce different kind of food, such as leguminous.

A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.

Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.

There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).

The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!

The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.

Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can’t rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.

That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can’t get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico’s gulf.

71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.

The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don’t count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we’re dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks…

Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they “take care of the land” is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.

But I wouldn’t blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.

Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would’nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.

Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5–7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4–5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3–4 -Egg (for comparison): <2

You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!

There are only 2 ways out of this:

• reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
• grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)

One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don’t need meat every meal, we don’t even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.

The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.

The third (and let’s face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn’t exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we’ll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.

We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.

Never seen that one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQdM369msk

Just add it to the list: “The ink used to print this warning is toxic”

There is pretty much nothing done in Matrix that couldn’t be done with XMPP. But XMPP suffers from multiple issues:

• The protocol is very well controlled, but the downside is it takes forever to have any extension approved, leaving sometimes features you would want fast in limbo for months, years, and clients/servers dev waiting for the extension to be finalized. The worst example is probably when Google dropped a group video implementation for XMPP in 2005 on the table, (at the time, Google messenging system was using XMPP) with source code, free license and everything. They would just have to take it and use it. Version 1.0 of the protocol extension was released… in 2009! Meanwhile, many clients were just “waiting” for the protocol before starting implementing anything. When the protocol was finalized, XMPP’s world could congratulate itself for being 3-4 years late on every other communication system. This story repeated recently with an encryption extension.
• There are many clients project, most of them are carried by 1 or 2 devs, each of them almost single platform.
• As XMPP is “older”, it doesn’t benefit from any buzz effect, and some of the “waiting for features” have worn out many adopters.

As it was said in another comment, there is a company and some investors behind Matrix, and with that:

• Protocol can change as fast as they need to implement a new feature. Worst case it is updated again later
• Having much more resources, they could develop a true multi-platform client with a quite consistent interface. That eases a lot the adoption by non-technical users.
• Being the new thing and with a bit of marketing, they had a buzz, and that leaded to more servers and more clients developed, though they all have to follow the company’s train.

Now, from a self-hosting point of view, Matrix has a huge flaw: rooms are entirely copied and synced on all servers from which a user participates. It takes only 1.

For example: if any of your users join a room with 10k users exchanging thousands of messages per day, your humble server will synchronize the whole flow in a local copy. There is not a chance a small server can take that kind of load. Last time I checked where they were for solutions (it was years ago, might be different today), the proposals were:

• Option for admins to prevent users from joining room bigger than xxx ?
• Wait for a new server implementation that’s lighter than the mainstream one? (still not released in prod to date, and won’t really solve the problem)

And for some positive points about XMPP:

• It proved its scalability. Whatsapp started as an XMPP server/client with no federation (don’t know how far they drifted from the base protocol now, though)
• It is extremely versatile. Right now, there are 2 leading project that include blogging/microblogging features and more

https://movim.eu/

https://libervia.org/

The last has microblogging, events, forum, ticket management, file sharing features, etc… Still needs a lot of love but it shows the potential of the protocol.

There are other projects using XMPP for whole different things (IoT, …)

No, I don’t mean to destroy life in the river. I mean to highlight the difference of impact between going from 90% of your capacity to 0% in one information to reducing from 90% to 80% or even 70%. Shutting down a nuclear reactor is quite a big deal in terms of operations. Restarting it is not like turning back on a switch either. Claiming a reactor was shut down makes it sound like a much bigger deal than what it was.

Looks like it’s happening already. Natural disasters are on the rise, costing billions, insurance companies start bailing out of some area. I was also wondering if international help would come back every year to address a fraction of the wildfire in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and soon pretty much everywhere.

Pretty sure the cost of the disaster is soon going to be unbearable and we’ll start abandoning places and infrastructures instead of rebuilding (not officially, of course, we’ll just “push back until conditions allow to rebuild” and forget about it as more disasters will occur).

It will be a slow death, though.

Theyve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low,

This is a fake news. Period.

Some reactors had to REDUCE THEIR OUTPUT because otherwise they would exceed the temperature increase they’re allowed to cause in the river, this to preserve life in the river. No reactor was shutdown because of a low water stream.

What happened last year is a systematic defect was found in an external protection layer, and the decision was made to fix all the reactors having the same potential defect at once. The work took longer than expected, and that caused France having very limited capacity for months, causing worries about power outage.

Not to say it could never happen in the future, but it didn’t yet.

So is it better to start a nuclear project and hope it can start reducing coal & NG emissions 10 years from now? Or is it better to add solar and wind capacity constantly and at a fraction of the price per MWh?

It’s better to do both!!

Nuclear is not more expensive than solar and wind. And today’s paradox is solar and wind are cheap because oil is cheap…

Besides, comparing the 2 is totally misleading. One is a controllable source of electricity, the other is by nature an unstable source, therefore you need a backup source. Most of the time, that backup is a gas plant (more fossil fuel…), and some other time it’s mega-batteries projects that need tons of lithium… that we also wanted for our phones, cars, trucks etc. Right now, every sector is accounting lithium resources as if they were the only sector that will use it…

And then you have Germany, that shut down all its nuclear reactor, in favor of burning coal, with a “plan” to replace the coal with gas, but “one day”, they’ll replace that gas with “clean hydrogen” and suddenly have clean energy.

There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems

So we’ll have very very exactly the same conversation 10 years from now, when we’ll be 100% renewable but we’ll have very frequent power outages. People will say “we don’t have time to build nuclear power plan, we need to do «clean gas/hydrogen/other wishful thing to burn»”. And at that time, someone will mention that we will never produce enough of these clean fuel but … How many times do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot??

I think you’re forgetting that once the waters from a dam break dry up you can rebuild…a nuclear accident has the potential to poison the land for generations

In the years to come, we’re going to lose much more land just because it won’t be suitable for human survival, and that will be on a longer scale than a nuclear disaster. Eliminating fossil fuel should be the sole absolute priority, and nuclear is one tool to achieve it.