> It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
Which decisions though? The decisions to hold back nuclear, NIMBY solar, or keep cheap Chinese EVs out of the hands of consumers have a much bigger impact than whether you leave the lights on. Freezing in place with our existing fossil fuel system and fearfully minimizing our consumption will at best only slightly slow our decline.
IMHO, we must rise above fearful, superstitious individual moralism and boldly apply ambitious zero carbon energy science, engineering and policy, including fission (to keep things going in dark winters) and possibly even geoengineering (pending extensive research and small-scale pilots).
We cannot afford continued reflexive, neurotic rejection of any deviation from the status quo as we approach these tipping points. Continuing exactly as we are is not safe, nor can we return to preindustrial society. We need to build zero carbon supply for the needs of civilization. Including the stuff that people are uncomfortable with out of ignorance.
We need a plan. Neurotic criticism of every realistic plan is not a plan.
We cannot afford a continued overhang of 1970s Boomer environmentalist sentimentalism. Scientific engineering of the future is needed, not ideological nostalgia for an idyllic past we can no longer return to.
AI may not do much good directly, but it has the salutary effect of making rich tech companies care about electrical supply and distribution, accelerating the learning curve towards cheap supply.
yep. it's a total market failure. 20 years ago, carriers completely underestimated the tail of cognitive decline and priced it way too cheap. now the legacy claims are bleeding them dry, which is why new LTC policies are basically non-existent or priced for the moon. it's a tough lesson in what happens when the actuarial data lags reality by 20 years.
This could significantly underestimate the real impact. A single point measurement is perhaps a pretty noisy measure of long term average. If we had lifetime averages, the quintiles would be more purely differentiated by the variable of interest, and the risk would be as well.
Not great. It works but the performance isn't ideal for this case. Still the advice is sound. You can build a new analytics system when you're doing enough analytical queries on enough data to bog down the primary system.
If you miss challenge, the world has plenty more. Maybe it's not all your comfort zone, but if you try being a little ambitious and maybe use AI to understand a field you're not already deeply familiar with, you can continue to grow.
Nah, it doesn't mean they support the status quo. It just means some political tactics are pointless, incompetent, and counterproductive.
Political opinions about how things should be don't automatically dictate the actions that should be taken in support of those opinions. I can be mad about a law or a court decision and still have the good sense to, for example, not throw red paint on a lawmaker or judge.
Some behaviors just aren't helpful, and neither being right nor being upset changes that.
Maybe, but telling people who are speaking to their audience on the platforms that audience is voluntarily visiting that they need to shut up is even more pointless, incompetent, and counterproductive.
Notepad++ is free, open source software for which there are dozens of alternative packages of equivalent quality. The entire cost of using this software and benefiting from the work of the developer, is having to scroll past or close a few political opinions.
If the reaction, if someone vehemently dislikes this sort of thing, is to tell that developer to "just shut up and make your software" rather than to stop using that software? Then I think that's possibly the most entitled and hypocritical position that I think it's possible to have.
Notepad++ maintainers can do whatever they want. I don't care. I'm just taking apart this tedious, superficial, self-serving activist cliche about how not being an activist is supporting the status quo. Some people want change just as much as activists do, but they have different ideas about when and how it's helpful to be an activist.
The good sense is your judgement. At some point a real, direct, disruptive protest is going to be the right solution for a big enough group of people. Peaceful protests are just a "we're starting to get there" signal. It's not like politicians normally say "gee, lots of people don't like how I abuse power, I guess I'll stop now". It's all about being collectively upset enough about status quo.
> Whatever stance changes nothing .. is a vote for the status quo, by definition.
As problematic as the assertion "by definition" is aside, it should be noted that endlessly commenting about politics on internet forums effectively changes nothing.
I've been kettled by mounted officers and hit by high pressure hoses on cold evenings, something that also rarely effects change .. but that's a least a fun night out with people and better than wasting bits on the intertubes.
Whether it's a waste is not entirely up to you. There are plenty of people on this forum who are completely naive and live in a bubble. The chance that a comment they see her could make a lightbulb go off is non-zero.
So write good comments, neutral in tone, avoid preaching, stick to the facts, gently emphasize how laws are being broken without an excess of righteuosness, see the people whose opinions you oppose and find common ground to pivot to your position, etc.
FWiW I recall handing a guitar (I hear they kill facists) to Billy Bragg way back when he was on tour Talking to the Taxman About Poetry and FYI he's back, again, following Springsteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKOW2ZikGW8
I wouldn't say that avoiding political discussion yourself because you can't handle it is a vote for the status quo, but telling others not to talk about politics is definitely a vote for the status quo.
Doesn't that depend entirely on the context? Telling the grocery store not to carry dairy products is an anti-dairy stance. Objecting to dairy products in the vegetable section is not anti-dairy it's pro-keeping-things-organized. Debating whether or not dairy ought to be allowed in the vegetable section is also not anti-dairy, at least in the general case.
Unlike milk, politics pervades everything. It's not like keeping milk cartons out of the vegetable section, it's like keeping the letter "p" out of the vegetable section.
You've broken the analogy. The broad categories of food equate to the broad categories of discussion topics.
How attention works, whether training on scraped data is legal, and whether or not the latter should be permissible are three distinct topics. Only the third is inherently political. The second has a close relation to politics but is ultimately a legal question as opposed to a political contest. The first has absolutely nothing to do with politics in and of itself.
> politics pervades everything
That's exactly the problem. Sometimes I don't want it to. If I pull up a spec sheet for a microcontroller I don't want to be bombarded with propaganda pertaining to the political tug of war of the day.
The fact that mundane actions can have political impacts when considered en masse does not imply that we can't or shouldn't have spaces for discussions that are reasonably free of political topics. It isn't always appropriate (imo) to discuss the political impacts of the task at hand. It's okay to have a space in which only the task itself is permitted.
The spec sheet being written in English is politics. The spec sheets of the most advanced microcontrollers, the cheapest microcontrollers, and the most widely used microcontrollers are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics.
Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal to microcontroller. Politics is orthogonal to microcontroller, and orthogonal to maximum I/O current. The letter "x" is orthogonal to all of the above.
If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
Saturated fats pervade foods (but not all of them), the Flemish letter "a" pervades foods (but only 1/26 of them), electrical concepts pervade microcontroller spec sheets (all microcontrollers, but not all documents describing them) and politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
> are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics.
We definitely do not agree on that point. I mean sure, I can imagine a scenario where a company chooses not to publish in a particular language for a political reason. But I do not believe that is typically the case.
If I pull up a Japanese ActivityPub node and notice that the people there are posting in Japanese (not English!) is that political? I don't see how. They're using the language that is convenient for them in that context. So too a Chinese outfit publishing documentation in Chinese for a chip they only ever intended to sell domestically. Or perhaps they fully intended to export it but decided to cut costs by not bothering to translate the documentation. Cutting costs is a universal pressure that transcends all boundaries. Working in one's native language doesn't seem even remotely politically charged to me.
> If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
The point of my original analogy (that I feel still stands) is that wanting to categorize something for some purpose is not necessarily political in nature. Sure, it could be motivated by such. But it doesn't have to be. Perhaps you have a legitimate reason to want to sort your vegetables by fat content. It doesn't have to be political (though it certainly can be).
It follows that me not wanting political conversations in a certain venue is not necessarily a politically motivated position in and of itself. It could be (my intention could be to manipulate the discourse for a political purpose) but it doesn't have to be.
> politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
Politics influence the vast majority of human activity almost by definition. It doesn't follow that everything is political. Words are intended to mean things. If "everything is A" then what is the point of A as a category? Obviously categories are only useful to the extent that they exclude things.
Some day I want it explained to me why it's impossible to put controls on a computer. Computers follow symbolic mathematical rules, so, "you're only allowed to run this app for 30 minutes" seems like a really easy command to follow. But you cannot buy software that actually, reliably causes this to occur at any cost on any device.
It seems like there are three hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and forbidding things.
If there was an easy way for productivity apps to do that, it would also be a good way for malware to do that. It could also still be tricked, for example, by changing the system date on your device.
I bet that various niche paid software may have access controls like that.
It should not be very hard to write though, given that processes have predictable names, and executables have predictable signatures. Replacing the executable until the next time slot comes would additionally help.
Deploy a rootkit to make certain that the user cannot get rid of this software.
It might be easier and cheaper to have a dedicated device for that special thing, kept under a lock and key. Maybe the very insanity of such a setup would help reason overcome the addiction.
As a trivial application of the spec, consider that there are time-limitted trials of software. Once it's run for 30m, it'll never run again without significant intervention.
If you're the kind of person that's willing to go out of your way to invalidate the control spec rather than just abide by your own time control rules, you've got a more significant problem than you're willing to admit.
We don't need software that prevents running for 31 minutes in every 24 hour period, we need humans who are both willing and able to manage their time.
I mean, can you imagine being the kind of person that blames a piece of software for one's inability to stop using said software. Like it's somehow tiktok or youtube or android or linux or who the fuck ever's fault that you can't stop doomscrolling or gaming or gambling or whatever.
As a matter of fact, every software already supports what you're asking for. Run a script that monitors focus time and kills after a certain period if you're really so unable to simply close the software based on your own paradigm. Leave the script running and have it issue kills for the entire duration of your specification. [use=focustime/24h; while use>30m/24h, kill proc.exe].
There are already existing implementations of this that, for instance, limit a user acct to a certain amount of time per period. Imagine a library that only allows 30m/account. I just got out of an environment that only allows accts to access for a maxiumum of 15m with one sign on with a 15m cooldown. If you used it for 3 minutes and signed out, you'd have to get back in line for 15m. If you demanded using it as much as possible you would use it for 15 and wait for 15.
Is it your impression that scientists should be considered the paramount experts on climate change policy questions? Even though their expertise is on the climate side and not the policy side?
What exactly does the science say that makes it definitively a bad policy choice, regardless of the fact that policy requires the consideration of political and economic feasibility?
I do. My question is whether you are willing to share the justification for your claims with the room. By your own account, it is trivial, no? How long does a Google Scholar search take to pull up an article for a person such as yourself who is versed in the topic?
And again, my question is: does the science show that this is objectively bad, regardless of bog standard policy considerations? For example, comparison with the status quo?
That’s actually not the question that you asked, lmao. You can scroll up to see the question you actually asked.
No, the science doesn’t show it is “objectively bad,” which is why I didn’t claim it was. I said it is not an idea endorsed by many climate scientists (which it’s not), and that’s mostly because of the numerous unknowns involved with perturbing a highly complex system, the expected irreversibility of many of its effects, and the path dependence of making us perpetually dependent upon dumping aerosols lest we risk a global climate snapback effect.
This is a summary of the current posture of the climate science community towards this idea, which is not “it is objectively bad,” nor is it something I can spend my time linking you to a singular paper on.
That is why my suggestion, from the very very top, was to get curious about why so few climate scientists support this idea for climate intervention.
Any good faith curious person should pretty immediately ask themselves this question to begin with.
It does not mean we need to listen to said scientists in and have them exclusively dictate policy, but if “climate community doesn’t like climate solution” doesn’t set off enough alarm bells for YOU to go open up Google Scholar, then you are not earnestly interested in the problem and your “just asking questions” approach here is actually just profound laziness.
Hmmm. Well, if you won't give us an article, perhaps I should provide us with one.
Here is an article by a climate scientist at Cornell and the head of a climate nonprofit, which is positive towards carefully scaled piloting of solar radiation management:
I am curious if you can cite an article that is responsive to the specific plans articulated here, especially the plans to help ensure safety by scaling slowly and gathering lots of data. Which is a normal practice in all reasonable policy rollouts.
It seems you've forgotten the thread here. I'm totally fine with experimenting with this idea.
The comment I replied to said, however, "this pretty much proves we can somewhat slow down climate change by spraying certain chemicals into the air".
No, it doesn't![†] In fact, your article mentions how much we don't know and how many risks there are. I.e. it is not proven. There are still unanswered questions of literally existential magnitude. That's why the consensus view toward this amongst people who think about our options on climate all day long do not see this as a great option, never mind a proven one.
Anyway, as for your article, merely breaking an experiment into 3 phases does not make it like a clinical trial. This experiment has nowhere near the controls nor the limited blast radius of even the riskiest clinical trial being conducted today. So that's my commentary on that. Seems naive and/or dishonest to compare it to a clinical trial.
† Technically of course it's possible to lower the temperature of the earth via aerosols. But this article/observation didn't "prove it," it's not new information, and it doesn't address the main reasons not to do this otherwise obvious idea. Which again is why the scientific consensus is not currently behind it
> Is it your impression that scientists should be considered the paramount experts on climate change policy questions
Yes.
We should listen to people who use evidence and reason to suggest the best course of action. We should listen to people who have spent decades of their lives studying this issue for relatively little reward other than trying to make the world better.
We should NOT listen to semi-literate goobers who gained authority by being popular with simpletons they manipulated into voting for them, mostly through graft and trickery. Those people's opinions should be regarded as being equivalent in value to the opinion of your weird conspiracist uncle who helped vote them into power.
So your belief is that scientists are the people of evidence, reason, and selfless dedication to goodness, while policy people who are not scientists are incompetent and despicable?
I don't know. Is such a black and white group based worldview plausible? It's possible I guess, but I find it hard to believe?
Decisions made based on science are more effective than those based on politics in almost 100% of cases. Especially when the subject of those decisions itself is science (the climate).
I wouldn't argue that all scientists are selfless that would be silly. I would argue that the average scientist is less selfish than the average politician, yes.
Examine the motivations. Few people go into pure science seeking power or money. Most or all politicians do.
That brings us back to the original question: does the science tell us what to do? Or is it your contention that the scientists tell us what to do, and whatever scientists say about a decision is presumably the right way to make decisions based on science?
If there is scientific consensus that this is worth trying, and that the risk/reward ratio works out then I'm in favor of it.
Right now though, my own limited guess would be that the risk/reward doesn't justify it. The climate is a chaotic system which exemplifies the concept of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. We could easily kill millions or even billions of people with a little "whoopsie". It might be better to wait until the alternative is worse than that potential cost.
I would, of course, defer to a consensus of experts on the subject if such a thing exists. I am not one.
All well and good, but some Org Mode markup symbols are badly chosen if the purpose is human-to-human communication, and that is a profound demerit for a system that purports to structure and facilitate human-to-human communication. Most notably, asterisks are not good section headers. Pound signs are.
So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system.
YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.
What's cool about Org isn't the symbols, but the semantics of a tree with tags, TODOs (along agenda & scheduling), and code blocks.
Org had the problem that a single implementation gained too many features and went underspecified, making the language unusable outside of emacs.
Markdown has the reverse problem, lots of implementations with variance that leave you with the lowest common denominator (there's specs, but IMO having many specs is pretty much having no spec, just many implemenattions)
It'd be cool to see a language that standardised Org features, but tried hard to keep things readable/compatible with markdown.
Good outline of capabilities; one of the few in the comments! The tree with tags part is super interesting. I'm using beads more and having short codes for tickets is something I want my mark up to be better at, want to integrate.
I mention this, because I am not particular about which character symbolises what as long as it is consistent and documented.
However, some people do want things to look just so, and for them, few tools come close to Emacs orgmode.
One can certainly reskin the plaintext rendering to show up however one wants. This has the downside of "two systems" though, e.g. type ** but see it insta-rendered as ###. Although, I rarely type headings like that (character by character). I use the keybindings to "make header", "indent", "de-indent" etc.
Precisely. Emacs folks often talk about how incredibly powerful and flexible their system is, so working with a reskinned Org Mode markup system when dealing with other people's stuff should be completely trivial for them, right? They should consider accommodating less technically sophisticated people for whom different notations are a bigger burden, no?
Your wish is our command... I'd argue that Emacs package maintainers care a lot about usability, in general. This extends to when they craft a package for general use.
https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak "the complete audio desktop" by our blind and sight-impaired friends, for our blind and sight-impaired friends (and others who must necessarily use speech interfaces)
If there is a specific kind of person's specific kind of text editing need, there's probably an Emacs package for that.
The real tragedy is how poorly Emacs itself is conveyed to people. Mouse-pointing etc. works just fine out of the box. And as the emacspeak package demonstrates, at its core, it is a very usable and humane piece of technology.
The problem isn't customising your editor to use the symbol you want, but to have a spec that allows freely sharing files back and forth without trouble.
Org has no specification other editors can follow (although people have tried adding support to other editors and also writing such a spec).
Which decisions though? The decisions to hold back nuclear, NIMBY solar, or keep cheap Chinese EVs out of the hands of consumers have a much bigger impact than whether you leave the lights on. Freezing in place with our existing fossil fuel system and fearfully minimizing our consumption will at best only slightly slow our decline.
IMHO, we must rise above fearful, superstitious individual moralism and boldly apply ambitious zero carbon energy science, engineering and policy, including fission (to keep things going in dark winters) and possibly even geoengineering (pending extensive research and small-scale pilots).
We cannot afford continued reflexive, neurotic rejection of any deviation from the status quo as we approach these tipping points. Continuing exactly as we are is not safe, nor can we return to preindustrial society. We need to build zero carbon supply for the needs of civilization. Including the stuff that people are uncomfortable with out of ignorance.
We need a plan. Neurotic criticism of every realistic plan is not a plan.
We cannot afford a continued overhang of 1970s Boomer environmentalist sentimentalism. Scientific engineering of the future is needed, not ideological nostalgia for an idyllic past we can no longer return to.
AI may not do much good directly, but it has the salutary effect of making rich tech companies care about electrical supply and distribution, accelerating the learning curve towards cheap supply.
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