fsociety999
Joined 5 years ago
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547
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72
Member since
Sep 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Okay, so it is a clickbait title that “disproves” the claim.
The bigger issue, in my opinion, is what about all the energy needed to recharge the batteries? Last I checked, most of that still comes from fossil fuels.
In addition, what about the environmental impact of mining lithium and other minerals to produce the cars? This article goes into that a bit:
https://therevelator.org/ev-batteries-seabed-mining/
I think there is a non-zero chance that when all is said and done, electric vehicles actually are worse for the environment than fuel powered vehicles.
There is also so much we don’t know. I feel like in one way or another, human efforts to “solve” climate change will ultimately be what leads to our extinction. Whether that is trying to send things into space to block out the sun, or mining oceans for rare metals to use to make batteries. Fun fact, the oceans actually suck up a huge amount of carbon dioxide. It would be pretty fitting if human mining efforts at the bottom of the ocean throw that balance entirely out of whack.
This is one of the problems with government mandates related to electric vehicles. All of the metrics they use to measure success are based on emissions while driving, but that is only one small part of the picture.
Comment · 3 years ago
What I find so odd about all this stuff is the target is very rarely OpenAI/ChatGPT. I understand it can be a useful tool, but if your concern is that AI has scanned your books without your consent and can generate new content in your writing style, then OpenAI is who you should be complaining about.
Somehow the project with tens of billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft gets a free pass, but a two person passion project that makes no money gets viciously attacked and killed. The same thing happened with generative art. The open source tools and smaller projects got served with lawsuits, but somehow DALL-E was not included in those.
Open AI is who people should be targeting since they are the ones who have all the money and the politicians in their pockets to basically stomp out any competition. My real fear is not that people find creative uses for AI on a small scale, but that Microsoft/Open AI builds a centralized system that works on their terms where you are forced to play by their rules and they decide what is fact and fiction.
I haven’t read Zach Rosenberg before, but I put this prompt into ChatGPT, and sure enough, it generated what I presume to be writing in his style:
> Could you write two paragraphs in the style of Zach Rosenberg arguing in favor of shutting down a tool that uses AI to analyze the text of his books?
Did the author consent to Open AI scanning the text of his books to generate new text emulating his writing style? Where is the outrage over that?
Comment · 3 years ago
I have received Apple satisfaction surveys before and the options are basically this:
How satisfied are you with your new iPhone?
* Insanely satisfied
* Extremely satisfied
* Very very satisfied
* Quite satisfied
* Satisfied
* Mostly satisfied
* Somewhat satisfied
* Neither satisfied or dissatisfied
* Neutral
* No opinion
* Dissatisfied
I’m exaggerating a little to make my point, but I suspect that’s more or less how they get these insanely high scores. Also I’m not sure they send the satisfaction surveys to everyone. Probably you have to have a history of purchasing Apple products.
I don’t think they are manipulating the data itself as this article seems to suggest though. I think the survey methodology itself is skewed.
Comment · 3 years ago
Previous hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136819
Comment · 3 years ago
I am not entirely sure why you are getting downvoted. It says right in the study
> Vaccine-expanded T cells were durable, persisting up to 2 years despite post-vaccination mFOLFIRINOX treatment
So yes, that seems to suggest you may have to keep going back every couple years for more boosters.
Comment · 3 years ago
Of course this isn’t and wasn’t ever about TikTok. The same way the original Patriot Act was never really about catching terrorists. When a bill has broad bipartisan support you can usually be sure it is not in the interests of the people.
I am honestly a little surprised they named it the RESTRICT Act as opposed to something like “The Internet Freedom Act” which is more in line with how they usually operate.
The bill is overly broad to the point where they can basically ban any app or service for any reason, and they don’t have to tell anyone why they did it. It also includes a section I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about:
> (K) e-commerce technology and services, including any electronic techniques for accomplishing business transactions, online retail, internet-enabled logistics, internet-enabled payment technology, and online marketplaces.
“internet-enabled payment technology” to me sure sounds a lot like Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies. So all they have to do is say that some Russian state actor used Bitcoin to transact and boom Bitcoin is illegal. You try to use it, 20 years in federal prison and/or up to $1M fine.
This is perhaps the most tyrannical/orwellian bill I have ever read. If this passes, Americans need to take to the streets and burn it all to the ground.
Comment · 3 years ago
While I agree it is a bit of a clickbait headline, it is all about the precedent when it comes to this kind of thing. I think you are severely downplaying the risk here. Using vague language like that opens the door for them to crack down even harder.
The government wants to monitor everything people do online and VPNs give people a way to opt out of that surveillance. It is a typical legislative move to add extra provisions all in the name of “banning the evil, Chinese spy app”. There is no reason to believe this will stop at TikTok. What if people use VPNs to get around other censorship that may or may not exist now? What if people use VPNs to access content using BitTorrent? Who is to say they won’t crack down on that that stuff next?
Governments love to take advantage of situations to expand their control think about what happened after 9/11.
Apparently this is exactly what is going on here: https://twitter.com/Fynnderella1/status/1640016692305711105
Comment · 3 years ago
I used AltStore for a while, but it’s kind of a mess. The project is not super well maintained, it’s buggy, it doesn’t recognize paid developer certificates if your paid account is linked to a business, it requires a Mail.app plugin to run, etc.
There is a community developed fork now called sidestore, which seems to work much better in my limited experience trying it out.
It still requires a bit of setup and you have to set up a VPN client on your device in order to install an app, but it seems more reliable to me.
I’m hopeful that Apple will allow sideloading apps directly in iOS 17 to comply with new EU regulations, but I guess we will see.
I think this is an overly simplified view. That is the main problem I have with all this stuff. It is too easy to repeat the established “scientific consensus” which is all based around everything operating perfectly in a vacuum. In the real world, systems are complex and it is often not nearly as simple. See, for example, this article:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natur...
It states
> The drilling and extraction of gas from wells and its transportation in pipelines results in the leakage of methane, the primary component of natural gas. Methane is 34 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat over a 100-year period and 86 times stronger over 20 years
And
> Whether gas has lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal and oil depends on the leakage rate, the time frame employed for evaluating global warming potential, the energy conversion efficiency, and other factors. One study found that methane losses must be kept below 3.2 percent for natural gas power plants to have lower life cycle emissions than new coal plants over short time frames of 20 years or fewer
As far as I’m concerned even if natural gas is “not a fossil fuel” on paper, if it leaks methane in order to extract it, it is no better, and perhaps worse than coal. Let’s say natural gas is only 25% better than coal when all is said and done. That puts us at approximately 50/50 in terms of emissions for the US grid (20 + 0.75 * 40) = 50. At that point, my claim that “most” of the energy still comes from fossil fuels is essentially true when you look at it just in terms of emissions.
Of course, it doesn’t take into account that the energy use in the grid has been shifting towards more renewable sources over time, but the idea that there is some net positive just from switching to electric vehicles, I think is far from a foregone conclusion.
Also, it seems everyone in the replies has latched on to my claim about the energy in the grid, but no one touched on the environmental impact of mining lithium and other metals to produce the batteries which will almost surely be a net negative for the environment.
I am not trying to trash on electric cars here, merely trying to point out that these issues are far more complex than the way they are talked about in the mainstream media, the scientific community, and hacker news.