snickerbockers

Joined 10 years ago

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Comment · 10 days ago
>The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything.

Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.

Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.

>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.

Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.

Comment · 10 days ago
It's because the corporations were all banding together to censor their opponents a few years ago, so they got used to the idea that large corporations are your friends. The left took an opportunistic stance on this instead of a principled one, despite the fact that they're the side that on paper is supposedly opposed to letting corporations turn into pseudo-governments.
Comment · 10 days ago
>Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.

IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.

>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.

Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.

Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.

Comment · 28 days ago
> the engine ran too hot for electronics, so they designed a hydraulic mechanical computer responsible for regulating various inputs

There was a proposal at one point for NASA to deploy a 21st-century automaton to Venus because the atmosphere is too corrosive for an electronic computer. Supposedly it would have delivered its data to an orbiter using a balloon and then the orbiter transmits the information over radio. I really wish they'd do that, I would love to see what could be done with mechanical computing using modern technologies.

Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of situations where clockwork logic makes more sense than semiconductors.

Comment · 1 month ago
Well you're probably right that this could reduce the amount of load coming from power plants during brownouts, but the article presents it as something that is going to protect against blackouts and I really can't imagine that working as a replacement for peaker plants. If you're in silicon valley or NYC you probably think of a blackout as something that happens once or twice a year for about 15 minutes but in a lot of the country blackouts are several hours or even days long and happen fairly frequently.
Comment · 1 month ago
Well that's fine if the goal is to use it to protect against brownouts like a large-scale UPS but the article discusses it in terms of a protection against blackouts which often are not relatively short durations.
Comment · 1 month ago
Power isn't a particularly helpful metric here, energy is. Power doesn't tell you anything about how long the batteries will last, it only tells you how quickly they can drain. Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.

>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.

Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".

Comment · 1 month ago
>The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.

>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.

Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?

Comment · 1 month ago
I dont disagree with you about this being unreasonable and unwarranted, but the US constitution quite explicitly does not apply to non-citizens outside of the United States.

>We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Although more generally I do believe even without the preamble it would still be implied that the US government does not have jurisdiction over the entire planet. We would never be able to invade a foreign country if their government was entitled to third-amendment and fourth-amendment rights.

Comment · 1 month ago
No it just reveals that the people in charge of star trek for the past decade are incompetent and have only a passing familiarity with the franchise.

Of course it would be absurd to cast that judgement based of what could easily have just been a bad season but by this point its pretty clear that nobody running the star trek franchise actually wants to be running the star trek franchise. Thats why every new show has some bizarre cross-genre gimmick and they never try to just make a proper star trek.

Comment · 1 month ago
Why don't we start with the animals then? It should be far easier to confer consciousness onto something which already meets the definition of "alive", has a divergent evolution path from ours, and displays many traits present in humanity such as emotion, a desire to continue its own life, and (to varying degrees) concepts of a social structure based around their immediate family members.

Of course thats not actually tenable because virtually every society anywhere on earth is predicated upon treating animals as a commodity resource in ways that are horrific even compared to some of the worst things we've done to other humans in the past.

My point here is that it is vain and narcissistic to let computer programs have rights above those of animals just because they can speak English and pretend to be your dream anime trad-waifu.

Fix the fucking animal problem before you compare my relationship to inanimate objects unfavorably against the trans-atlantic slave trade of all fucking things.

Comment · 1 month ago
So what you're saying is that it's conscious as long as the guy who made it wants it to be?

I know consciousness is notoriously difficult to define or prove to anybody other than yourself but thay doesn't mean anything which a third party believes to be conscious is actually conscious.

Comment · 1 month ago
I dont prefer traditional architecture because I have high standards, I just hate all these rectangular-prism concrete stripmalls and loglo highways.
Comment · 1 month ago
Am I supposed to feel sorry for jeff bezos' loss?
Comment · 1 month ago
Because that's not what IP law is for. IP law was always corporate rent-seeking. None of those arguments about fairly compensating people for their creations or preserving the profit motive were ever being made in good faith. The point was always to force you to pay for something that would be free under natural laws. And I do mean you specifically, because the act of copying information freely was always going to be preserved for them.

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