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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This is the wrong aporoach.

    You should build a mockup site, use it to raise 2M$ for the startup behind it you just created arguing you’re about to collect personal data about the age, education level and place, curiosity, etc. with overinflated numbers on their real values.

    Then you hire a bench of students, or better: launch a competition for the best “fact you were told that turned out wrong” with a 1k$ prize that you eventually give to some biz angel’s investrent adviser’s child.

    Once data are acquired, claim the company is now worth 10M$ and raise that much in a new round.

    Finally, sell the company for 20M$ either to a tech company that will enshitify, paywall and crater it.

    You still don’t have your website, but now you’re rich and you no longer care about these things.










  • In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

    In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

    I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.





  • I use to say “all extremes call for their opposite”. Since almost no information ever transpires about this whole scandal, the opposite is to release all the names to the public. It was to be expected. If we were trusting the justice system, this would seem inappropriate. But we have what we have, and making the whole list public is the only guarantee we have that not one of the “bad” guy can escape public’s attention. That of course, is valid only if the list is comprehensive and some names have not already been taken out.

    It is indeed unfortunate that a lot of people who didn’t deserve and didn’t want any bad attention will get some.

    I’m not saying I agree with the move. I’m saying it was to be expected.

    [Edit made: grammar & missing words]



  • Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.

    Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:

    Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.

    Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.

    Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.

    With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.


  • Scientists have not been hyperbolic. If anything, so far, they’ve been very cautious abut their statements.

    I still remember reading headlines about “likelihood of global warming” then “probably caused by human activities” because 90% level of confidence is not enough, you need more data until you can reach 95% or 98% confidence before boldly writng “most probably”.

    But in their “probably” they predicted we would see more floods, droughts, violent storms, all of these happening one after the other causing devastation.

    And Ô surprise: we see floods, droughts and storms following each other and causing devastation. Yet our leaders will claim “no one could have predicted all of that would happen at once!”.

    Now they start telling us our civilization could collapse (“could” must be what? 75% confidence level???)

    We’re going to spend 20-25 years claiming they exagerate, another 20-25 years saying “well, they maybe right, but we can’t change things too fast because that would be unreasonable and the people would not accept it”.

    By the time, we will start reading articles stating no matter what we do now, we can only push out the end a bit, but we’re doomed. And the first reactions will be “those damned scientists always exagerate and use hyperboles”.