myrmidon

4 ms·

31.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
Diesel for agricultural use is subsidised almost everywhere in the west to some degree. France removed taxes on non-road diesel this year and paid per-liter-subsidies on top. Keeping independent local agriculture is quite existential for an
32.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
Agreed. Interesting fact: If you price CO2 at <$100/ton and assume that (ballpark) 2000 Gt of emissions (starting now) already lead to very severe consequences (this is quite generous), then you are pricing "somewhat intact cli
33.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
Is there any reason to assume they are not doing the same (ingesting books that they hold no rights to into training data)? From the copyright holders point of view, it is simply much easier to prosecute western companies.
34.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
> You can fix companies by voting a government too Indirectly only. This is typically also always too late; instead of doing "the right thing" in the first place, companies are disincentivized by regulation from doing "bad
35.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
I understand the sentiment, but your government you can actually fix by voting. If Apple (or another large international company) suffers from decreasing margins, gets a new CEO and decides to turn the data it sits on into money there is ab
36.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
It's "move fast and break things" in action. But Anthropic alone paid >$1bn for copyright violations, so they did not just get away with it. These hacking cases are more difficult, because from a legal perspective there
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by myrmidon 1mo ago
Julia is really fun to use, and I think they are onto something with the type system: Complex types interact much better across module boundaries than in most other languages; here's a good talk on this by one of the creators: https:&
38.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
There is a big difference between some sports association being greedy/unethical and elected officials abusing their position of power (especially when they sit in the highest positions and there are zero consequences).
39.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
The EU comission is not directly elected, what else is the AI supposed to reply here? Comparisons between Chinese and western media control/censorship always strike me as somewhat ridiculous; This is like comparing Guantanamo Bay with
40.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
> so all you need is for paying clients to not be motivated to redistribute the chapters in an organised way This is exactly what copyright is . I agree that you could work around this in a world without copyright (e.g. by watermarkin
41.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
Gravitational binding energy is too large. Project sundial was ~10Gt of TNT, but dispersing Pluto would require a billion times that (~5E27J).
42.
by myrmidon 1mo ago
The more successful "self published" authors writing web novels make significant money from patreon (>$20k/month); this relies on copyright protection (but interestingly, just a few months would be sufficient for that busi
43.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Those numbers sound insane to me. This is almost half a roll per day, for a single person? Can any average american or german person comment on how this actually works? Do you wipe like 15 times per visit, or is it just a very high amount (
44.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
German law forces you to provide address/contact info on any commercial website (just running ads qualifies). But this is often "abused" by lawyers to basically send cease-and-desist letters to small websites that don't
45.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
> Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge omino
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by myrmidon 2mo ago
If you need to denigrate pure context as "whataboutism", then maybe your core argument is trash? I mean, sure, lets not build datacenters that are 100% evaporation-cooled into each desert-oasis. But if general water availability i
47.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground). Even if you use such an extremely conserv
48.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Completely agree. Specifically: If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you , but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent e
49.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
> You are an economist, aren't you? No. I do embedded software engineering for a living. I use (in my view) HN appropriate levels of jargon (because lots of people here are involved with getting people to pay for some newfangled clo
50.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
I think this is disingenuous framing. Credit card rewards are not a mechanism to shift wealth towards premium card holders (this is a negligible distraction), they exist purely to increase revenue/conversion rate, by decreasing custome
51.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Low Gini compared to the US, but mediocre for a European country (comparable to France, Germany, Italy; significantly worse compared to low-Gini regions like Scandinavia).
52.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
They were pretty obviously hoping to find a specific crime to accuse him of (because he is a protester against the Atlanta "Cop City" thing). But no respectable judge would ever have issued a search warrant on the basis of &quot
53.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
There is no duty to keep a copy of messages and private data on your phone for the FBI to peruse at its leisure. Quite the opposite, actually (according to the constitution). It is pretty clear to me that law enforcement conspired to abuse
54.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Because it is politically much easier to just spend on medicare, social security and military than it is to raise taxes to cover that spending? Interest on debt is already a double-digit percentage of spending, so the problem gets worse b
55.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Never surpass in what exactly? If you look at absolute numbers ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us... ), it seems likely that China will surpass the US economy pretty soon (they're a lot
56.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
China has a massive demographic problem in the near future (after 2040ish), and it is extremely unlikely (IMO) that it is going to catch up/surpass the US in GDP per capita within the next decades. But its relative GDP growth has been
57.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Put a significant price on CO2 emissions (think like $300+/ton, instead of <$100), then tax every import from countries that take insufficient actions (or run a low CO2 emission price). Likewise, tax any export into countries that
58.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Erasing any datacenter ever built (and planned) would do almost nothing to stop climate change. What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel. Very effective ways
59.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Absolutely. Gas is a lot less problematic than coal. But my point is that it fills (in China) a very similar role for the electric grid and countries don't get to choose what fossils are in their soil. The US using relatively more gas
60.
by myrmidon 2mo ago
Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China). Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and polit

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