myrmidon

9 ms·

181.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption. With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that. To reduce emis
182.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
For reference: Starlink is <$20bn yearly revenue (a bit over $1k/customer). Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealisti
183.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Colonialism in Congo would be controlling the local government, administrating/allocating mining workers and extracting raw material against the will of the local population. "Buying stuff from poor countries" is not coloni
184.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
To be fair, a lot of younger people also think that human extinction by climate change is a significant threat (it is not), while a lot of older people believe that a nuclear war could eradicate our species (also no).
185.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Regional emissions do matter for the conclusions you draw. All high-income countries already trend down in emissions. Global emissions are rising because poorer countries that were basically almost "no emission"/capita in t
186.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
The whole kinetic strike concept is 100% complete idiocy. There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept ge
187.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Agree 100%. Another point that people love to neglect is that for earthbased hardware, you keep all the material, and can recycle/reuse all the copper and trace metals somewhat easily. Even if space was cost competitive (which it rea
188.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Very interesting and detailed article. My main question is: Why would you really expect anything else? Sure, tools have improved a lot (especially battery electrical), but should this really amount to more than low single digit productivi
189.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
What do you mean by colonialism? If industrial production/mining in lower wage countries is "colonialism" to you, then I strongly disagree, and so would most dictionaries. Colonialism, to me, implies exerting direct political
190.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Neither leaded gas nor CFCs were eliminated by communism, nor did communist governments do a particularly good job at eleiminating their use in an extraordinarily expedient way or anything. In fact, leaded gas and CFC elimination in communi
191.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
> if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? In Germany literally "linksgrünversifft", which loosely translates to filthy green/left advocate. Which is, critically, completely unrelated to both com
192.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
The entire point of capitalism is to incentivise people to do things that other people are willing to pay for. Induced demand is a second order effect of that at best, and both ecological concerns and negative growth are demonstrably co
193.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Most of the far-right are idiot contrarians (my personal view) and they have no claim on capitalism. Just because far-righters are against sustainability does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist (or w/e) just to be for i
194.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
https://permacomputing.net/
195.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Discussions on colonialism and sustainable computing are completely unrelated topics by themselves (as is post-marxism). You can advocate for sustainability, right-to-repair, privacy etc. while being strongly capitalist just fine. The point
196.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
> [...] permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.
197.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
I completely agree. I find it generally remarkable that the whole sustainability/environmentalism cause still struggles to find conservative support, because those things are basically perfectly aligned, and preserving the environm
198.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
You can recognize externalities and deal with it just fine without abolishing capitalism. See leaded gas or CFCs for example.
199.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Maybe, but it was during school hours. Every court ruling on this decided that it counted as "school speech", which makes sense to me, similarly to how a school should be able to suspend if you misbehave on a school trip IMO.
200.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
That still seems somewhat defensible to me; there has to be line somewhere (you probably would want to suspend students advertising crack cocaine use during school, right?). And "I got suspended during school despite doing something th
201.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Yes. But there is still a significant difference between some agency snooping around when it shouldn't and police physically taking your things, and exactly that happened both under the current and the previous german administration, j
202.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Those, to me, are mainly authoritarian tendencies of the current administration. That is a different argument: The Trump administration is not really shifting the defamation vs. free speech tradeoff in the US (you could argue that it does,
203.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
I'm not saying that you can't protest in Germany, just that european free speech/defamation protection tends to lean a bit more against defamation. You call that a crazy outlier, but under the previous administration some ret
204.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the
205.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
> Are you trying to argue that current LLMs have consciousness? If I get to define "consciousness", sure. I'd go with "capable of building a general-purpose internal model of reality, ability to reason on that model (
206.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
This does not follow. Just because biological brains can be conscious does not mean that all of them are, the same way that not every computer is running windows XP. Why would you expect more concern from people about biological computing
207.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
I'm not suggesting to pursue AGI via Excel, this is just a hypothetical for a reason. The technical feasibility of this (low) does not really matter, but if you want to base your argument on it you are basically playing the "god o
208.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
> If that hypothetical spreadsheet emulated human brain molecules, did you not just invent AGI? And if we overclock that spreadsheet is it not sAGI? And if that spreadsheet says “don’t close me” but you do, is it murder? Yes, yes and no:
209.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
If you make a hypothetical spreadsheet that emulates a dog brain molecule for molecule, why would that not be conscious?
210.
by myrmidon 6mo ago
Dismissing the dutch agricultural output as "creative bookkeeping" goes waaaayy too far IMO. Your own article distinguishes local production and re-exports and those make up less than half.

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