Lugh

joined 2 years ago
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[–] Lugh 197 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (21 children)

I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I'm one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It's been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.

This is despite the fact we've permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.

[–] Lugh 189 points 1 year ago (32 children)

Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.

[–] Lugh 184 points 7 months ago (23 children)

As sad as this topic is, this is a much better way to go than a prolonged miserable painful death where you suffer the last months of a terminal disease.

[–] Lugh 152 points 3 months ago (7 children)

So the same people who have no problem about using other people's copyrighted work, are now crying when the Chinese do the same to them? Find me a nano-scale violin so I can play a really sad song.

[–] Lugh 85 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You know why Trump really hates her?

Because as a bishop, she can move diagonally anywhere on the board, but as a Russian pawn, he can only move one square at a time.

[–] Lugh 84 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.

Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can't you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here's a thought, if you can't pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don't have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.

[–] Lugh 83 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I'm 99.99% sure I'm dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.

[–] Lugh 77 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

This is what is being banned.

  • AI used for social scoring (e.g., building risk profiles based on a person’s behavior).
  • AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.
  • AI that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability, or socioeconomic status.
  • AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.
  • AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics, like their sexual orientation.
  • AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.
  • AI that tries to infer people’s emotions at work or school.
  • AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.

Almost everything on this list is outlawing what an authoritarian regime would want. How long before the EU bans the American Big Tech AI, that it seems is toadying to Trump to enable it.

[–] Lugh 70 points 1 year ago (28 children)

The Chinese automaker BYD reminds me of the famous phrase attributed to the sci-fi writer William Gibson - "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

Future EV cars will be cheap to own and run. Self-driving tech will lower insurance costs. You can charge them with your home solar setup if you want. They'll last far longer with lower maintenance costs thanks to simple electric engines with few moving parts. As their construction gets more roboticized it will lower their costs further. The batteries that make up a huge chunk of their current costs are falling in price too. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is set to cut costs in half by mid 2024.

Some people still think gasoline and ICE cars have a long life ahead of them, and don't realize the industries behind both are dead men walking.

[–] Lugh 66 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

DeepSeek buzz puts tech stocks on track for $1.2 trillion drop

Just a few months ago many American commenters thought their country was 'years ahead' of China when it came to AI dominance. That narrative has been blown out of the water.

[–] Lugh 63 points 1 year ago (11 children)

NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options.

Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon.

  • Re-light Starship engines
  • Achieve stable orbit
  • Dock with another Starship
  • Transfer propellant
  • Use transferred propellant
  • Dock with Orion and/or Dragon
  • Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon
  • Build life support system
  • Test life support
  • Achieve escape velocity for TLI
  • Demo propulsive landing on Luna
  • Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle
  • Dock with Gateway (?) up and down
[–] Lugh 50 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Worth pointing out that covering parking lots with solar became the law this year in France. A study there says that if half France's parking lots were covered in solar panels their output would exceed all of France's nuclear power stations.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/09/new-law-50-solar-power-over-parking-lots-in-france/

 

The new US President has used his first 24 hours to pull all US government support for the green energy transition. He wants to ban any new wind energy projects and withdraw support for electric cars. His new energy policy refused to even mention solar panels, wind turbines, or battery storage - the world's fastest-growing energy sources. Meanwhile, he wants to pour money into dying and declining industries - like gasoline-powered cars and expanding oil drilling.

China was the global leader in 21st-century energy before, but its future global dominance is now assured. There will be trillions of dollars to be made supplying the planet with green energy infrastructure in the coming decades. Decarbonizing the planet, and electrifying the global south with renewables will be the largest industrial project in human history.

Source 1

Source 2

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