There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

admiralteal

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

admiralteal ,

Counterpoint: electrifying homes is also a huge cost savings in general once you are at the point where you're willing to forgo that big gas furnace in favor of an efficient heat pump system.

Cookers use very little gas. It's really only water heaters and furnaces that use a lot of it, and heat pump units are incredibly efficient for both those tasks. Though I will admit that the noise a heat pump water heater makes is just atrocious and you'll need to figure out if your can manage that in your life (e.g., by setting it to only run at night, when you're out of the house, or putting it somewhere far away from where you spend time).

Keeping a gas hookup at $15+/month for a single appliance like a water heater or range is an expense a lot of people can and should trim, but instead they treat it like a sunk cost and think "well I have this one appliance, so I may as well get MORE gas appliances". Which is intended. The whole "now you're cooking with gas" campaign and all the nonsense ad campaigns about how gas ranges cook better than electric* was a deliberate (astroturf) marketing campaign from natural gas utilities because they knew that keeping electric cookers in the house would stop people from abandoning the appliances that ACTUALLY use gas but were hard to get people passionate about. This isn't a conspiracy theory; we have the memos and POs.

  • the difference is at best unnoticeable to the average cook and I truly believe the performance is worse, especially when factoring in time spent cleaning. Electric ovens are flatly better and modern electric cook tops work super well, even if not induction.
admiralteal ,

Even modern radiant electric boils water faster (pretty typical for even a pretty low-end electric top to have a 3500-5000W quick boil burner). And induction or a kettle both do it a near order of magnitude faster. Not to mention none of them hugely heat up the room or require a superpower ventilator that sucks out your conditioned air. If boiling water fast is the task you care about, gas is almost certainly the worst choice. At least for home use.

Commercial kitchens are a different story that isn't even part of the discussion. Even with three-phase power, to run an all-electric mid size-large commercial kitchen would likely require some crazy service level that wouldn't be available in many places. It'll be a while before that is an option.

admiralteal ,

Man, it would be great if highly-potent fentanyl that could be administered by just skin contact were available to addicts. Think of how many public health problems disappear by eliminating the need to inject. Not to mention you should be able to get very consistent dosing by just counting patches.

There are fentanyl formulations for patch administration, but they have WAY less potency and are quite niche in application. Not something that has recreational application.

I don't know of any drug that makes drug enforcement police less cowardly, though.

Judge who signed off on raid of Kansas newspaper is facing a complaint about the decision (www.cnn.com)

The judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the raid of a newspaper office in Marion, Kansas, is facing a complaint about her decision and has been asked by a judicial body to respond, records shared with CNN by the complainant show.

admiralteal ,

The penalty for searching without a warrant is that evidence acquired is inadmissible. Sometimes. Sometimes not even that. Typically, that's fucking it. So it doesn't really matter that the search was illegal once the property is returned. Mostly, the penalties for the police are just political ones.

If there are some provable damages, the person who's civil rights were damaged might be able to sue, though with qualified immunity even that is a very, very uphill battle. SCOTUS rules against plaintiffs in cases like that routinely because the SCOTUS is very, very pro-police. They routinely rule that making things harder for the police & prosecutors is too high a price to pay for protecting civil rights. See, for example, Van Buren vs US or Arizona v. Gant.

admiralteal ,

Church housing used to be a part of the service that "missing middle" represents. Not literally stuff in the middle, but housing products that are largely not allowed anymore. They used to supply at the lower end that we now have to rely on extremely inefficient institutions like shelters to do.

All housing that gets built is good for the housing crisis. But what's particularly good is building housing at Market slices where there is currently nothing.

admiralteal ,

Absolutely. And if the state were offering that safety net earnestly there would be no need for anyone like the church to offer it today. But when the church stopped being the public safety net, the bottom end of housing significantly just dropped out.

We had the idiotic belief that everyone would be living in the suburbs with a two-car garage so we built our society around the idea that very little else needed to exist other than detached single-family homes in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

I'd much rather see serious pushes towards legitimate public/social housing rather than empowering third parties with their own goals and motivations to supply the thing we need. But at the moment I'll take whatever we can get.

admiralteal ,

Never underestimate how much of the current crisis is caused by people who think or thought they were doing good. Prejudiced idiots with good intentions is the chorus in the song of history and something we must always be cautious not to fall into ourselves.

A lot of the people responsible for driving the "suburban experiment" in the 50s/60s would've self-identified as science-minded progressive urbanists in their day. They weren't, but they probably genuinely thought they were. It was easy enough to not realize how awful their "science" was, how brutally regressive the policies were (especially for how they affected poor and vulnerable populations). They didn't understand the environmental catastrophe it represented or the financial timebomb it set ticking. They thought they were building better cities for a brighter tomorrow that would benefit everyone.

Just because the effect was "I got mine, fuck you" does not mean that was the goal. A lot of these people didn't even consider the downsides of these policies because there were vanishingly few major voices challenging them. Yeah, there was also a lot of capital interest involved and undeniably a lot of legitimate conspiracy (especially re: trolleycar destruction), along with a VERY stateist postwar news media that give us a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but the reality is that the zeitgeist was pretty seriously bought in.

That's a big reason organizations like Strong Towns push so hard to try and upend the current development pattern -- return cities to slower, organic, community-driven growth instead of large top-down projects. It's because we often have terrible missteps when we jump in and start wildly building all the new hotnesses.

admiralteal ,

I couldn't live in the country. Too inconvenient with too few upsides. I've spent years in New Hampshire 35 minutes on the highway from everything (meaning a kmart and a massive Hannaford store and nearly zero locally run businesses) and it was awful. I hate every single trip needing to be a planned special occasion.

My city is an under 3 story mix of single and multifamily homes with a loose grid and a lot to do. A handful of medium sized buildings in a walkable downtown. Dead silent at night, busy in the dayz always somewhere open to grab something when late at night. That's my view of a proper place to live. But property values are going insane and the exurbs are growing fast and bringing with them traffic congestion and stupid politics, so I know I'll need to fight to keep it a great place in the future.

admiralteal ,

I suspect the list of people who switched to Chrome from Firefox, especially within the last decade, is vanishingly small.

In the early days of Chrome, it was svelt and lightweight compared to Opera or Firefox, but IE had the vast, vast, vast market share. Chrome handled tabs in a really cool way (the way ALL browsers now do it, putting them right in the application title bar in place of menus). The light touch and nice tabs made it worthwhile to switch at the time. And frankly, Blink was better than Gecko. But even then, the goal of all of the browser wars was to get people off of IE. IE didn't respect web standards and made it flat-out hard to build websites. Switching someone to Chrome from IE was super easy so many people were encouraged to do so.

For most of its life, people were switching from IE (and Safari) to Chrome. Not Firefox to Chrome.

Nowadays, Chrome is just everywhere. People know it, and it still has a fairly-undeserved reputation as being better than the default browser (Edge/Safari).

So the reason this feels so illogical to you is because that scenario just... wasn't happening.

admiralteal ,

Enshitification

admiralteal ,

I'm not entirely sure that seven's catsuit was really what boosted ratings with adding her to the crew though.

The fact is, she was a good character with interesting development. She put life back into a kind of meh show and quickly became one of the stars over most of the original crew.

But ratings was, without question, the intent of that stupid outfit. It just makes me sad to think back that they might not have needed it.

admiralteal ,

The older I get the more I realize the luddites & saboteurs were definitely on to something.

admiralteal ,

There should be no such thing as a routine traffic stop. That kind of adversarial police interaction should NOT be happening to citizens behaving normally. It should be reserved only for people behaving in a truly deviant way, which modest speeding is not. Normalizing this kind of interaction is part of what it means to be in a police state.

You can automate highway speed enforcement for a lot cheaper than the wage of police officers sitting and waiting at a trap all day, and will catch everyone instead of just a bunch of arbitrarily (or worse) chosen randos from the pack.

For outside of highways, you can still automate speed enforcement, but you also need to be designing roads that discourage speeding. Current ASHTO/MUDCD rules do the opposite, constantly pushing roads to have higher speeds in pursuit of better letter grades even though this represents a constant one-way ratchetting of road danger.

The purpose of road rules, including speed limits, needs to be SAFETY, not funding. Pretty much every municipality outside of the US that pursues vision zero programs does so primarily with engineering rather than enforcement, and when enforcement is used, camera-based enforcement is more effective and less likely to murder some random person of color.

admiralteal ,

I disagree. Strongly.

Good road designs self-enforce safety.

There's only a short list of things that ROUTINELY get people pulled over.

Speeding, which is better enforced by cameras than cops. Relying on human enforcement means people pull the lever on the gamble. Automated enforcement means you will get caught, and there's no better deterrent to crime than that. And road design is STRONGLY correlated with prevailing speed. You can calm a road with better designs -- if a road is rife with routine dangerous speeding, most likely it's the engineer's fault for putting in a racetrack instead of a street.

Running red lights. Same as above.

Vehicles out-of-spec. Expired tags, damaged tail lights, etc.. A lot of this stuff should simply not result in a pull-over. Key in the plate then send the person notice and/or a fine in the mail.

Running stop signs/failing to yield to pedestrians. Not even that routine, but anywhere where this is a routine problem is SURELY an intersection that needs a redesign (e.g., roundabout treatment, traffic calming) to eliminate bad behavior.

DUI. This is deviant and unacceptable behavior. Cops should be enforcing this and people caught driving intoxicated should see their rights to operate motor vehicles RAPIDLY escaping them.

Using cell phones. Largely same as above.

And there's one other routine traffic stop -- the pretextual traffic stop, where the cops are just making the fuck up some bullshit reason to stop you in order to try and get you on some other crime / violate your civil rights.

There's a litany of other common and bad driver behaviors that happen routinely. Failure to yield, merging on people, pulling out without looking, et cetera... but most of these do NOT generate traffic stops because no cop sees it happening and even if they do they don't give a shit.

admiralteal ,

There was also that Greek flight where they killed an entire plane load of people with hypoxia because the alarm for cabin air pressure was the same as the alert for arriving at cruising altitude so the flight crew didn't realize it was going off. And thanks to post-9/11 locked cabin policies, which has basically certainly killed more people than they helped, the captains weren't in proper communication with the rest of the crew.

admiralteal ,

"Multiple properties" is SIX or more?! That is so many properties. In a housing shortage, rich fucks should have to sweat to keep even a single residence unoccupied, but consequences don't start until six. It's the right direction, but that is still so bad.

Every city should just pass big ol' pied-a-terre taxes. Property taxes for a property operated as a primary residence by the owner should be a low coefficient on the millage rate. Property taxes for places with long-term tenants who call it their primary residence should get a medium coefficient on their millage rate. Properties that are not a primary residence should get a huge multiplier on property taxes. And unoccupied homes should be so expensive as to force a nearly-immediate sale.

Rent payments up to some reasonable threshold based on prevailing rates should be tax deductible, ensuring most rents show up on the city ledge.
This helps make up for the fact that renting costs more than owning in a way that targets relief to renters instead of owners without creating crazy incentive structures where rich fucks start selling their own homes to an LLC they rent it back from or other nonsense. Individuals can declare their rent payments absent any action by the landlord; totally under-the-table rent should be very rare.

All real estate transactions that aren't resulting in a property becoming a primary residence should have a HUGE sales tax.

Properties operated as a primary residence should have significant leniency on permitting for infill development -- owners living in their own property should have development-by-rights permission to do things like build an ADU. Development led by members of the community infilling in their own community should have a SUBSTANTIALLY lower bar for permitting than development by outsiders.

admiralteal ,

It's weird to me because the first time I ever heard someone being seriously critical of any absolute idea to free speech, at least at a high-level, was on the EFF's how to fix the internet podcast.

I'm with you. Their logic makes some sense, but it's just not practical or reasonable to me. I just don't see the slope as particularly slippery. Kiwi Farms was enthusiastically engaging in dangerous, heinous, and illegal activities.

Perhaps we do need some kind of serious due process for this kind of intervention. I'll sign that petition or forward to my reps that letter. But in the meantime, I'm happy to say bye to this scumb.

admiralteal ,

And also stops Reddit from monetizing this volunteer-made content they intended to disrespectfully pilfer.

admiralteal ,

Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.

We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There's no hypocrisy in doing so.

It wasn't that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way -- they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.

admiralteal ,

It's your account and your comments. You can do with them as you wish.

That's the point. If you don't wish to leave them behind to be profitable to Reddit, that's also your choice. I don't feel strongly about your choice to do it one way or another. Personally, I nuked my 15yo account and all comments completely because I don't want to leave anything valuable behind to make profits for a company that I feel doesn't deserve them.

The point is, those comments were mine, not theirs. I don't want them selling them for profit, especially to an LLM mill.

admiralteal ,

I really hate the attitude that everything is exactly the same and that nothing is ever worse than anything else.

There is nothing naive here.

Reddit changed policy and philosophy significantly and that's what led to the backlash and lots of users leaving. You know that and clearly agree with it. And using my comments for display purposes as part of the community under the terms and understanding I had 15 years ago is very different than using my comments to train AI and their new attitude that started this year.

admiralteal ,

I'm not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don't have moderators.

I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.

So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.

Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It's amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.

But hey, here's 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.

admiralteal ,

That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.

Once in a while I'll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I'll close it down and get back to work.

I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.

admiralteal ,

This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don't buy that.

Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.

admiralteal ,

Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they're all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever

Nope. It's only this specific thing that I necessarily think they're doing a bad job of. And I'm right; they are. Their algorithm is a struggling baby compared to TikTok and YouTube at large is not a major profit center (and indeed may not be profitable at all -- but they maintain it because abandoning it would be too costly for them).

TikTok is so good at doing this thing that it is a profitable business for them. YouTube is struggling, and we can clearly see why.

admiralteal ,

This is a thread about YouTube shorts and its bad algorithm, dude.

admiralteal ,

The literal subject of this thread.

You're in here arguing with people without even reading the headline of the article.

admiralteal ,

God I hate so much the technowizards who think all of our society problems around cars are going to be fixed by self-driving cars. My dad always does this -- any time you point out the issues with expense and congestion near him in the city downtown, he'll start talking about how any day now the self-driving cars will fix it and won't need to park and it'll be sunshine and roses.

Nope. The geometric problems of cars are not solved by fleets of vehicles that park in huge lots at the edge of town. It may mitigate issues, but it does not fix them.

Want to get rid of downtown congestion? Putting people in automated cars won't do it. Only getting rid of the cars will.

The only upside is it will make it that much easier to get rid of mandatory min parking rules which are totally unscientific and should never have been codified to law in the first place.

admiralteal ,

For what its worth, lower speeds are one of the most straightforwardly effective way to reduce congestion. Road capacity is higher at lower speeds. Errors are less likely to cause serious incidents at lower speeds. Traffic controls don't need to be so aggressive, causing you to spend less of your trip fully-stopped. For most trips, going a bit slower has a completely negligible effect on drive times, especially when you can get most of traffic to do it leading to more laminar flow.

The problem is, only road design is effective to lower speeds. You can't just ask drivers to slow down or change the posted signs, you have to re-engineer roads. People tend to just drive at whatever speed feels comfortable on the road.

admiralteal ,

What's the "no" part of this? You don't seem to disagree with anything I said at all.

admiralteal ,

It's absolutely bizarre that you grouped Taiwan and China together in this sentiment.

Taiwan being a silicon powerhouse is literally part of a deliberate strategy by western nations, especially the US, to combat Chinese manufacturing. They were supplied with science and technology. They have the license agreements. They're one of the cadre of nations that are currently waving protectionist flags against the "threat" of Chinese manufacturing.

It'd be like putting the Dutch in the list. Except even weirder, because there is not any semblance of abnormal diplomacy/hostility between Amsterdam and Beijing.

admiralteal ,

Are you legitimately saying that we should treat Taiwan as the same as China just because its citizens are the same race? Jesus fucking christ, dude. Take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and reconsider that racist ass position.

Straight up Tankie shit, the rest.

admiralteal ,

Ah, who else does that logic apply to? We should treat South Korea the same as DPRK because they're all Korean, right? It's easy for Koreans to spy on other Koreans since they're all the same. And DPRK intends to one day annex South Korea! Ditto for Ukraine and Russia. I bet we can do a lot of these, where we racially categorize nations based on western cultural ideas that have nothing to do with local political conditions and declare them to be the same.

Fuck allll the way off you fucking racist fuck.

admiralteal ,

Always happens. A commitment to achieve some climate goal in the future isn't even worth use as an buttwipe. There need to be serious consequences for failure that go above and beyond the worst-case theoretical cost of the commitment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRB6rSDW5i4

It's literally nothing. Only ACTUALLY decarbonizing is worth a damn.

And to be clear, offsets in ANY form don't count either. The Paris commitments are to get to ZERO carbon. The only way it makes sense for a country to sell an offset is if they sell that offset at an equivalent price to what it will cost you to get rid of your LAST ton of CO2. Since the offsets aren't nearly that expensive, we know they are load of total bullshit. They're fraudulent. Double or triply so for non-national exchanges.

Carbon removal can count, but the legit research is almost always worse bang for your buck than just fucking decarbonizing.

admiralteal ,

I'll eat my fucking hat if Shell's follow-up here is to invest more money instead of less, absent state consequences forcing them to behave.

They are in the business of selling virgin oil. Anything they spend towards decarbonization hurts the selling of virgin oil. They know it. The rest of this shit is just advertising and they will terminate the campaign as soon as it stops performing. They can just do more adbuys for advertorial content through the NYT if there's any backlash.

admiralteal ,

It also has what is called the "leakage" issue in carbon offsets -- if one group of people were going to cut down the trees, get paid, and don't, there's still a demand for the timber/land. Some different hectare of trees somewhere else will likely get cut down instead.

It really is a rare case where the neoliberal logic has it right. We expect the cost of decarbonization to grow as we have less and less CO2 being produced. The first tons of CO2 to get rid of are the easiest and cheapest ones. The very last ones, the holdouts, are going to be the most difficult and expensive. In a paradigm where as close to 100% of carbon as possible must be eliminated, then any carbon offsets only make sense if they're being sold at an equivalent price to those last tons of CO2 to be eliminated. Because otherwise, the person who thinks they're selling it is really just loaning it out -- and the payment is guaranteed to come due.

So carbon offsets should be at least as expensive as, say, direct air carbon capture. Likely more, since even air capture may struggle on those last few tons of emissions. And that's assuming no scammy accounting practices with the emissions are happening. When in reality, carbon offsets is nearly nothing but scammy practices.

Duet AI for Google Meet can take notes, summarize, and even attend meetings - The Verge (www.theverge.com)

Another new Meet feature lets Duet “attend” a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click an “attend for me” button, and Google can auto-generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them.

admiralteal ,

The dubious usefulness of AI bots meets the almost unquestionably uselessness of most meetings.

admiralteal ,

Yeah, and even if it WERE truly intelligent -- which these SALAMIs are almost certainly not -- it doesn't even matter.

A human and a robot are not the same. They have different needs and must be afforded different moral protections. Someone can buy a book, read it, learn from it, and incorporate things it learned from that experience into their own future work. They may transform it creatively or it may plagiarize or it may rest in some grey area in-between where it isn't 100% clear if it was novel or plagiarized. All this is also true for a LLM "AI". -- But whether or not this process is fundamentally the same or not isn't even a relevant question.

Copyright law isn't something that exists because it is a pure moral good to protect the creative output of a person from theft. It would be far more ethical to say that all the outputs of human intellect should be shared freely and widely for all people to use, unencumbered by such things. But if creativity is rewarded with only starvation, creativity will go away, so copyright exists as a compromise to try and ensure there is food in the bellies of artists. And with it, we have an understanding that there is a LOT of unclear border space where one artist may feed on the output of another to hopefully grow the pot for everyone.

The only way to fit generative bots into the philosophical framework of copyright is to demand that the generative bots keep food in the bellies of the artists. Currently, they threaten it. It's just that simple. People act like it's somehow an important question whether they "learn" the same way people do, but the question doesn't matter at all. Robots don't get the same leeway and protection afforded to humans because robots do not need to eat.

admiralteal ,

A slightly compressed JPG of an oil painting is still, at least for purposes of intellectual property rights, not distinct from the original work on canvas. Sufficiently complex and advanced statistics on a work are not substantially different from the work itself. It's just a different way of storing a meaningful representation.

These LLMs are all more or less black boxes. We really cannot conclusively say one way or another whether they are storing and using the full original work in some form or another. We do know that they can be coaxed into spitting out the original work, though, which sure implies it is in there.

And if the work of a human that needs to be fed is being used by one of these bots -- which is pretty much by definition a commercial purpose given that all the relevant bots are operated as such -- then that human should be getting paid.

admiralteal ,

There is no question that if this bill is passed, some fucker corrupt crony like Ashley Moody will use it to isolate and persecute queer, trans, or black kids by labeling content that supports them as "harmful".

A bill like this will kill kids.

admiralteal ,

At least it's a democratic body. Way better than Musk being in capricious control of deleting speech rights.

How Many Star Trek Episodes Pass the Bechdel Test? (TOS to ENT) | The Mary Sue (www.themarysue.com)

I found this after reading and responding to this post here about early Trek fans’ prejudicial negative reaction to TNG. One of my responses (see here) was to point out that any fans of the progressiveness of Trek ought to have been mindful of the room for improvement over TOS, with female representation being an obvious...

admiralteal ,

Very, very little romance in it too.

admiralteal ,

Mrow

admiralteal ,

You're directing your anticapitalist energy at quite possibly the most anticapitalist organization on earth right here.

admiralteal ,

Congress members get as many votes for war as they have draft-age family members. For each vote they cast, they must enlist 1 family member. Starting with their own children.

admiralteal ,

No different than having no kids.

No kids/grandkids/niblings we can send to war? No right to vote for war.

admiralteal ,

Which benefits all local businesses, too. Instead of only having a lunchtime rush, they can have critical mass throughout the day.

admiralteal ,

Also high percent of techbro libertarian types.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •