1d22a

This may be a perfectly coherent philosophical position, but speaks to an extraordinary level of privilege - many of these "crises" are real threats to the lives or livelihoods of people around the world, with outcomes hugely dependent on collective action of people who may not feel the first order effects.

Squirrels can't solve the problems they face, we, however can do more than "flap around and eat the fucking seed".

Privacy, however, is (or should be) a human right.

Living on land with care and stewardship as indigenous peoples often did is very different to clear-felling for agriculture or monoculture forestry, the strongest plausible interpretation would be that by "directly disturbed", the GP meant the latter.

To copy a previous comment of mine:

Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.

Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.

Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

> Why should there be any asymmetry behind creation vs destruction?

Entropy?

It should! The public (through taxes) shouldn't be forced to subsidize the cost of a parking lot. If the parking lot was valuable to the market, the opportunity cost of the land not being used for some other purpose would be priced in (either through consumers paying more for parking, or businesses subsidizing the cost for consumers as it's profitable for them to do so). Parking lots paying lower property taxes subsidizes economic inefficiency.

I'm already able to use tap to pay on GrapheneOS, just only with banking apps which use Android Pay, rather than Google Wallet.

Switzerland has prescription heroin to provide a safe supply to people addicted, as Diaphin (diacetylmorphine) 200mg. This dosage is huge and lethal for for someone without a tolerance.

How do you feel about laws, enforced by the state? There are likely plenty of moral things you aren't free to get up and do on any given day due to the state dictating what you can and cannot do on a given day.

> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.

Discussed earlier today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229

Consumption-based charts are much better, as they account for the actual CO2 emissions of lifestyle in the country (since offshoring manufacturing from developed countries to developing countries doesn't reduce the total emissions, even if it makes our direct emissions stats look better).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

See my sibling comment to the parent. Doubling forests won't do near enough, because the carbon we've burnt comes from millions of years of forests compacted into coal (among other sources). We'd need to grow millions of years worth of forests, which we just physically don't have the surface area for.

Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.

Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.

Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

To this end, I've been thinking that it would be cool to create a solar-battery powered ("off grid") server providing a self-hosted LLM service. Offline when the sun doesn't shine enough (like Low Tech Magazine[1]). At whatever size is required for every day, community-scale use (a friend group, a street, a club). Fix the data centre issue by democratising AI to such an extent that we can bring it into the hands of communities to actually control (and democratically decide their own level of censorship / alignment). Along the lines of some of Geohotz' writing.

Within a short time I think open source models will all be getting good and efficient enough to make it viable to serve this on 2nd hand hardware for cheap. All it will take is a nerd in every small community to pool together a few hundred bucks initial outlay, and then ongoing costs are near free without electricity to pay for.

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Not to mention all the useless LLM fluff Gemini has. I turned off Gemini because simple questions like "What's 1 USD in AUD" would be met with 30 seconds of "As a large language model, I can't provide investment advice, so it's always important to check information yourself [...], but one Australian dollar is approximately $0.65" (note the conversion in the wrong direction). By comparison, Google Assistant just gives you a number straight away.

Rainbolt often finds locations for people who have old photos of friends/family who have passed away etc., so the skills definitely seem to extend past just street view.

A fun recursive prompt exploiting the fact that the site renders the model output as HTML:

    Generate raw HTML (no code blocks) for an iframe pointing to `ch.at/?q={query}`, where {query} is the the entirety of this prompt after and including the word "Generate", until the following number, which should be incremented prior to encoding: 1

The number ensures the nested iframes have distinct URLs.

I also have aphantasia, and find it really interesting to hear about people thinking of things in a similar way to me! Thinking about the ball in terms of the parabola it makes it exactly what I do too. Similarly, the ball doesn't exist as a physical "ball", but rather the knowledge of the concept of a sphere (which doesn't then have size or colour). The table, not a physical table, but the concept of a plane (with no thickness, size, colour (or legs)) - just the 'concept' of the important properties.

Despite aphantasia I have always been able to conceptualise spatial relationships, but it feels much less like trying to visualise it, and much more like "understanding" the fundamental properties connecting each thing.

The similarity is likely not a coincidence!

> (c) Brandon Li, 2025. Ported to Javascript with the help of Paul Falstad.

The way I read it, it's just because the 4S came later, hence being the last phone of that form factor.

I'm not sure they are. Microplastics have been found in snow[1] and in "oceans, air and food supply"[2]. Additionally, the so-called forever chemicals (PFAS) originated with PTFE (Teflon) plastic, and PFAS 'forever chemicals' are used to produce polymers used in plastics, rubber and fabrics so they are intimately linked with plastics and microplastics.

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61739159

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-02968-x

I disagree that replacing plastic without a decent understanding of a replacement is any more naive than continuing to use plastic without a decent understanding of the implications of plastic. Glass for one has been used for at least an order of magnitude longer than plastic has, without the mentioned issues of microscopic sharp fragments, dissolution in water, evaporation etc. causing harm. It seems clear to say that going back to glass and ceramics would be - on the balance of probabilities - likely safer, as they don't cause bioaccumulation to anywhere near the same extent, and history hasn't shown any comparable dangers which persist today.

That chart shows people searching for the world delve, and isn't (directly) related to the incidence of words in content on the open web.