That was really a fantastic read!

Whelp…

“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.

Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.

Because osmotic power has enormous potential in the sense that millions of cubic meters of fresh water is running into oceans all over the world every minute. If we’re able to get even a low-efficiency method of using the salinity gradient to generate power working then every place a river meets the sea is essentially an unlimited (albeit low-yield) power source.

This is tech that doesn’t rely on elevation (like hydropower) or weather conditions (like wind/solar) it’s stable and in principle possible to set up at pretty much any river outlet, which is great!

Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.

Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.

Do you have a source for this? My only reference here is hiking at > 10 000 ft (3000 m), and from that I can say that this seems very unlikely: If you stay at 3000 for a couple hours without acclimating first, you will definitely start to feel the effects. To be fair, you’re usually not moving around a lot in an aircraft, but a couple hours at 3000 m can make you feel sluggish and weak, and even a bit light-headed, you could even get a mild headache from oxygen deprivation.

Note that not everyone will see severe symptoms already at 3000 m. Plenty of people can go to 4000 m before seeing significant symptoms. However, given that I’ve never heard of anyone experiencing altitude sickness in a properly pressurised aircraft, it seems unlikely to me that they’re pressurised to 3000 m.

It differs per community.

Good point, I’ll moderate myself and just state that I’ve never experienced it being a hard requirement in my field.

No it’s not. I have both published in a variety of scientific journals, reviewed for a couple journals, and turned down reviews for a couple journals.

No journal checks your “review history” before allowing you to publish. However, if you consistently turn down reviews from a journal, the editor is likely going to get annoyed and you will probably have a harder time publishing in that journal in the future.

Yep. At that point, why even bother taking the review? You’re not forced to do reviews. Never taking any is likely to negatively impact your career, but still… just decline the review if you’re going to use a LLM for it anyway. Have some dignity.

The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.

Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.

You don’t need to pretend education was perfect before in order to realise that it’s getting worse and try to reverse the trend.

You also don’t need to pretend it was perfect before in order to see that the proliferation of LLM’s is harming education.

People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.

It can also be noted that the trend over time for the “unknown” category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the “unknown” category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.

Still remember the first time I saw this. It was the last time I touched YouTube for a looong time.

It would cost them absolutely nothing to show a feed of hot/high rated/popular videos. Throwing in some entropy such that it doesn’t only show the most viewed videos globally wouldn’t be hard at all either. They’re just openly stating that they don’t want you there at all if they can’t track your viewership.

Hard disagree. I work a lot with numbers, both hand-written and typed. I’ve yet to come across a situation where spaces are not sufficiently clear for readability. Using spaces for separation has never been an issue with letters, why would it be an issue with numbers?

I’ll be honest: It’s complete insanity to use commas within a number. If you need laughably high precision, use spaces for readability. If you need a lot of zeros, use power notation.

There is no excuse for putting commas in a number. I rest my case.

Whatever anyone China-affiliated says they’re not doing, it’s a safe bet that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories, but I believe the strongest evidence pointing towards Covid-19 originating in a lab is the Chinese government insisting that it didn’t, while prohibiting anyone not under their control from investigating. That doesn’t mean it did originate from a lab, but if anything, that’s what it points to. To be explicit: My impression is that, currently, most available evidence points towards natural origins. However the Chinese government has done its best to convince me otherwise.

This is a case where you have to be careful about cause-effect order. I assume that Tiwanese people that are heavily opposed to China are more likely to avoid tiktok. But of course, it’s been shown that tiktok tends to show more pro-China “content” as well, and likely influences the opinions of its users.

To be fair, this was originally the point of plastic. The primary point of plastic today is that it is an extremely cheap material that you can mould into pretty much any shape.

Need a bag to carry stuff? Plastic.

Packaging for toothpicks? Plastic.

Spacers inside an electric circuit? Plastic.

Packaging for clothes? Plastic.

Fake plant? Plastic.

Part of the problem is that we’re using a wonder-material that lasts forever (plastic) for a bunch of mundane shit where we don’t need it, because that wonder-material turns out to be the cheapest material around as well.