sonori
@sonori@beehaw.org
- Comment on AI's $1.3 trillion future increasingly hinges on Taiwan 1 week ago:
I’ve considered it, but as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Given you have to pay interest on short positions and can only make as much as the stock falls by, if they can keep the grift going for another year or two the market could crash and you would still turn a loss.
- Comment on Know thy enemy 1 week ago:
Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.
While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 5 comments
- Comment on Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’ 1 month ago:
Yep, one of the few, or perhaps only, redeeming qualities of the witch was that she did want to phase out coal in favor of clean energy, mostly for the wrong reasons and being a conservative her idea of helping didn’t really help all that well, but that’s more of a silver lining to her reign that her US contemporary.
- Comment on OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out 1 month ago:
What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s
- Comment on U.S. to ban Chinese, Russian software and hardware used in autonomous vehicles 1 month ago:
Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?
This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.
And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s
Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.
The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.
Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.
Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.
If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.
Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.
- Comment on U.S. to ban Chinese, Russian software and hardware used in autonomous vehicles 1 month ago:
Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into an over the air update.
Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.
It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.
Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.
Biggest /s possible.
- Comment on U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs 2 months ago:
I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.
- Comment on U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs 2 months ago:
I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.
- Comment on U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs 2 months ago:
Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.
I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.
US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.
Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?
- Comment on U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs 2 months ago:
This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.
Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.
Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.
Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.
- Comment on Jet Fuel 2 months ago:
Note, since the 70s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdle being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork and concern over insurance rates.
From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the sixties that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturer, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.
Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical product line.
You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying historical aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced miscarriages and damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.
- Comment on What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future 2 months ago:
I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.
Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.
The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.
I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.
- Comment on Smartwatch insults Chinese as authorities struggle to tame AI. 2 months ago:
Yep, we’re all gonna die.
Not because the robots planned it mind you, but just because some lobbyist sold a few Congressional members on the military needing AI enhanced weapons, and we couldn’t be behind China when it came to the LLM powered ICBM race now could we.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 2 months ago:
That every currency is not accepted everywhere in the world, though every one you listed is pretty commonly accepted by business and as such you absolutely could by things with them in the Eurozone, is not an argument that they are the same as an casino token.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 2 months ago:
Yes lightning, the network of centralized trusted third party banks that are needed to make bitcoin useable so long as you deposit all the bitcoin you want to use into one of these centralized banks first, at which point they can make bank to bank transfers without having any involvement with the actual bitcoin network at all.
Or you could do basically the same process with an actual Debit card, which does the same thing but can be used in actual stores.
You also need to note that for something posturing itself as a currency, the fact that you either have to wait hours or days for the price per transaction to come down or spend an even more absurd transaction fee on you’re cup of coffee before you can check out is actually a rather fundamental problem.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
I’ve rarely heard it suggested as an investment, but it can actually be realisticly used to goods and services outside of itself and as such does have an actual purpose, which is more than can be said for any crypto currency.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
I don’t think it’s obvious that a tool for loaning money to businesses would be primarily used for loaning money to businesses trying to solve problems with the tool itself.
I don’t think the internet has really changed all that much when it comes to due diligence. Maybe it’s a little easier to do background checks or find a person’s previous projects, but you still need an trusted third party to audit a company, you still need to be sure who is legally liable for if things go wrong, etc…
Neglecting that a lot of companies don’t actually want every person’s pay, every dime they spend for a luncheon, and every thing R&D buys to be publicly available to their competitors, it’s still not actually much help for verifying and auditing their financials because nearly all fraud already relies on people entering false information to the computer about what the transaction was for or why it was made, not anything that could be verified by the chain.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
Um, no. Traditional markets have financial related companies, but you’ll have to show me where you’re getting the idea the finance sector makes up the majority of the traditional market and as such it is no different than the crypto space where finance makes up nearly the entire market.
I also don’t think that the existence of the internet really changed much when it comes to the need for rules for soliciting investment from the public such as providing investors accounting figures and legal accountability. Nor has it changed the fact that cryptocurrencies haven’t changed the process for gaining the investment necessary to start a new bakery or other small business and never will provide a pathway to do so, and as such hasn’t really changed much at all when it comes to providing customers with more access to investment loans outside of more crypto businesses.
A lot of the scandals you listed weren’t done under the current market regulation, but rather directly led to the current market regulation at the behest of the little guys who got screwed over and pressured politicians into passing it, and as such I just don’t see how removing the protections for the little guy is ment to benefit them over the rich.
I mean surely then the rich would be opposed to the crypto and loosening regulations rather than being the ones most heavily pushing and lobbying the government for them?
- Comment on Russia legalizes Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining 3 months ago:
They banned it after it kept driving up energy prices.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
It means that despite being fifteen years old, it still takes more electricity for a single bitcoin transaction than to drive an electric SUV from Florida to California, cost per single transaction has still spiked over 50 USD twice in the last six months, and it remains too prone to wild inflation and deflation for any serious business to actually price anything in.
In other words, it has the same inherent value it always has, none at all.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
You realize that the things listed on the NASDAQ actually represent more than just an entery in a database, right? Like the groups listed on there tend to make physical objects and software that does things beyond move things that can be traded for currency around?
You also realize that the NASDAQ, without all the protections and basic rules the public forced it to adopt after vast numbers of little guys got screwed out of all their money, isn’t actually that great of a pitch? At least not to anyone but the far right uber rich libertarians that hold majority control of the crypto space.
We are talking about a technology that is about as old as smartphones, but which has still yet to see any widespread use to solve a problem it did not itself create.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 3 months ago:
Most people when starting out are, or at least should be, very uneasy about putting money into things with no underlying value or feasible purpose beyond being bought by a greater fool in the future.
- Comment on [Asianometry] The Big Data Center Water Problem 4 months ago:
I’m actually kinda amazed that this overview video is only coming out now given the topics Asianometry primarily covers are semiconductors, water infrastructure projects, and economic/corporate histories. I assumed that this topic was the first video to be uploaded to the channel.
- Comment on 4chan Is Using TikTok Owner ByteDance's Hidden AI App to Generate Porn 4 months ago:
You can’t publicly share nudes from your imagination or pass them out to your friends with five minutes work, something you basically definitionallly have to be doing in order to get caught.
Revenge porn is absolutely a serious method of harassment that does routinely end in suicide even for adults, and it is absurd to compare making it so easy that kids can do it to someone they’ve never talked to in minutes to fantasizing about their classmates.
- Comment on Dark Matter 4 months ago:
To expand on this, we also have mapped it out and know that the amount of dark matter varies wildly between galaxies, with some having basically none while others have far more dark matter than observable matter in them. There’s also a lot of stuff with the early universe that only works if you have something with gravity that doesn’t otherwise interact significantly with matter.
As Angela Collier puts it, dark matter is not a theory, it is a set of observations.
- Comment on ChatGPT’s much-heralded Mac app was storing conversations as plain text 4 months ago:
So? OpenAI is to my knowledge open about incorporating conversations into future versions of GPT, and you can often get it to replay training data in full, so your effectively publishing your conversations to the open internet anyway. This feels more like saying that my lemmy comments are stored in plain text on my phone than any sort of security violation.
- Comment on Electric Aviation is already better than you think - Volts with David Roberts 4 months ago:
But we could have an average of 684 9/11’s a hour, the actual number of car crashes per hour in the US, driven purely by the piloting skills of the average Amarican driver given command of an aircraft, who wouldn’t want to live in that future?
- Comment on Are you embracing AI? 4 months ago:
“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Even more importantly when it comes to assessing properly, deep learning has been continuealy shown to not just repeat the biases in its training data, but to significantly exaggerate them.
Given how significantly and explicitly race has been used to determine and guide so much property and neighborhood development in the training data, I do not look forward to seeing a system that is not only more racist than a post war city council choosing where to build new moterways but which is sold and treated as infallible by the humans operating and litigating it.
Given the deaths and disaster created by the Horizon Post Office Scandel, I also very much do not look forward to the widespread adoption of software which is inherently and provablly far less accurate, reliable, and auditable than the Horizon software. At least that could only ruin your life if you were a Postmaster and not just any member of the general public who isn’t rich enough to have your affairs handled by a human.
- Comment on Murphy Open To "Beverly Hills Cop 5" - Dark Horizons 4 months ago:
I didn’t even know there was a 2.