• 7 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Not only the pollution.

    It has triggered an economic race to the bottom for any industry that can incorporate it. Employers will be forced to replace more workers with AI to keep prices competitive. And that is a lot of industries, especially if AI continues its growth.
    The result is a lot of unemployment, which means an economic slowdown due to a lack of discretionary spending, which is a feedback loop.

    There are only 3 outcomes I can imagine:

    1. AI fizzles out. It can’t maintain its advancement enough to impress execs.
    2. An unimaginable wealth disparity and probably a return to something like feudalism.
    3. social revolution where AI is taken out of the hands of owners and placed into the hands of workers. Would require changes that we’d consider radically socialist now, like UBI and strong af social safety nets.

    The second seems more likely than the third, and I consider that more or less a destruction of humanity


  • I wasn’t taking about new fields. I was talking about resource partial updates (eg PATCH, or commonly the U in CRUD).

    If you just want to update a single field on a resource with 100 fields, rather than GETting the entire resource, updating the single field, and PUTting whole thing back, just do a PATCH with the single field.

    Likewise if you’re POSTing a resource that has nullable fields, but the default value isn’t null, how do you indicate that you want the default value for a given field? Do you have to first query some metadata API? That doesn’t seem ideal, when this existing pattern exists


  • Imagine you’re writing a CRUD API, which is pretty common.
    If null attributes aren’t included in the payload, and someone does an update (typically a PATCH), how do you know which fields should be nulled out and which should be ignored?

    I agree for many cases the two are semantically equivalent, but it’s common enough to not have them be equivalent that I’m surprised that it causes arguments







  • I agree it’s not the ideal solution, but it’s better than most solutions we have, depending on location.

    Rooftop solar doesn’t only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.

    One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it’s easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
    With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can’t really change direction mid-construction, and you can’t just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.

    Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn’t destroyed.

    So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they’re still generally an excellent solution.

    The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.



  • Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
    How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They’ll have an impact for sure, but it’s not like the whole place gets paved over.
    And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn’t affect any one area too much.

    I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
    I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don’t know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.

    The other advantage of renewables is that it’s distributed so it’s naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.

    I like nuclear, and it’s certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable










  • You’re right wrt personal preference. It’s just strange to me how seemingly all the neurodivergents but me hate overhead lighting 😭

    Floor lamps that are above head height are… Ok I guess, but that’s still mostly head-on. Light that is clearly cast down is so much more satisfying. Personal preference, of course.
    And to be clear I don’t have anything against mood lighting or accent lights, I like them… Just not only them.

    The impression I have (mainly from social media like tiktok and Lemmy) is that the desired lighting is head high and below which just… Puts me in a tailspin lol. Idk how people can live like that 🤣

    In my ideal room, there would be indirect overhead lighting that illuminated most of the ceiling to provide an indirect overhead area light, with a near-head level accent lights. I’ve looked into if I could use a short-throw projector onto the ceiling to provide some kind of crazy configurable overhead lighting, but they’re simply not meant for that kind of application