Overspark

The price of electricity in a country usually has nothing to do with whether power lines are run above or below the ground. Very often a large part of your electricity price is determined by taxes and subsidies for example. And in my country (the Netherlands) the suppliers of electricity are different companies than the ones responsible for the power network too. Like Sweden we haven’t had residential power lines running above ground for half a century or so, it’s pretty uncommon in (Western?) Europe.

Yeah they would, as multiple countries with a better standard of living than the US have already been doing it for quite a while.

I think this one is more meant for high-speed links between (AI?) datacenters. In theory it could be more reliable than ground-based links, until a solar flare comes along of course. And once the constellation is up linking two locations that are very far apart is a hell of a lot easier than laying more cables.

Anything Blue does or announces should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, so I fully endorse your scepticism about the speeds. We’ll see how this one pans out. But from a purely technical standpoint it does sound kinda neat.

TBF this is a very different proposition than Starlink, enterprise-only, MUCH higher bandwidth (6 Tbps!) and presumably higher latency due to the larger distance to earth. To my knowledge nothing like this has been proposed by anyone so far.

Het positieve nieuws is dat Groenlinks-PVDA nu de grootste partij in de oppositie is. Meer fragmentatie op rechts is altijd goed IMHO.

I might get downvoted for this, but Breaking Bad. I made it into the second season, constantly annoyed at how massively unrealistic and terrible these people were to each other. People kept telling me it would get better later on and that I should stick with it, but after that failed to materialise I just gave up.

The vast majority of games I play were never released on console, so there’s that too.

Matte coatings interfere with more than just contrast, they often look a little more blurry as well in my experience. But yeah, the “massively oversimplified” was there for a reason 😆.

Like Eheran said, they definitely exist: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/bright-room

The massively oversimplified explanation is that more reflective coatings give a better image quality as long as you don’t have reflections. Matte coatings dull the colours of the image a bit and make it a bit less sharp.

Yes, those go to the “unsubscribe” folder, so I read them less often than my normal mail.

In order to generate that texture, AI bots have already been attacking every website hosting content on the internet for the past year, to the point that they were basically DDoSed and forced to take extreme measures to stay online. Plenty of copyrighted works have been slurped up without consent from their authors, a massive amount of energy has been used to inference the models and even more energy (far more than all cryptocurrencies combined for example) is used generating things from those models. So yes, a lot of damage has already been done. Far more than killing a couple of cows.

One way of looking at it is serving a vegan a vegan meal, after you slaughtered a cow for the first couple of tries. Some of the damage has already been done.

Also, we’ve had several kerfuffles already where GenAI “placeholders” were present in a released game, and caused plenty of outrage. It’s far safer to never have those placeholders to begin with. Just draw up something ugly in Paint, at least it’ll be plenty obvious you need to fix it before launching the game.

Yes, that’s what happened in NL too. The previous government was a horrible combination of extreme right-wingers, a farmers party and the regular right-wingers, who all didn’t like or trust each other. Predictably they failed to realise even the simplest of their promises and they blew it all up when right-wing voter opinion started to turn sour after it looked like they would have to water down some of their promises in order to get anything done. The last election was a massive win for centre parties, although we unfortunately narrowly failed to make the left-wing party the biggest one. And this pattern has played out in a similar way in several EU countries in the past year(s).

Can’t have a little weather stop us from cycling.

Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.

Right wingers have already lost most of the gains they made in most EU countries. There is a pattern where right wing parties gain enough votes to get into parliament, fuck it up massively and then lose again in the next election. So far only Meloni in Italy seems to be doing well. So they can scream all they want, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get anywhere.

Brexit was a pretty good example of how incredibly dumb that is. Efforts in other EU countries to garner similar sentiments have largely failed IMHO, so I don’t think this is a credible threat.

He did, but that doesn’t excuse what the US did.

I did not expect a Guild Wars reference in my Cyberpunk content! Recently picked up GW2 again and having a blast this time, so relevant to my interests. 😂