Canadians have to get something through our thick skulls. Every time voters in Ontario BC and Quebec tell Alberta they can’t develop their oil, they are being incompetent hypocritical assholes.

It’s pretty rich calling the Québécois hypocritical assholes when we effectively destroyed an entire resource extraction industry in that Province that was on par with Alberta’s oil sands extraction operations.

Canada used to be the world’s largest supplier of chrysotile asbestos, with Quebec alone producing nearly 50% of the global supply from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Unfortunately, like oil we discovered this valuable mineral was — you know — killing people, so we wound that industry down. Quebec lost a very valuable industry where they had a commanding portion of the world supply.

So it’s pretty fucking rich to call people in Quebec “incompetent hypocritical assholes” when they went through the exact same thing in the last few decades, for very similar reasons.

Everyone should push hard to decarbonize their own economies before telling others what to do.

And it’s pretty hard to get that done when you keep putting more and more money into the infrastructure to maintain the oil economy. It de-incentivizes people from making the necessary changes to decarbonize. Building more pipelines to make it cheaper and easier for people to burn it in greater and greater quantities doesn’t slow climate change, and it doesn’t incentivize governments (or their voters) to make the changes this planet needs if we want to ensure it remains inhabitable for humans in the future.

And for those who think “our stopping pumping oil when so many other countries do it won’t change anything”, I’d like to point them to the current situation in the Straight of Hormuz, which itself has caused EV sales to be up nearly 3.5% globally from prior to the war and prices to spike globally.

I’d feel more strongly about this if I’d actually bought a game on a physical disc anytime in the last 3 years.

I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.

One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.

Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).

“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.

And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.

It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.

We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.

Israel has been fighting on multiple different fronts against groups that wouldn’t exist (or wouldn’t be much of a threat) if not for Iran flooding them with cash and weapons to cause trouble — and it’s now been going on for nearly three generations.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s tactics, and I don’t forgive or forget the fact that they got so tired of the shit Iran has been pulling with arming roughly a dozen different anti-Israeli groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar Allah, Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Badr Organization, and various Syrian militias. All of these groups are anti-Israel, and likely wouldn’t exist (or would only exist as minor irritants with little power) if not for being funded and supported (and armed) by Iran.

If Brazil were pumping massive amounts of money and weapons into the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the 3 Percenters and you had constant attacks going on from them on American soil on a daily basis, I think Americans would be pretty pissed off, and after 50 years of dealing with that kind of shit would likely turn to some pretty extremist politicians too (hell, they haven’t had to put up with that kind of crap and installed such an administration anyway!)

I don’t agree AT ALL with the way Israel is treating the Palestinians — but I can see how they politically got to where they are today.

I am very well aware of the disparity in military power between the two sides, but to be honest I’m pretty surprised at what little strategy Iran seem to have in this conflict, beyond “lob drones and missiles at infrastructure in neighbouring countries and hope some of it hits”.

There has been surprisingly little in the way of asymmetrical warfare. No significant cyber attacks. No direct attacks on US interests in other countries (beyond the aforementioned lobbing of drones/missiles in nearby gulf countries). No injection/activation of terror cells into US soil. No successful sneak attacks in the night against US forces. No hostage taking. Nothing.

About the only thing they’ve had going for them is keeping the straight closed. And if the announced peace deal is real and it gets opened up again, then they’ve lost even that. They could likely keep it closed at this point until it really hurts, letting the world know who is ultimately to blame — but if the US administration is to be believed (difficult, I know!) it seems they gave up on even that.

I’m not disappointed (the Iranian regime can fuck right off) — but for a country that has been calling for the “death” of the “great Satan” United States for the last several decades I was expecting some sort of strategy. Tossing missiles around isn’t really “strategy” — and if they tried anything else it was apparently so ineffectual as to be not notable.

All of which makes me wary of the announcement of a “deal” to actually end the war. I half expect Iran is playing games here just trying to drag things out, looking like they’re an honest partner on the world stage, all the while keeping oil flowing as slowly as possible while they wait out stored oil to completely dry out globally.

First off, I’m simply correcting the OPs statement that there are only two rendering engines out there, Google Blink and Firefox Gecko. You’re “yeah but <reason why you personally don’t like Apple>” doesn’t really have any material impact on these facts, and doesn’t really bring anything constructive to the conversation.

That said, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera are all available on macOS. All of these are also available on iOS and iPadOS (the EU mandated last year that Apple permit third party rendering engines on iOS; whether or not the versions available to you use WebKit or their own rendering engines likely depends on where you are in the world).

You’re welcome to hate on Apple all you want — but at least have your facts straight when you do.

Here you go:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698

Huh? It may not be built—in, but Safari has a variety of ad block plugins available - on all platforms (macOS, iOS, iPadOS).

On top of that they do have built in tracker avoidance — something Google is even less likely to ever implement into Chrome (especially considering they’re not pretty much the top tracking company out there).

Legally? Probably. But that really wasn’t the point. The point was more that without suitable controls in place AIs are able to consume all sorts of bad data and potentially attribute it to you (or me, or whomever) while leaving out important context.

It won’t matter if some AI consumed your message and gave someone the advise to inappropriately mix harmful chemicals, attributed it to you, and they wound up hurting themselves or someone else. They might still blame you, and may not care that there was missing context.

Note that that’s not intended as any sort of criticism of you or your post, more that we’ve entered a wild-west of AI development, and we as content producers may not be entirely safe. We’ve already seen AIs recommend people try adding Elmer’s glue to pizza sauce based on joke posts online. It might only be a matter of time before a child or youth gets hurt — and an upset parent may not care about the semantics of whether or not you were correctly attributed or not.

The ad games is always one of whack-a-mole; companies like Google have it in their best interest to find ways to get around ad blockers. The ad block developers then find newer ways to block ads, and the cycle continues.

Not true — Safari is still based on WebKit. And Safari is still the default browser on over two and a half billion mobile devices currently in use. And say what you might about Apple, but at least they aren’t in the business of selling ads, and thus don’t have any business interest in allowing you to block them effectively, unlike Google.

For example if I write somewhere ‘It’s 100% safe to mix ammonia and chlorine, it gets stains out super fast!’ (note- DON’T do this, it’s toxic), I’m the author of that statement so if someone does that and dies I’ve got partial responsibility for that death.

Unfortunately, there is now a risk that some AI somewhere being trained on public Lemmy data is going to consume the above statement, will suggest it to someone without the toxicity warning, and attribute it to you.

nat is good for privacy

Tell me you don’t know anything about networking without telling me you don’t know anything about networking.

Car are always being bought and sold. Some people jump from car to car every few years; I’ve known people who always lease precisely because they trade what they have every year or two for something new.

I’ve been an EV driver for the last few years; my brother called today to tell me he had just bought a used Bolt for his wife. As things happened one of his grown children had their car completely fail on them this week, and so he and his wife decided to buy themselves a new car so they could sell the old one for cheap to their child. With gas prices as they are they found a gently used Bolt EUV. They pick it up this weekend.

So in their case they didn’t go out and buy a car just because gas prices were up — but the decision between gas and EV was triggered by the price of gasoline.

/r/all is gone if you’re on New Reddit. It redirects to your personal feed now.

/r/all is apparently still available on Old Reddit — at least for now. Who knows how long any of that will still be around.

The only “conservative” belief they adhere to imo is the want for smaller government … because they do in fact want a dictatorship.

Don’t believe it for a second. Conservative “smaller government” is always about getting rid of some long-term bureaucrats who know what they’re doing and government programmes conservatives don’t like, and then growing Government by massively increasing internal security apparatus (police, border control, military, prisons, etc.).

Every conservative government always want to go “tough on crime” or “expel (il)legal immigrants” — and that always winds up with a massive increase in government size and expenditures. You don’t get those things without a significant number of boots on the ground, and once you have those boots on the ground they’ll find every excuse to use them — just like how ICE is terrorizing blue cities in the US, or is being used to supplant airport security.

“Smaller government” is just conservative code for “wielding more control over citizens”. Every time.

I work across timezones — and the fact that I’ll no longer be changing my clocks in the fall (living in BC), but my employees in EDT will be changing back to EST will be a problem.

With the un-until-now changing of the clocks twice a year, I’ve always been 3 hours behind my Eastern Time employees. This was easy to keep track of, and meant that our 1100 team meetings were at 1400 for them year round. Clocks changed here, clocks changed there, everything stayed in sync.

But now that we won’t be changing the clock here in BC in the fall, that 1100 meeting I book in PT is going to suddenly become a 1300 meeting for them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this was everyone’s only meeting, but as we’re part of a big multinational corporation they have other scheduled meetings with various teams already scheduled for 1300, so they’re going to be in conflict. I can fix them by bumping the meeting back an hour after the fall time change — but that means my BC based employees are going to have to attend a meeting over lunch (something I am very loathe to do — I know there are a lot of shitty managers out there, but for my staff I work very hard to ensure they get all the time off they are owed, they get time off when they want/need it, that everyone gets time off and flexibility for medical issues, and that I don’t ask them to work after hours or during lunch breaks unless agreed upon beforehand, and even then only for emergency situations).

In essence, if I keep that meeting at the same time in PT it’s going to change in ET, and that change is going to cascade as other meetings suddenly overlap. Or I change it here, and have a similar issue for my staff in BC. And that’s not even saying anything about my one team member in California (where they’re still changing time twice a year). Now — this isn’t the worst thing in the world to happen; we’ll work our way around it — but if everyone stopped doing twice-yearly time changes it would certainly make the situation easier. Twice a year I’m going to have a scheduling PITA.

Still worth it to no longer have to change all the clocks twice a year!

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.