Spedwell

joined 1 year ago
[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it's probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.

IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I'm getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I don't understand how SPAV fixes gerrymandering in this case. It seems like the re-weighting operation is meant for a pool of identical ballots. When you have district-level elections that differ between ballots, how is this meant to work?

Edit: Ooooh you meant for selecting the redistricting committee, not for running the elections. Gotcha, makes sense now.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

I think it's what they've been calling "statistics".

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

As the article points out, TSA is using this tech to improve efficiency. Every request for manual verification breaks their flow, requires an agent to come address you, and eats more time. At the very least, you ought not to scan in the hopes that TSA metrics look poor enough they decide this tech isn't practical to use.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I'm curious what issue you see with that? It seems like the project is only accepting unrestricted donations, but is there something suspicious about shopify that makes it's involvement concerning (I don't know much about them)?

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Right concept, except you're off in scale. A MULT instruction would exist in both RISC and CISC processors.

The big difference is that CISC tries to provide instructions to perform much more sophisticated subroutines. This video is a fun look at some of the most absurd ones, to give you an idea.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 22 points 4 months ago

Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.

I'm just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There is an episode of Tech Won't Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.

Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Having express self-checkoit is great. The Kroger near me went full-self-checkout. They have large kiosks that mimmic the traditional checkout belt kiosks, except the customer scans at the head of the belt and the items move into the bagging area.

If you have a full cart, you scan all the items, checkout, walk to the end of the belt, and bag all of your items. Takes twice as long as bagging while a cashier scans (for solo shoppers), and because of the automatic belt the next customer cannot start scanning until you finish bagging, or their items will join the pile of your items.

It effectively destroys all parallelism is the process (bagging while scanning, customers pre-loading their items with a divider while the prior customer is still being serviced), and with zero human operated checkouts running you get no choice

[–] Spedwell@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

There is a theory based around how ocean tankers' exhaust historically included sulfates, which can actually seed cloud formation.

Recent emissions regulations reduced this effect, so fewer clouds are being seeded over the ocean, and the oceans are absorbing more sunlight and heating more.

So we were basically painting large swaths of reflective clouds over the oceans, masking the heating. And now we're seeing unencumbered heating effects.

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