Bluesky is up -- no, Bluesky is down -- well, it's down since inception, but now it's "leveled off".

But who cares and why, though? Honestly. Do what you like. Engage with whom you like. Forget about whether something is "popular", that's never a good measurement. Death, for example, is "popular". 100% of people engage in it.

No worries about an invader killing your people, or a madman rounding up the sick and infirm in concentration camps to be disposed of. No, we'll just off ourselves and demand the government cover our expenses. In Canada one in every TWENTY deaths is medically "assisted". https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcbn.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth%2Fca...

Ah yes, those philosophers who doubt their own existence (but hope you'll buy their books.)

I've just discovered Scottish common sense realism, an 18th century philosophy that was a reaction against some of the Enlightenment who had gone off the rails in this regard. It was very popular among the founders of the US (we get the phrase, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence from it.)

Thomas Reid's essay, "An Inquiry Into the Human Mind" has a great take-down of this approach:

Descartes found nothing established that could serve as a deep foundation; so he resolved not to believe in his own existence until he could give a good reason for it. He may have been the first person to make such a decision; but if he could have actually done what he resolved to do—if he could have become genuinely unsure that he existed—his case would have been deplorable, and there would have been no remedy for it from reason or philosophy. A man who disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be reasoned with as a man who thinks he is made of glass. There may be physical disorders that can produce such absurdities, but they won’t ever be cured by reasoning.

Descartes wants us to think that he got out of this craziness through this logical argument: Cogito, ergo sum [= ‘I think, therefore I exist’]. But obviously he was in his right mind all the time, and never seriously doubted his own existence. That argument doesn’t prove his existence—it takes it for granted. ‘I am thinking’, he says, ‘therefore I am’; and isn’t it just as good reasoning to say, ‘I am sleeping, therefore I am’? or ‘I am doing nothing, therefore I am’? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest it must exist then too.

A sports journalist for the Washington Post engages with an LLM to discuss articles she herself had written, and is appalled both by the number of errors. When she confronts its bug-laden responses, it meekly apologizes but doesn't get any better. After repeating its smarmy apology for the umpteenth time, the author begins to suspect that the LLM is actually malevolent. The entire "conversation" is laid out for all to see.

Infuriating to read if you know anything about what an LLM is and how it works.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...

Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

We see this logic everywhere now: if the government doesn't fund [insert favored program here], then it will cost taxpayers money." Really? So, how much money was being spent on the Direct File pilot? Would it surprise you to learn it was $24.6 million? Some 140,000 people used it.

Cost per user: $175.00

That's MORE than TurboTax, even with a State return added on.

So, yeah, the government "saved" SOME people the cost of using tax prep service, but it absolutely did NOT save taxpayers any money.

The kind of diversity one finds in a cord of multiple strands, all of which are load-bearing, but each of which have slightly different properties that can optimize the cord's strength in the work you want to put it to is, indeed a better rope than one made of all the same kinds of strands.

The problem is that if you choose a diverse cord just for diversity's sake, you could easily wind up with a cord that is actually completely unsuited to the work.

A diversity of WHAT is the key question to ask.

This is ridiculous and hysterical. Read the IPCC reports, the latest ones. Read some of the observational studies on the most likely warming scenarios. There is no justification for these doom laden fantasies.

You are correct about one thing: there is no likelihood that global CO2 emissions are going to fall. In fact, they will certainly rise. The world outside the West, which is doing 75% of global emissions, does not believe there is any climate crisis, and their approach to emissions is maximize economic growth and let emissions rise as they may. Their approach to COPs is to attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any mandatory targets. So we will see global emissions rise well north of 45 billon tons a year by 2040 or so. China probably north of 15 billion.

But this is not plausibly going to result in a 4C rise in average global temps by 2085. Though if it were, the appropriate policy response would not be to try to get to net zero in the US, UK, Canada, Australia by installing wind and solars. That will neither get to net zero nor have any effect at all on the global climate even if it does.

The right policy response is to make a rational assessment of local risk, and use the money currently being wasted in subsidizing wind and solar to protect whichever of our local populations are most at risk.

Try reading the paper. You'll find that there is no rational cause for alarm in it. Its just another of these pieces which tries to promote alarm without supplying any rigorous argument for it.

It may be that the fungi are properly modelled in their procedure. But what they do not show, don't even try, is to show that in particular environments any probable increase in local temperatures will lead to major expansion of them.

Modelling the fungi is probably a useful thing to do, an advance in scientific knowledge, of some value in itself, assuming they have done it right. Someone may use it someday for a useful purpose.

But the armwaving in the direction of global warming is without any sort of rigor, its just the more or less compulsory current nod to a prevailing meme.

There is no reason from this paper to think that any reasonably probable increase in global temperatures this century will lead to any alarming spreads of the fungi in any particular locations.

The slashdot moderation system is a broken-down piece of junk which gets abused ALL THE TIME, just as with this post. There is not the slightest troll-like thing about it.

A troll is someone who posts an INFLAMMATORY message with the intent of upsetting the reader. A troll is MALICIOUS.

This post is eminently reasonable. It has a moderate tone, not inflammatory in the least. It is interesting and clearly an opinion. It is sincere.

If you look at my ID, you will see that I have been a reader here for a very long time now. The quality of discussion here has always been a mixed bag, but moderation at least made it possible to quickly surface the interesting posts. Over the course of the last decade, however, moderation has been abused not to identify actually bad content, but to suppress disfavored content.

If you disagree with a post and you mod them down because of it, you are abusing your privilege. When you are a moderator, you are to judge the QUALITY of the conversation, not the CONTENT. No one elected you Chief Censor.

Slashdot desperately needs to add a feedback mechanism to report abusive moderation, and to ACT on that feedback by removing moderation privileges from abusers. Slashdot can still be interesting and worthwhile to read, but not if the site runners allow crap mods to proliferate like homeless drug abusers over-taking the sidewalks.

The interwebs are full of loons. LLMs are just vast rooms of cracked funhouse mirrors. Proceed accordingly.

"Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

So lets build some more wind turbines and install some more solar panels.

And then, since the data centers run 24 x 7, lets install some batteries for when its calm or night.

And then, we notice that some kind of inertia has to be provided, or the whole thing keeps falling over and its kind of difficult to do a black start. So we install a bunch of gas powered flywheels. Not a bunch, really a lot actually. In fact, enough plant to run the data centers except these are just flywheels with no generation attached.

Now it all works, and we have saved the planet and powered the data centers at the same time. That's good.

Until some bright spark wonders why don't we couple some generators to those flywheels as long as we are spinning them all the time....

I am most definitely a form-follows-function guy when it comes to tools and appliances. My impression of Dyson products has always been that they design the look and feel first, and then iterate like crazy until they can make the damn thing work at a minimal level. They find tons of ready buyers because the look and feel is truly awesome, and they sell it as a truly awe-inspiring price to match.

At an early point in the development of the Internet, I was called in as a software consultant to prepare a technical recommendation on how to stop people stealing music using the Internet. The Internet, I told them, is the world's largest digital copying machine, and the only way to stop it from being used to copy music would be to build an anti-Internet of equal size. Since that is entirely impossible and ridiculous, you need to stop trying to figure out how to constrain distribution, and instead use it to your advantage to make money *by* distribution.

I was not asked back to complete that project.

Thankfully, Google figured out how to do exactly that. It made deals with the major licensing agencies. It added a way to automatically identify content so copyright holders could be properly credited. It gave copyright holders the choice of either suppressing their content or taking the ad revenue. It took several decades, but eventually it became clear that it made much more sense -- and much more money! -- to let Google allow the content but redirect the revenue. This wasn't always perfect, but it's getting better. If you are a premium subscriber, part of your fee gets distributed to copyright holders in the same way (and that's one of the reasons the fee is so large, comparatively.) Google itself takes a rational administrative cut, similar to the cut that managers and agents have taken in the business. And, they're working on adding a content creator subscription model, so that directed subscriptions can be sent to creators, and not just ad revenue shares.

Again, this has not been an easy transition. Some copyright holders, especially music, continue to hold onto the belief that they can make more money working outside YouTube. It's still way too easy to game Google's copyright Content ID system.

But the people at Google are pretty smart. YouTube is a global phenomenon, for good reason.