The biggest relevant factor back then was that state militias were a huge part of the military capacity of the US. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State", was absolutely true in the then-existing military structure. The militia structure still exists; it is now known as the National Guard. Also, back then, individuals were responsible for bringing their own weapons (and doing their own training); today, the National Guard itself provides the weapons and the training. A modern rendering would be: "A well regulated National Guard, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the Guard to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

Even that isn't quite correct, because the Guard's role has changed. On one hand, it is now much less significant of a military force than it was back then. On the other hand, the Guard was a tool of state power back then; the amendment was also devolving some martial power to the nation to the states (whereas today state guards can be federalized without the consent of the state).

A lot of 2nd Amendment fans today seem to think it was intended as some sort of Jeffersonian "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" eternal-fight doctrine. But while that certainly was Jefferson's view that you're going to need regular revolutions and should empower them, it was not some general doctrine of the constitutional convention, and it was absolutely not what they codified into the US constitution. They absolutely could have used Jefferson's "armed revolution" notions as justification, and explicitly chose not to. They chose empowering the (now National Guard) to be a potent state-run military force as a justification.

Also, early on, interpretation of the Second Amendment was much more lax than it is today. For example, bans on sword canes, dirks, bowie knives, and concealed pistols. Aymette v. State (1840) explicitly ruled that the 2nd Amendment only applied for the "common defence" (militia purposes), and thus only covered protected arms "usually employed in civilized warfare". State v. Reid and State v. Mitchell also took similar positions. There was one early outlier - Bliss v. Commonwealth - but it was so unpopular among the public that Kentucky passed a constitutional amendment banning concealed arms.

You really think things will go back to normal in three years, don't you? You really are unable to see the damage that has been inflicted on your nation, much of which will never be repaired. Particularly the damage to the constitution. The last year was a reminder to us all that the constitution is just a piece of paper; it has no power to save us except as people in power (and indeed all people) voluntarily honor it. The DOJ is actively working to circumvent the limits of the constitution and in fact is currently in literal violation of the law, yet courts are powerless to do anything other than pass rulings (by design), and congress also sits idle and does nothing to check the executive. The system only worked before because people, especially presidents, agreed to abide by it. Not anymore. Don't think for a moment this isn't doing permanent damage to the Republic. I thought the Star Wars prequels were pretty bad (and they are), but Lucas' story of the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire have real parallels in what we see happening today. Trump may be a rambling old man, but he's surrounded by people who aren't rambling and aren't senile, who very much want all of what he has said he wants, including "having Greenland." That's why we take it seriously.

Multilateral agreements, be they about peace or trade, are dead, even if a sane guy gets in the white house in a few years. No one wants to take the risk of signing something with the US only to have it be torn up when the next crazy guy gets elected. Free trade and globalization is dead. There will be no new north American free trade agreement. No one in the administration wants it, and congress doesn't want it either. By all accounts the president wants everyone to self destruct, sowing division, and then he'll come in and steal what's left for himself. That's the way he ran his businesses, and that's the way he runs the country.

There are no winners. Things have been fracturing for decades, but Trump finally threw the brick that shattered it. Whether it was inevitable or not, you'll forgive us if we aren't exactly thrilled about him ripping it all down.

Did you even actually read the report? This is Slashdot, so my money is on "no". Do you even know who the authors are? For example, Friends of the Earth is highly anti-tech, famous for example for protesting demanding the closure of nuclear plants, against mining (in general), against logging (in general), they've protested wind farms on NIMBY grounds, etc. Basically anti-growth.

The report is a long series of bait and switches.

Talking about how "data centres" consume 1,5% of global electricity. But AI is only a small fraction of that (Bitcoin is the largest fraction).

Making some distinction between "generative AI" and "traditional AI". But what they're calling "traditional AI" today by and large incorporates Transformers (the backend of e.g. ChatGPT), and even where it doesn't (for example, non-ViT image recognition models) tends to "approximate" Transformers. And some outright use multimodal models anyway. It's a dumb argument and dumb terminology in general; all are "generating" results. Their "traditional" AI generally involves generative pipelines, was enabled by the same tech that enabled things like ChatGPT, and advances from the same architecture advancements that advance things like ChatGPT (as well as advancements in inference, servers, etc). Would power per unit compute have dropped as much as 33x YoY (certain cases at Google) if not for the demand for things like ChatGPT driving hardware and inference advancements? Of course not.

They use rhetoric that doesn't actually match their findings, like "hoax", "bait and switch", etc. They present zero evidence of coordination, zero evidence of fraud or attempt to deceive, and most of their examples are of projects that haven't yet had an impact, not projects that have in any way failed. Indeed, they use a notable double standard: anything they see as a harm is presented as "clear, proven and growing", even if it's not actually a harm today; but any benefit that hasn't yet scaled is a "hoax", "bait and switch", etc.

One thing that they call "bait and switch" is all of the infrastructure being built on what they class as "generative AI", saying you can't attribute that to "non-generative AI". But it's the same infrastructure. It's not bait and switch, it's literally the same hardware. And companies *do* separate out use cases in their sustainability reports.

They extensively handpick which papers they're going to consider and which they aren't. For example, they excluded the famous "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning" paper "on the grounds that it does not claim a ‘net benefit’ from the deployment of AI, and pre-dates the onset of consumer generative AI". Except they also classify the vast majority of what they review as "non-generative", so what sort of argument is that? Most of the papers are recent (e.g. 2025), and thus discuss projects that have not yet been implemented, whereas the Rolnick paper is from 2019, and many things that it covers have been implemented.

They have a terrible metric for measuring their impacts: counts of claims and citation quality, rather than magnitude and verifiability of individual impacts. Yet their report claims to be about impacts. They neither model nor attempt to refute the IEA or Stern et al's net benefit impact studies.

They cite but downplay efficiency gains. For example, efficiency in general is gained from (A) better control, and (B) better design. Yet they just handwave away software-design efficiency gains (aka, A) and improved systems design software (up from molecular to macroscopic modeling). They handwave away e.g. a study of GitHub CoPilot increasing software development speed by 55%, ignoring that this also applies to all software that boosts efficiency.

They routinely classify claims as "weak" that demonstrably aren't - for example, Google Solar API's solar mapping does demonstrably accelerate deployment - but that's "weak" because it's a "corporate study". But if a corporate study talks about harms (for example, gas turbines at datacentres), they're more than happy to cite that.

It's just bad. Wind forecasting value uplift of 20%? Nope. 71% decrease in rainforest deforestation in Rainforest Connection monitored areas? Nope. AI methane leak detection? Nope. AI real-time balancing of renewables (particularly in controlling grid-scale batteries' decisions on when to charge and discharge)? Nope. These are real things, in use today, making real impacts. They don't care. And these are based on the same technological advances that have boosted the rest of the AI field. Transformers boosts audio detection. It boosts weather forecasting. It boosts general data analysis. And indeed, the path forward for power systems modeling involves more human data, like text. It benefits a model to know that, say, an eclipse might be coming to X area soon, and not only will this affect solar and wind output, but many people will drive to see it, which will increase EV charging needs along their routes (which one needs to understand where people will be coming from and going and what roads they'd be likely to choose), while decreasing consumption at those peoples' homes in the meantime. The path forward for energy management is multimodality. Same with self-driving and all sorts of other things.

If you're forecasting AI causing the emissions of ~1% of global emissions by 2030 - which is a forecast that assumes a lot of growth - you really don't need much efficiency gains at all to offset it. The real concerns are not what they focus on here: they're Jevon's Paradox. It's not what the AI itself consumes, but it's what happens if global productivity increases greatly because of AI. There it doesn't have to offset a 1% increase in emissions - it has to offset a far larger growth of emissions in the broader economy.

Diesel heaters have been used on ICE heavy trucks for decades for cold starting. Webasto made their name in North America selling such heaters. They are used on all sorts of heavy vehicles and agricultural machines where there's no electricity to run a block heater. Webasto isn't the only game in town either.

Actually it turns out it's not only been deemed practical, but Webasto is selling a product that does exactly this, made exclusively for EV vehicles such as vans: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.webasto.com%2Fen-int...

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. When you combine cabin heating with warming the entire battery system, you can get full EV range and fast charging at the coldest temperatures for the cost of a tiny amount of diesel per day. Seems like a great idea for the small amount of time each year it's necessary.

Wow. Where to start. Huge diesel tanks? You do realize bus depos already have diesel tanks fill stations? Further we're not talking large tanks. 5 gallons that you can fill with a jerry can for goodness sake. Does Webasto mean anything to you? If not then you really don't know what I'm talking about. Also the web is full of cheap diesel air heaters (no I'm not talking about construction heaters) that work well and are quite efficient. In fact I've seen some redneck videos, probably intending to be anti-EV where they pipe the air duct from one into the interior of an EV. Which in honesty isn't the stupidest idea.

Somehow I think add-on heaters like this, which are already widely used on heavy vehicles with a fluid cooling system (just like they use in battery packs) are a lot cheaper than heated charging buildings.

Do a bit of research before you post so you'll know what you're talking about. Stop assuming that what you know is the way things must be. If EVs are to be successful in colder climates, we will need hybrid heating systems like this.

One other thing was that Elektrotrucker found that regenerative braking was a bit sketchy in icy conditions. But that's not all that different from drivers having to be careful with jake brakes in icy conditions too.

No it's just that the temperatures in Norway's major cities, being coastal, are more moderate than a lot of the coldest climates in North America.

Elektrotrucker just documented a long-haul electric semi trip through Scandinavian countries. In Sweden he had relatively warm temps, only -5 or so. By the time he ended up in Finland it was -35. He had a major problem keeping the cabin warm at those temps. Battery thermal management systems consumed a lot of power too. His efficiency dropped from about 1 kwh/km in warmer places (Germany) to 1.6 kwh/km, which is actually not bad considering. He was able to charge along the way and he wasn't parking this rig indoors every 6 hours to charge it.

As I said in another post, having small diesel heater (air or fluid exchange like all the youtubers are hawking these days) to heat the cabin and also the batteries would be a great way to get full utility out of EVs in harsh climates. I'm really surprised bus companies and electric semi truck makers aren't considering this. Possibly the way the laws are written they'd not qualify as an emissions free vehicle. If so, short-sighted.

Don't laugh. Diesel heaters are a good solution to keep the batteries and cabin warm. I'm sure some say that's crazy and defeats the purpose of using an EV in the first place, and is an unacceptable compromise, but I strongly disagree. I'm really surprised EVs in cold climates don't embrace this. Sure burning diesel makes EV people uncomfortable, but it's a lot less diesel than an ICE bus would burn, and it lets the EV system work at its most efficient state all winter long. Such a hybrid system makes a lot of sense and is still an overall net positive.

. You can't bring a cow with you to Mars

Well... kind of. Most animals have small breeds. Cows remain one of the hardest, as their miniature breeds are tstillabout 1/4th to 1/3rd the adult mass of their full-scale relatives. But there are lots of species in bovidae (the cow/sheep/antelope family) and some of them are incredibly small - random example, the royal antelope. As for sheep and goats, you have things like dwarf Nigerian goats which are quite small, and a good milk breed. Horses, you have e.g. teeny falabellas. Hens of course are small to begin with, and get smaller with bantams. Fish like tilapa are probably easiest - they can be brought as teeny fingerlings, and in cold water with limited food, their growth can be retarded so that they're still small on arrival. Etc.

Whatever you bring, if you bring a small breed, you can always bring frozen embryos of larger or more productive breeds to backbreed on arrival. The real issue is of course management at your destination - not simply space and food/water, but also odor, waste, dust, etc (for example: rotting manure can give off things like ammonia and can pose disease risks). That said, there are advantages. Vegetarian animals can often eat what is otherwise "waste" plant matter to humans which we either don't want, can't digest, or is outright toxic to us - and then they convert that matter into edible things like milk, eggs, and meat. The former two generally give you much higher conversion rates than the latter, although you'll always get at least some meat from old animals (either culled or via natural deaths). Tilapia can even eat (as a fraction of their diet) literal manure (albeit this is controversial due to disease risks).

Also Qt's biggest downside is it's a C++ toolkit and to use it from other languages requires wrapper layers that instantiate and hold the C++ objects while exposing essentially a C-level interface to those objects. This means in Python, every time you instantiate a Qt object you really are dealing with two objects: the python one and the C++ one. I've run into bugs where the C++ object's lifespan got out of sync with the python object and led to crashes. Also the C++ nature of Qt means often your code is like transliterated C++ than native idiomatic Python for example.

GTK+ was always built out in C, which lent itself better to wrapping in other languages (including C++!). GTK+ was always my preferred toolkit because of this. However with GTK+ 4, their design philosophy is starting to diverge from mine with things like hamburger menus and client-side integrated titelbars. GTK+ is really focused on what Gnome wants first and foremost. It used to be the Gimp Toolkit, but now it's the Gnome Toolkit.

Yes and that's how it's done on Wayland. I don't see any reason why kwin on X11 couldn't do something similar except that you'd have to get all the various programs that want to see the screen to cooperate.

With Wayland, the only way to get an image of the screen is through the compositor through a somewhat well-defined interface (works across several different compositors), so that's what Zoom, OBS, screenshot programs all have to use. But on X11 all the apps just grab screen shots directly from the X server currently. At this stage a standard for X11 just isn't going to happen. Besides that, what would you do if you didn't have a compositor running? Would require fallback code. I just don't see anyone getting real excited about that. Whereas on Wayland these features can be added by the compositor for free as it were, and the screen sharing apps don't have to know anything about it or do anything special.

No, not really. X11 simply has no architecture for that sort of separation, and no way to screen share anything other than what is in the frame buffer.

Oh I see. It's not an option in Dolphin, it's in Plasma settings under Workspace->General behavior.

Very true. Although I hope KDE continues to work equally well on X11 and Wayland. And on other Unix OSes. Perhaps even on Windows. There was a time when I ran KDE on Windows, mostly for kicks. Alternate shells for Windows have disappeared and been banished by MS, sadly.

Regarding Wayland, it is worth noting that one of the features in the summary---not showing certain windows when screen sharing---is a wayland-only feature. X11 simply does not have a way to easily do it.