UK: Foreign Secretary says China does pose security threat to Britain, says she is ‘deeply frustrated’ at collapse of spy trial after Labour refuses to call Beijing an enemy
[...]
Yvette Cooper admitted the UK faced a “whole series” of risks from Beijing, days after the chief prosecutor said a case against two alleged spies collapsed because the Government had failed to brand China a threat to national security.
[...]
Ms Cooper was asked whether, during her time at the Home Office, she saw a dossier outlining the fact that China had frequently been referred to as a threat to Britain’s national security.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Let me be clear that we know China poses threats to UK national security from things like transnational repression and espionage to hostile cyber activity as well, and we have said so.
“And they also of course are a trading partner and they are a crucial partner in the process for example on tackling climate change. But I am deeply frustrated about this case because I of course wanted to see it prosecuted.”
[...]
Christopher Cash, 30, and Christopher Berry, 33, had been accused of passing foreign policy information to a high-ranking member of the Chinese government, charges that were denied by both men.
A Whitehall investigation into Chinese spying was also suppressed by Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, after lobbying from the Treasury.
[...]
China sceptics have long called on successive governments to formally shift their diplomatic stance and call China a threat to reflect concerns around security, surveillance and human rights abuses.
[...]
Chinese state-backed hackers targeted the Electoral Commission and accessed the voting records of 40 million people from August 2021. The breach was not identified until more than a year later.
China was also blamed for hacking the Ministry of Defence in May 2024, with hackers gaining access to payroll information including bank details, names and addresses.
The US foreign relation policies are completely brainrotten to a degree that it feels masochistic. They keep hitting themselves over and over, and it makes less and less sense.
Lol okay I hear you. But think like if you were a Russian asset just trying to do as much damage as possible and steal as much USD and convert it to a useful currency before you crash the dollar and cripple your enemy. Would that make it more clear?
Kim Jong Un's leadership delivered a speech as his military showed off a new intercontinental ballistic missile in a massive parade. Kim also held talks with Russia's Dmitry Medvedev.
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Did Lunduke now entirely jump on that bandwagon? Seems he now does 3 videos a week "calling out" wokeness and "extreme" leftists and it's become quite monothematic.
Yeah, he got a bit nuts over time... but i still watch him for his shit stirring and his ranting - but sometimes, even now, he still unearths really interesting bits like that one.
Indeed, the story is funny and weird. Though he used to share lots of interesting and funny perspectives. And these days the Youtube comments underneath are way more funny and on point than all his content.
Idk, I can't find that supposed Bluesky and Mastodon discussions, I think he made that up. And he fails to mention the email address is just a text field, people can put anything in there. And while highlighting it, he also completely fails to spot the timezone which is right next to it. And that's set to UTC-4 so America east coast. And as a blogger/influencer he could at least have sent a mail and see if it bounces before reporting on it... And then he invents what the reviewer's thought process was according to him, while the real next joke is their nationality, but he doesn't spot that either. So I don't know what to make of this. Sure he has a community and reach, and brings attention to niche things. But his own take on it tends to be wrong(?) and not in an inspiring way... In the old days he used to play devil's advocate and I think that was extremely on point. But you can't really fabricate "facts" and argue against that, because it turns it from a sarcastic, Socratic dialogue into just framing, spiked with misinformation and the next 15 minutes are just rambling and bullshit... And I think that's a bit sad because we know he's able to do more than that. And there's no shortage of people rambling and talking bullshit, so there is no need for him to jump on it as well. It turns him from the troll he used to be into just your average anti-woke nut without any originality, just a Linux theme slapped on top...
If a yt channel is unpredictable enough that you can't turn it on at work where folks can hear it, it's crossed beyond "rant" and into "inappropriate" territory. I would personally question what I'm getting from this guy, but I'm not here to make your choices for you.
i don't actually know the guy you are speaking of, just saying that to be fair work can get stuck up and imposing on the most innocuous shit. "nsfw" can often be overbearing.
I can't stand the guy. Seems like all he does is post videos about him getting triggered about software being developed by people who are vocal about their care for others.
Like buddy, do you understand what the FOSS community mostly consists of?
Well, as far as i have observed this (from safe distance, far, far away...) Andreas Kling rejected a proposal from a new contributor to change documentation to use gender neutral terms... and as usual with those things, people tend to get mad.
Kling has promoted the nonsense white replacement conspiracy theory, whined about "leftist activists".
The answer is because just a tiny bit of looking at kling - just like with DHH - will reveal so much more far-right attitude and behavior beyond kling rejecting an offer to fix the poorly written documentation.
I am not involved in the Ladybird project, do not really follow the development or the community thereof in any close fashion, so i do not want to take any sides here. What i can say for sure after spending ~ 30 years online is, that the net often amplifies drama beyond any rational measure... so, until i find the time and energy to look into that (unlikely) i will stay with a neutral "oookay...."
As someone who has been online since the late 80's (BBS) and early 90's (internet), I'm well aware of how things can be amplified.
However, this does not require in-depth review. These are things you can discover with a cursory search that would have taken less time than writing that comment, FYI. I don't think anyone is sitting here suggesting Kling has grand plans for a gassing center, just that he promotes far right conspiracy theories and other hard-right ideology. This is a simple, easily verifiable statement.
i will stay with a neutral “oookay….”
Just so you know, this can come across condescending. I'm not going to say that was your intention, but that is absolutely how it would be read.
Just so you know, this can come across condescending. I’m not going to say that was your intention, but that is absolutely how it would be read.
Just to clarify: It is not meant that way, it is meant as an "Okay, i understand what you say but i will take anything i read online with a truckload of salt - no offense"
Kling has promoted the nonsense white replacement conspiracy theory
This is news to me. I'll look into them saying that and change how I talk about this event. Because before knowing this I would've described it similarly as the other person. But yeah, any grace I was willing to extend goes away if they're parroting white replacement.
Lets combine that with the contributing.md here as a response to "Your docs could be written better, I can do that", and how he stands with DHH (note Lunduke there btw), which was a response to DHH+Ruby....
Well it kind of paints a picture. A very specific one, imo.
Lunduke, the video of the post, is also a pretty notably tech right wing, which is why I mention to note that earlier.
I will say, I think Kling hides it better than DHH, same with Vaxry, but... yeah its pretty small and specific circles that seem to gather.
It can get real ugly in tech sometimes, and I really hate seeing it.
For a long time I considered tech the more inviting and accepting bunch, but that has definitely changed over time. There's some real gross stuff out there.
Lmao there's actually something kind of hilarious about a person trying to push gender neutral terms into documentation for a program called "Ladybird".
Did they want the project to be renamed to "Lady/Man/Thembird" too? /S
For some, sure. For me, no... I genuinely feel bad for anybody who's head is so far up their ass that they fail to see the humour around the irony here.
I am also genuinely confused as to how there can be documentation for a web browser that has gendered terms in it in the first place... Aside from the browser name, what other gendered terms would there be?
For example developers or users could be referred to with a default male pronoun (if the user wants … he can …) when, and that might surprise you, women and queer people do exist and might even use browsers or develop software. There's no need to be exclusive.
Why would it surprise me in even the slightest? It surprises me that people would default to a specific gender when all there is to go by is a username - I would expect they/them/[username] to be the typical reference.
What surprises me more is how judgmental and hostile people are here in the absolutely horrible assumptions they're making about me, because of a very obviously sarcastic remark I made about changing the only thing I could think of having a gendered term to a gender neutral term in the documentation for an application... My bad for mistaking "documentation" for manpages, and for somehow thinking a thread about Ladybird would be about the project's previous name and a myriad of other projects. How foolish of me not to be psychic in a thread calling out people for trying to be psychics in commits and code comments, right?
Taipei hits back at ‘despotic and pig-headed authoritarian regime’ as Beijing publishes identities of 18 people it claims are spreading ‘separatist’ messages
He did both. Luke 4 has him reading in a temple specifically, and Mark 14:49 (and other places during the passion) Jesus specifically says "why didn't you come arrest me when I was teaching in the Temple?"
The whole story of him turning water into wine was literally because they had partied at that wedding for three days straight and ran out of booze. Mfs knew how to party harder than anybody
Incidentally, that was probably Jesus's wedding to Mary Magdalene. Because why, when you run out of wine at a wedding, would you (as a servant) run to one of the guests to tell them that?
Reading between the lines, I think there's a corruption problem where someone is stealing wine purchased for the church and being sold at bars. A new brand/label might be an effort to change processes to make this type of corruption more difficult or easier to uncover.
Officials from Indonesia’s nuclear energy regulatory agency have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology, or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed.
Investigators think that radioactive dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap metal containing cesium-137. “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind,” said Bara Khrishna Hasibuan, a senior adviser to Indonesia’s Ministry of Food Affairs, at a Sept. 30 press conference.
Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.
Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal
The Goiânia accident [ɡoˈjɐ̃njə] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.[1]
[2]The radiation source in the Goiânia accident was a small capsule containing about 93 grams (3.3 oz) of highly radioactive caesium chloride (a caesium salt) made with the radioactive isotope caesium-137, and encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.
On September 13, 1987, the guard tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site.[7] They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly in a wheelbarrow to later take to Roberto's home. They thought they might get some scrap value for the unit.[1]
A radioactive contamination incident occurred in 1984 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, originating from a radiation therapy unit purchased by a private medical company and subsequently dismantled for lack of personnel to operate it. The radioactive material, cobalt-60, ended up in a junkyard, where it was sold to foundries that inadvertently melted it with other metals and produced about 6,000 tons of contaminated rebar.[1] These were distributed in 17 Mexican states and several cities in the United States. It is estimated that 4,000 people were exposed to radiation as a result of this incident.
[1]Detection of radioactive material
On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went on because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory's LAMPF technical area.
A radiation accident occurred in Samut Prakan Province, Thailand in January–February 2000. The accident happened when an insecurely stored unlicensed cobalt-60 radiation source was recovered by scrap metal collectors who, together with a scrapyard worker, subsequently dismantled the container, unknowingly exposing themselves and others nearby to ionizing radiation. Over the following weeks, those exposed developed symptoms of radiation sickness and eventually sought medical attention. The Office of Atomic Energy for Peace (OAEP), Thailand's nuclear regulatory agency, was notified when doctors came to suspect radiation injury, some 17 days after the initial exposure. The OAEP sent an emergency response team to locate and contain the radiation source, which was estimated to have an activity of 15.7 terabecquerels (420 Ci), and was eventually traced to its owner. Investigations found failure to ensure secure storage of the radiation source to be the root cause of the accident, which resulted in ten people being hospitalized for radiation injury, three of whom died, as well as the potentially significant exposure of 1,872 people.[1]
The theft of radioactive material in Tammiku, often called the Tammiku nuclear accident, took place in 1994. Three brothers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish (Harju County), Estonia, who were scrap metal scavengers, entered a fenced area in the woods and broke into a small shed that was seemingly abandoned (after having had no success with entering a larger building inside the area), with stairs leading to an underground hall. The brothers did not know that the buildings were nuclear waste storage facilities (although there were signs at the gate, they did not see them because they had climbed over the fence elsewhere). One of the brothers, Ivan, suffered a crush injury when a drum fell onto him. The brothers placed some pieces of metal into their pockets and went home, planning to return later. Ivan placed a metal cylinder in his pocket, not knowing that it was a strong caesium-137 radioactive source that was released from a container broken by the falling drum.[1] He received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days later.[2] Only after Ivan's family's dog died, and Ivan's stepson showed radiation burn of his hands (as a result of briefly touching the cylinder), was the cause of Ivan's death identified. The delay in information was due to the brothers' reluctance to admitting to the break-in.[3]
While we've often --- not always --- managed to label radiation sources, in general, people scrapping metal stuff, often stealing it, haven't done the best job of understanding or following related rules.
Three men from Lia (later designated as patients 1-DN, 2-MG, and 3-MB by the IAEA) had driven 45–50 km (28–31 mi) to a forest overlooking the Enguri Dam reservoir to gather firewood. They drove up a nearly impassable road in snowy winter weather, and discovered two canisters at around 6 pm. Around the canisters there was no snow for about a 1 m (3.3 ft) radius, and the ground was steaming. Patient 3-MB picked up one of the canisters and immediately dropped it, as it was very hot. Deciding that it was too late to drive back, and realizing the apparent utility of the devices as heat sources, the men decided to move the sources a short distance and make camp around them. Patient 3-MB used a stout wire to pick up one source and carried it to a rocky outcrop that would provide shelter. The other patients lit a fire, and then patients 3-MB and 2-MG worked together to move the other source under the outcrop. They ate dinner and had a small amount of vodka, while remaining close to the sources. Despite the small amount of alcohol, they all vomited soon after consuming it, the first sign of acute radiation syndrome (ARS), about three hours after first exposure. Vomiting was severe and lasted through the night, leading to little sleep. The men used the sources to keep them warm through the night, positioning them against their backs, and as close as 10 cm (3.9 in). The next day, the sources may have been hung from the backs of Patient 1-DN and 2-MG as they loaded wood onto their truck. They felt very exhausted in the morning and only loaded half the wood they intended. They returned home that evening.
If you find a strange grey canister in the middle of the woods that has somehow melted the snow around it and is steaming hot for no reason, don't fucking touch it.
....but we all know in our hearts that if we didn't have prior understanding of these thing, all of us would totally go touch the mystical heat canister.
If you read the first incident above, the Goiânia incident, after the people involved managed to use tools to break open and extract whatever was behind all that protective shielding, they found a glowing blue substance that they thought might be supernatural, so they brought over their friends and family to show them. And the kids played with it...
They began dismantling the equipment. That same evening, they both began to vomit due to radiation sickness.[clarification needed] The following day, Pereira began to experience diarrhea and dizziness, and his left hand began to swell. He later developed a burn on his hand in the same size and shape as the aperture, and he underwent partial amputation of several fingers.
[8]On September 15, Pereira visited a local clinic, where he was diagnosed with a foodborne illness; he was told to return home and rest.[1] Roberto, however, continued with his efforts to dismantle the equipment and eventually freed the caesium capsule from its protective rotating head. His prolonged exposure to the radioactive material led to his right forearm becoming ulcerated, requiring amputation on October 14.
[9]On September 16, Roberto punctured the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.
The exact mechanism by which the blue light was generated was not known at the time the IAEA report of the incident was written, though it was thought to be either ionized air glow, fluorescence, or Cherenkov radiation associated with the absorption of moisture by the source; a similar blue light was observed in 1988 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States during the disencapsulation of a caesium-137 source.
[1]On September 18, Roberto sold the items to a nearby scrapyard. That night, Devair Alves Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard, noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days, he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing powder.
On September 21, at the scrapyard, one of Ferreira's friends (identified as "EF1" in the IAEA report) freed several rice-sized grains of the glowing material from the capsule using a screwdriver. Ferreira began to share some of them with various friends and family members. That same day, his wife, 37-year-old Maria Gabriela Ferreira, began to fall ill. On September 25, 1987, Devair Ferreira sold the scrap metal to a third scrapyard.
The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg[10] while sitting on the floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. The egg was also exposed to dust from the powder; Leide absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, a fatal dose for which medical intervention was ineffective.[11][12][13] Leide's mother, Lurdes Ferreira, also got sick from the radiation.[14]
[15]Maria Gabriela Ferreira had been the first to notice that many people around her had become severely ill at the same time.[16] On September 28, 1987 – fifteen days after the item was found – she reclaimed the materials from the rival scrapyard and transported them to a hospital.
In the morning of September 29, a visiting medical physicist[17] used a scintillation counter to confirm the presence of radioactivity and persuaded the authorities to take immediate action. The city, state, and national governments were all aware of the incident by the end of the day.
There was also a second ex-Soviet de-encapsulated RTG incident, like the one you mention, that I recall, where people came across RTG.
kagis
Okay, apparently more than two incidents. I was thinking of the second Georgia incident, I think.
That wasn't the only incident involving RTGs however. In 2001, scrappers broke into a lighthouse on Kandalashka Bay and stole three radioisotope sources (all three were recovered and sent to Moscow). Three men in the mountains of Georgia were also exposed in 2002 after stumbling upon cores left out in the woods. In 2003, scrappers hurled a core into the Baltic Sea, where a team of experts retrieved it.
All of this from a steel plant’s smoke stack radioactive plume, from the melting down of medical equipment? …I’m still suspicious of the containers themselves. But, that’s just me.
Cesium is highly radioactive, and the sensors are very sensitive.
When Iceland had the Huefaleflefthaflafla volcano outbreak, I could smell the sulphur from my house. In Norway. More than 1500 km / 900 miles across half the atlantic ocean.
So radioactive smoke being detectable 1.5 miles away makes sense to me.
I suppose that both the cloves and shrimp have been traced to the same geographic area it stands to reason that this is indeed correct. It’s just so strange and the spices contamination isn’t as fully explained. Maybe if I saw a map the plume theory would make more sense. But at that rate it seems the whole island may be experiencing this issue which is very unfortunate.
This is totally a kaiju-causing event and I expect the results looking like a giant guy in a big costume trying to hug things, but the eye holes are too small and keeps missing.
IF it's a salt, THEN it could easily be dissolved into whatever dissolves that salt ( like, you know, water ).
Scrap gets rained on, & salts washed away, going into the waterways..
I'm not saying that is what happened, this time, but I am saying that if they're using radioactive cesium salt, then they're creating extra risk, that wouldn't be the case if they were using a solid pellet of metal.
( this, obviously, applies to the spent fuel from any thorium-salt nuclear reactor, too: salts dissolve! Containment that is absolutely proof against that, for the entire required duration, .. may not be possible, for some long-duration isotopes, right? )
That it isn't an international-criminal-law offense to have such materials immediately taken to radioactive-waste-management, .. is .. morally-criminal.
Allowing it to just happen, when normal people aren't competent to either recognize, or deal-with, nuclear-radiation..
Typical rejection-of-accountability & rejection-of-responsibility, though, of authority, isn't it?
Not every salt is easily soluble in water. Salt in a chemical sense is a compound made up of multiple ions. Marble and pretty much all rocks/minerals are also salts in a chemical sense and you don't see our mountains being washed away by one rainfall. So saying they use a thorium salt is not in itself a problem, depending on which salt they use.
I couldn't find any definitive answer, but from what I found on Wikipedia is that they mostly use Thorium dioxide at the moment, which is practically insoluble in water and alkaline, by slightly soluble in acids.
So no, salts don't all dissolve. It completely depends on the specific salt and its properties.
But yeah, nuclear industry in general is pretty hands off with regard to accountability and taking care of the long time effects.
I knew, when writing, that some salts are functionally insoluable ( lithium-fluoride, I'd read, pretty-much doesn't dissolve in water ).
I'd hoped that I'd phrased it carefully-enough, but obviously didn't.
Definitely thank you for identifying that the salt specific to thorium-salt reactors isn't at room temperature going to be easily dissolveable into our environment..
but .. I've also learned that hot-chemistry can be drastically different from room-temperature chemistry, & after all the .. gaslighting .. of various industries, through the past decades..
I want systematic & thorough testing to see what that salt can react with, under its entire temperature & pressure regime, before anybody signs-off on it.
"hands off" is a very polite way of saying it, Hoomin..
& I'd never thought of marble as a salt, you got me on that point!
Was given this little wintel box by a friend fairly recently, but I haven't yet even powered it on. I don't have a power cable for it unfortunately but when I do, what do you think I should do with it? What would you do with it?
I think it could potentially be just a basic lightweight desktop for web browsing and such, maybe a little smart tv box or something like that to replace the Chromecast I'm ashamed to admit I use, maybe run some basic self hosted stuff like pihole or home assistant? Could probably be a little emulation machine for retro games but I doubt it would be capable of much more than that. But I'm not sure there's too many ideas! I need suggestions people
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Yup! Though that's Adam Sandler doing the bit in the Rob Schneider movie, the original bit on SNL was done by Schneider (originally in 1993 i think). 🙂
For what it's worth I was able to migrate my docker of gitea to a docker of forgejo by just changing the image to be forgejo and remaining some if the environment variables. It uses the game data and database so it's basically a drop in replacement that they have instructions for on their website.
Makes trying it out pretty simple, not sure about migrating back to gitea from forgejo though.
Indeed but by doing so I can connect from the outside World too, e.g. if I'm at the dentist waiting for an appointment, I just connect to the VPN over my 5G connection, no login required.
You only need one VPN peering point inside your network. You do not need WG on other internal devices, just routing between intermediary subnet and LAN.
I setup WireGuard only last week so maybe I'm the one who misunderstand something : on your LAN assuming you are NOT using your router (or switch, or a networking device) to be a peer of the VPN, don't you need to add each machine as a peer to the VPN? Also doesn't that leave the most granularity so that the (root) user of each machine can chose to be on/off and more, e.g. split tunneling?
What you're saying is true, however VPNs connect both hosts and subnets. If you have a VPN server on your subnet, you can easily allow any client that connects to it to have access to your LAN.
VPNs are simply networking over encrypted tunnels. What you do with that tunnel is up to you.
I got some old Futro S920s recently. Put in WiFi/BT, loaded them up with Batocera and some Retro ROM's and gave them to friends to game on. Setup was super easy.
Sell it. Put your money earned to buy a general computer to tinker with instead.
If you have the skills you've already been tearing it down, soldering some pins, and compiling your modified uboot/EFI firmware and flashing it. The hack above has only like twenty people in the whole world who know how to do.
If it was a TV box and still functioning, there are people out there genuinely have a valid use case for it, to watch TV of course. Don't ruin it.
NetBSD. This box seems to have a vanilla x86 processor and it has plenty of resources (for NetBSD, that is). You can't use this as a daily driver, but it should be good enough to learn UNIX and/or self-host some stuff.
I used one of these (might even be the exact same model) as a little music player attached to an old soundbar. I could connect via ssh and play music through the speakers. The main challenge was finding a distribution that worked well with the internal sound card, since I wanted to use the aux output for sound. I don't think that I ever tried connecting a monitor to it, but it worked well for what I used it for, right up until I needed the sound bar for something else.
From a long term environmental standpoint that's not at all clear cut.
We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.
However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.
Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven't been able to solve before.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can't.
So we objectively have too large of a population, but not if we change our standard of living and you want AI to solve this problem not by reducing our standard of living but instead by reducing the population?
We can support the current population, it's just not profitable or popular to do so.
Birthrates naturally level off as societies develop. Many are already seeing negative growth.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren't living under Capitalism.
We don't need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
We can support the current population, it's just not profitable or popular to do so.
If your solution ignores the nature of human psychology it's not a solution, it's a quixotic quest.
Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren't living under Capitalism.
Yes, and as their standard of living rises to meet ours, the whole human output becomes increasingly unsustainable.
We don't need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.
There is a more plausible path for neural networks to be involved in climate change solutions then their is for you to replace capitalism.
I'm sure that if AI could get to the state where it could even approach maybe doing those things, it will mesh very well with capitalism and we'd all benefit collectively. One of the core tenants of capitalism.
We're just going to pretend that the only reason companies are funding AI research isn't because they want to replace the work force because it could be cheaper?
They should. That's how automation works. We should be building a society that doesn't require as much work, not insisting on doing work that machines could do when we don't want to.
Surplus value cannot be extracted from technology? I guess if you mean directly.
Every technological advancement has been used to to create more value that workers produce that gets stolen by the owner class, so through the transitive property, 100% percent of the value created by technology is stolen from the people actually using the technology to produce the value.
We've had insane technology breakthroughs that have made the value we produce skyrocket, and we're in the negative, by a shit ton.
Also those data centers would be classified under "means of production" and in an actual socialistic or communistic economy would be under the control of the people and would then produce value for us.
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet? and for what? these supposed automation tasks will not serve us. we will have mass poverty and more wealth concentrated into the hands of a habdful of tech bros. it's the industrial revolution all over again.
the global south is suffering from our actions. and how do you define living standards? do you think a capital slave that works in deadly conditions will be happy becase now they have an iphone and access to electricity? No. a slave is still a slave.
my brother in christ what are you saying? you know that rich people are the biggest polluters?
Yes, and what do you think is happening as other countries rise out of poverty? We have way too many humans on this planet to support everyone having a middle class lifestyle.
you know how ai datacenters literally destroy our planet?
Yeah, right now. But if you tried to render 4k videos in 1990 it would also take a full data center and enormous amount of power, but computer chips can do this thing where they get smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient over time, which is how every single phone can do it on 5W of usb power today.
The rain of down votes on ur comments shows me that Lemmy has become every bit as much if not worse an echo chamber than reddit. Facts of the matter are humans are overcrowding the plant and gobbling up all the resources at an unsustainable rate. Human population DOES need to drop a bit of we are to use this planet long term, lest we spell our own doom in a few hundred years by picking this once beautiful planet to the bone.
Only on lemmy would someone think 22 total votes of which only 3/4 are downvotes would be considered a “rain of downvotes” imagine if you were in a room with 22 people and 4 agree with you but 18 didn’t. That wouldn’t be considered a flood of downvotes. That’d just be a minority position.
You can separate the vote totals in the settings i believe. Piefed does it automatically. You can also use lemvotes.org to see how each person voted for the comment or post.
I am using the voyager app and have not found a place to separate them but I appreciate the response! I have not looked much into other Lemmy browsing apps and hardly ever use it on the computer...
They're the ecofascist yet you're the one saying "you'll shit in the mud and you'll like it".
Birthrates lower partially thanks to higher standard of living, which are not sustainable for 7+ billions people.
Not that I think LLMs are going to help in any way, but every time someone mentions overpopulation, all the counter arguments I see are loads of anti system rhetoric with nothing to show for it.
You think soviet Russia was/current China is sustainable?
The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.
You don't need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.
Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.
If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can't.
Theoreticisizing LLM's usefulness and resourcefulness doesn't help you there. For now they are rather useless embaracingly inefficient resoucehogs existing purely because of the bubble. It's a gamble at best, or a waste of resources and a degradation of human workforce at worst.
AI is not just LLMs, and it's already revolutionized biotechnical engineering through things like alpha fold. Like I said, "AI", as in neural network algorithms of which LLMs are just one example, are literally solving entirely new classes of problems that we simply could not solve before.
I don't have to dream, DeepMind literally won the Nobel prize last year. My best friend did his PhD in protein crystallography and it took him 6 years to predict the structure of a single protein underlying legionnaires disease. He's now at MIT and just watched DeepMind predict hundreds of thousands of them in a year.
If you vet your news sources by only listening to ones that are anti-AI then you're going to miss the actual exciting advancements lurking beneath the oceans of tech bro hype.
You need to take a step back and realize how warped your perception of reality has gotten.
Sure LLMs and other forms of automation, artificial intelligence and brute forcing of scientific problems will continute to grow.
What you are talking about though is extrapolating from that to a massive shift that just isn't on the horizon. You are delusional, you have read too many scifi books about AI and can't get your brain off of that way of thinking being the future no matter how dystopian it is.
The value to AI just simply isn't there, and that is before you even include the context of the ecological holocaust it is causing and enabling by getting countries all over the world to abandon critical carbon footprint reduction goals.
Don't come at me like you are being logical here, at least admit that this is the cool scifi tech dystopia you wanted and have been obsessed with. This is the only way you get to this point of delusion since the rest of us see these technologies and go "huh, that looks like it has some use" whereas people like you have what is essentially a religious view towards AI and it is pathetic and offensive towards religions that actually have substance to their philosophy and beliefs from my perspective.
The rich are using the gullibility of people like you to pump and dump entire economies you fool.
Edit I am not sure why I wrote this like you might actually take a step back, you won't, this message is really for everyone else to help emphasize how we are having the interests of the entire earth derailed by the advent of a shitty religion and its mindless disciples. The sooner the rest of us get on the same page, the sooner we can resist people like you and keep your rigid broken worldviews from destroying our futures.
You seem to be projecting about warped perspective.
Sure LLMs and other forms of automation, artificial intelligence and brute forcing of scientific problems will continute to grow.
That's not brute forcing of a scientific problem, it's literally a new type of algorithm that lets computers solve fuzzy pattern matching problems that they never could before.
What you are talking about though is extrapolating from that to a massive shift that just isn't on the horizon.
I'm just very aware of the number of problems in society that fall into the category of fuzzy pattern matching / optimization. Quantum computing is also an exciting avenue for solving some of these problems though is incredibly difficult and complicated.
You are delusional, you have read too many scifi books about AI and can't get your brain off of that way of thinking being the future no matter how dystopian it is.
This is just childish name calling.
The value to AI just simply isn't there, and that is before you even include the context of the ecological holocaust it is causing and enabling by getting countries all over the world to abandon critical carbon footprint reduction goals.
Quite frankly, you're conflating the tech bro hype around LLMs with AI more generally. The ecological footprint of Alpha Fold is tiny compared to previous methods of protein analysis that took labs of people years to discover each individual one. On top of the ecological footprint of all of those people and all of their resources for those years, they also have to use high powered equipment like centrifuges and x-ray machines. Alpha fold did that hundreds of thousands of times with some servers in a year.
Don't come at me like you are being logical here, at least admit that this is the cool scifi tech dystopia you wanted and have been obsessed with. This is the only way you get to this point of delusion since the rest of us see these technologies and go "huh, that looks like it has some use" whereas people like you have what is essentially a religious view towards AI and it is pathetic and offensive towards religions that actually have substance to their philosophy and beliefs.
Again, more childish name calling. You don't know me, don't act like you do.
I am treating you like a child because you refuse to use your brain.
You gave me one obscure very early stage example that isn't even connected to the overall rise in value of LLMs and other forms of AI that has created an economic bubble worse than the dotcom bubble. So you are claiming the next real AI revolution is justtttt around the corner with a totally new technology you swear?
Maybe?
What I do know for sure is you are far more interested in that maybe than you are in actually engaging with the existential real world problems we are facing right now...
I am treating you like a child because you refuse to use your brain.
No you're doing so because you started doom scrolling before you had coffee and now you're trying to justify your uncalled for rudeness.
You gave me one obscure
It literally won the nobel prize.
very early stage example
It is not early stage, predicting the structures of those proteins has already actively changed the course of biomedical science. This isn't early stage research that need fleshing out, this is peer reviewed published research that has caused entire labs and teams to completely change what they're doing and how.
that isn't even connected to the overall rise in value of LLMs and other forms of AI
It is in that it uses the same underlying type of algorithms and is literally from the same team that developed the "T" in ChatGPT.
So you are claiming the next real AI revolution is justtttt around the corner with a totally new technology you swear?
I have not claimed that, I said that AI algorithms are likely to be part of our climate solutions and our ability to serve more people with less manual labour. They help to solve entirely new classes of problems and can do so far more efficiently than years of human labour.
Rage out about tech bubbles and hype bros if you want. Last time it was crypto, streaming before that, apps and mobile before that, social before that, the internet before that, etc etc. Hype bubbles come and go, sometimes the underlying technology is actually useful though.
I have not claimed that, I said that AI algorithms are likely to be part of our climate solutions and our ability to serve more people with less manual labour. They help to solve entirely new classes of problems and can do so far more efficiently than years of human labour.
hahaha like AI will be a part of climate solutions are you serious right now?
Y'all are incapable of understanding expertise in your domain does not make you an expert in everything else, there is no way anyone in the industry you are speaking about will listen to climatologists and environmental scientists long enough to even begin to be helpful.
You keep talking about technology, when this is really a discussion about the catastrophic myopia of the tech industry of which you are making yourself a perfect example of.
To some biologists, that approach leaves the protein folding problem incomplete. From the earliest days of structural biology, researchers hoped to learn the rules of how an amino acid string folds into a protein. With AlphaFold2, most biologists agree that the structure prediction problem is solved. However, the protein folding problem is not. “Right now, you just have this black box that can somehow tell you the folded states, but not actually how you get there,” Zhong said.
“It’s not solved the way a scientist would solve it,” said Littman, the Brown University computer scientist.
This might sound like “semantic quibbling,” said George Rose, the biophysics professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins. “But of course it isn’t.” AlphaFold2 can recognize patterns in how a given amino acid sequence might fold up based on its analysis of hundreds of thousands of protein structures. But it can’t tell scientists anything about the protein folding process.
...
AlphaFold2’s success was founded on the availability of training data — hundreds of thousands of protein structures meticulously determined by the hands of patient experimentalists. While AlphaFold3 and related algorithms have shown some success in determining the structures of molecular compounds, their accuracy lags behind that of their single-protein predecessors. That’s in part because there is significantly less training data available.
The protein folding problem was “almost a perfect example for an AI solution,” Thornton said, because the algorithm could train on hundreds of thousands of protein structures collected in a uniform way. However, the Protein Data Bank may be an unusual example of organized data sharing in biology. Without high-quality data to train algorithms, they won’t make accurate predictions.
“We got lucky,” Jumper said. “We met the problem at the time it was ready to be solved.”
However, it should be noted that due to the intrinsic nature of AI, its success is not due to conceptual advancement and has not hitherto provided new intellectual interpretive models for the scientific community. If these considerations are placed in Kuhn’s framework of scientific revolution [68], AF release is a revolution without any paradigm change. Instead of “providing model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners” [68], it is a rather effective tool for solving a fundamental scientific problem.
This is because scientists working on AI (myself included) often work backwards. Instead of identifying a problem and then trying to find a solution, we start by assuming that AI will be the solution and then looking for problems to solve. But because it’s difficult to identify open scientific challenges that can be solved using AI, this “hammer in search of a nail” style of science means that researchers will often tackle problems which are suitable for using AI but which either have already been solved or don't create new scientific knowledge.
^ this is NOT the scientific method and it undermines the scientific integrity of the entire process
AI has not revolutionized biology research at all, its not complex enough, to come up with new experimentation methods, or manage the current ones, they maybe used to write AI slop papers thats about it.
Bro grow up. The world is not black and white. Literally not a single award on the planet is meritocratic if you insist on dealing in absolutes. Every award is awarded by some committee and there is some room left for human judgement, which leaves room for human bias, which makes it not perfectly meritocratic.
If you want to go an unhinged rant that no one wants to listen to then email the nobel association directly, don't waste federated server time.
no, because it's literally what it is, words have meaning. that's quite a lot of mental gymnastics and insults to defend the legitimacy of a prize that goes to war hawks and fascists for a while now.
it's being used to push for pretty evil politics right now and should not be taken seriously for that reason. however the fuck you want to define the words i'm trying to use to describe it.
Thank you for finally spewing out the point you wanted to make from the jump. It's irrelevant in the context of the original discussion, but you got to hear yourself talk.
that's literally my point the entire time. it's not meritocratic, it's political. bother to understand next time. unless you somehow think that these folks deserve any prize.
And your point is wrong because you keep boiling it down to simple black and white.
The Nobel prize is not purely political and is not devoid of merit.
The world is not full of binary systems. It's made of multi variable systems where multiple influences can be true at the same time.
If you want to make a point about why accurately predicting the structure of hundreds of thousands of proteins doesn't deserve the Nobel in chemistry then I'm all ears. Please tell us all exactly why you think their prize was political and not meritocratic, and why predicting protein structures automatically is not important?
Because if you can't answer that very specific question, then you weren't making a point relevant to the conversation, you were making a snide generalization to hear yourself speak.
Most people are cool with some AI when you show the small, non-plagarative stuff. It sucks that "AI" is such a big umbrella term, but the truth is that the majority of AI (measured in model size, usage, and output volume) is bad and should stop.
Neural Network technology should not progress at the cost of our environment, short term or long term, and shouldn't be used to dilute our collective culture and intelligence. Let's not pretend that the dangers aren't obvious and push for regulation.
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it's sentient. Nvidia couldn't come to it's current capitalization if we defaulted to useful models that can speed up technical process after some fine tuning by data scientists, like shaving off another 0.1% on Kaggle or IRL in a classification task. It usually causes big but still incremental changes. What is sold as AI and in what quality it fits into your original comment as a lifesaver is nothing short of reinvention of one's workplace or completely replacing the worker. That's hardly hapening anytime soon.
LLM is what usually sold as AI nowadays. Convential ML is boring and too normal, not as exciting as a thing that processes your words and gives some responses, almost as if it's sentient.
To be fair, that's because there are a lot of automation situations where having semantic understanding of a situation can be extremely helpful in guiding action over a ML model that is not semantically aware.
The reason that AI video generation and out painting is so good for instance it that it's analyzing a picture and dividing it into human concepts using language and then using language to guide how those things can realistically move and change, and then applying actual image generation. Stuff like Waymo's self driving systems aren't being run through LLMs but they are machine learning models operating on extremely similar principles to build a semantic understanding of the driving world.
I'd argue, that it sometimes adds complexity to an already fragile system. Like when we implement touchscreens instead of buttons in cars. It's akin to how Tesla, unlike Waymo, dropped LIDAR to depend on regular videoinputs alone. Direct control over systems without unreliable interfaces, semantic translation layer, computer vision dependancy etc serves the same tasks without additional risks and computational overheads.
I'd argue, that it sometimes adds complexity to an already fragile system.
You don't have to argue that, I think thats inarguably true. But more complexity doesn't inherently mean worse.
Automatic braking and collision avoidance systems in cars add complexity, but they also objectively make cars safer. Same with controls on the steering wheel, they add complexity because you now often have two places for things to be controlled and increasingly have to rely on drive by wire systems, but HOTAS interfaces (Hands On Throttle And Stick) help to keep you focused on the road and make the overall system of driving safer. While semantic modelling and control systems absolutely can make things less safe, if done well they can also actually let a robot or machine act in more human ways (like detecting that they're injuring someone and stopping for instance).
Direct control over systems without unreliable interfaces, semantic translation layer, computer vision dependancy etc serves the same tasks without additional risks and computational overheads.
But in this case, Waymo is still having to do that. They're still running their sensor data through incredibly complex machine learning models that are somewhat black boxes and producing semantic understandings of the world around it, and then act on those models of the world. The primary difference with Waymo and Tesla isn't about complexity or direct control of systems, but that Tesla is relying on camera data which is significantly worse than the human eye / brain, whereas Waymo and everyone else is supplementing their limited camera data with sensors like Lidar and Sonar that can see in ways and situations humans can't and that lets them compensate.
That and that Waymo is actually a serious engineering company that takes responsibility seriously, takes far fewer risks, and is far more thorough about failure analysis, redundancy, etc.
The ones advocating for corporate greed and AI are the same ones talking about a birth rate crisis. I guess they just want more proles to slave for them and damn the ones who die young in the process.
i see some state universities around saying the same, thing trying to blame the low enrollment crisis, to low birth rates, and not because COVID exposed the low-no job prospects and HCOL of post graduation. if your universities obscures/obfuscate the most important part of your DEGREE: labwork, or internships/ experience its only going to end one way.
Lol. I thought the "crash can't come soon enough" line was hilariously close to Dwight's line. It was a joke. I guess everybody missed it. Fair enough, too, it was a joke from a comedy program... Why would anyone think that was supposed to be funny.
and only keep around a couple senior engineers, employees to manage those outsourced people, since the outsourced people may not be on par with stateside employees.
It's doing a shit job at replacing people, it's still too prone to hallucinating for the vast majority of its applications.
In many of the applications where AI has replaced people the promised performance gains never materialized because of the insane amount of babysitting a LLM agent requires.
Doesn't matter if it can write 10 hours of code in 5 minutes if you still need a software dev to troubleshoot the output for 25 hours.
They have like 90% reliability (figure pulled directly from my ass) but they need 99.99% reliability to actually be effectively reliable.
They've burned through all their hype and still haven't made it reliable yet. I think they're not going to get it done before the bubble collapses.
It'll be similar to the dotcom boom, infinite hype implosion collapses the market to a few core players and then those core players will get there over the next 15 years.
Isn't going to disappear but it's absolutely going to fade into the background of day to day life.
If humanity's energy requirements without AI are x, and AI's requirements are an additional y, then AI is reponsible for the worst energy sources up to the value of y.
I live in a country that produces 70+% of its energy through nuclear reactors.
Sure we are definitely an exception but turning off datacenters where I live wouldn't change anything about coal.
To be clear I'm not advocating for nuclear energy nor am I saying it's a bad option.
Every country has a different energy mix, some more "carbon efficient" than others let's say but it is not only revolving about coal and renewables.
Anyway, I think it's fairly clear to me the datacenters won't shutdown anytime soon even without AI it's gonna be a major consumption of energy in any country. So I think nuclear should definitely at least considered as an option and to some extent be part of any energy mix. I think everyone knows that only renewables is not really a realistic scenario. Coal obviously is the worst option in any amount. So yeah, I was surprised that you didn't mention it that's it. I do think it's very much relevant to the topic of the ever increasing energy consumption we are all gonna face in the future. This post would probably not even exist if we shutdown datacenters but I suppose you meant it as shutting down only processing power toward AI. But still we will need more datacenters in the future no matter what.
Exactly, people don't seem to realise that higher demand for energy means higher demand for all sources of energy including fussil fuels.
If doesn't matter if this datacenter runs 100% on renewables if that means that the overall demand on the powergrid increases and now other clients that used to get (a higher percentage of) their power from renewable are getting it from coal, it's just a green washing shift blame technique.
There's one exception - when they are self-sufficient, or even net positive, with renewables. One example is the Google datacenter in Hamina, Finland. They build it in an old unused paper mill, built their own renewables (3/4ths of their required at this point), and they use the cooling loop for district heating for the city. That extra heat provides around 75% of the required heating, meaning the city could stop relying on their old natural gas heaters so now the district heating runs on renewables as well.
It's easy to be an energy neutral datacenter, simply pour enough money to building new renewables that wouldn't have been built without your contributions, and you don't tax the power grid.
I'll begrudgingly concede that this is a good point.
Part of me wants to say "just force these assholes to build renewables without the datacentres" but I know that's nonsensical.
I guess this is how carbon credit schemes are intended to work, but I'm aware that aside from a few specific cases carbon trading has just been a way to obfuscate carbon emissions.
I’m not into gold panning… though it’s not like all companies are using AI so much that it will transpire in their ESG. Now I now a couple that were so far very happily ignoring this source of carbon and, as far as I remember, it was not reported by the cloud providers either.
It's fucking insane how much is invested (both money and natural resources) in the emperor's new clothes. Let's scorch the planet because every idiot out there buys into the marketing and hype. We are utterly and truly doomed because of ourselves.
AI and the investment around it are literally the only thing holding up America’s economy right now. If you take the artificial growth and the vast amounts of investment that are being pumped in AI development data centers, the US economy has barely grown half percentage point.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs until it falls apart along with the US economy.
No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs
I mean, they could use their fascist power grab to drive through the infrastructure work to expand power transmission lines needed to support a modern economy, renewables, and yes more datacenters
Additional coal is just the easiest way since we already have century old power lines bringing that power where it’s needed
Yes, in this case, coal might be easiest, cheapest, fastest because we can continue to neglect infrastructure. It’ll fall apart on someone else’s administration
Typical. So basically, they’re gonna turn America into Texas. Their power grid is famously shitty and has been neglected for decades due to Republican control of the government. They are constantly kicking the can down the road for some other administration to deal with it.
Everyone time there’s even a slight dusting of snow anywhere in Texas the power grid shuts off and people freeze to death. But Texas refuses to fix the power grid and nationalize because it would mean investing and bringing their shitty substandard power grid up to modern standards.
Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population and call us sleep walkers. I know, as I'm one of them. Life is difficult enough already without jeopardising my freedom as the only way to change our course is violence at this point.
All of these problems are caused by a remarkably small network of people. I'm not even necessarily talking about the CEOs. It's the boards of directors. This is also the pool from which CEOs are drawn one and the pool to which CEOs return after their golden parachute. They function as a living repository of evil. A warehouse of criminals and nepo-babies. (Ex: Airbnb guy joined DOGE and is on teslas board. So first he destroys the housing market for a generation, and then destroys the government, and he is the person who directs Tesla.)
Like, the network is so small it could fit in one big room.
There's still time for a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic , and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above.
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If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth. And that includes nearly everyone using social media.
Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn't a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.
These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It's the 2 that's the problem.
I thought they were totally just using flare gas and renewables ;) 🙄
But my understanding for real is that ai data centers are just the same hardware as buttcoin but more of it and organized. The venture capitalists finally got what they wanted, blowing their wad on Nvidia.
China already has 200% the capacity relative to their demand. They've been growing solar fast enough to beat very high 8%+ electricity consumption growth last year, and can probably keep the pace.
Every company uses storage, and every growing company needs more.
You're comparing mountains to molehills. That's before you consider improvements in storage and compression relative to demands for space, or the degree to which our storage capacity "needs" are predicated on the voracious appetite of AI models and their unwanted output. Or, for that matter, the inefficient distribution of data and proliferation of spam data that predates it.
Here is a fact: an authoritarian non-democracy is doing a lot for securing the future of humanity, while the "leader of the free world" are vandalizing the climate and accelerating apocalyptic climate catastrophe.
In 2025, China is a net positive for the future of humanity, while the USA is a net negative.
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: "facts don't care about your feelings".
If you, like me, care about the future of democracy, we have to do a LOT of digging.
If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
It might be cold comfort, but none of these business models have the liquidity behind them to build out coal power at the levels they claim they'll need.
Nevermind that solar/wind would be cheaper. Or that the raw manpower to yield coal in quantity no longer exists. So much of these proposals are - at their heart - the same vaporware that promised waves of new nuclear construction and hydro-power and geothermal.
Bottom line is that GenAI's primary revenue comes from dumb VC and bad debt. They can't build, much less operate, any of this shit.
Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we're back staring at its approaching collapse. I don't think we can escape that long term, and we'll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we'll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.
capitalism was kind of never democratic i think, considering so much is basically dictated by the people who "own" it, which feels more like a dictatorship/ feudalism
Oh for sure. There's however a higher degree of democracy than feudalism, mostly stemming one way or another from the newly developed labour power under capitalism. Power that labour has slowly ceded over the last 50-70 years or so, but it can still regain when pressed. The system still contains this vulnerability (from the point of view of the capitalist) and it seems impossible to eradicate.
Fuck AI and these energy guzzling data centers. For decades we were told to conserve power and such and now all of those savings are being sucked up, and more, by these centers.
Yep. People are charged the marginal cost of power generation. Everyone pays the price of the most expensive source of electricity. The market is rigged.
The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with "AI" cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).
Wish my coworkers would get the memo. Constantly trying to shove AI videos in my face like "haha look at MLK Jr and Tupac as pro wrestling announcers haha"
As an artist I am deeply repulsed by AI. But other people around me? They love it for some reason.
How many of the AI companies that chose coal actually produce something worthwhile? Seems like the first the these nuScience fuckers should do with their digital overmind is create clean power.
People get distracted over the fate of the pure speculative frenzy could be an AI bubble, and the harm to the hapless speculators and banksters could have a minor impact on the rest of the economy.
Reality is far worse than an AI bubble. It is a US mission for a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel that is too big to fail. Bubble in AI investments becomes unlikely, but total destruction of rest of US economy/prosperity becomes assured when the "plebs able to eat in America bubble" bursts is a sacrifice that a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel is willing to make.
If Americans are still able to afford to eat, then China or Iran wins.
Marineland was a hellhole and I'm glad they're dying, but those whales are caught in a battle between people and there isn't a good way out.
Marineland doesn't have the money to continue to take care of them and the government has refused to help.
Marineland tried to offload them to a center in China, but that would mean they are almost certainly misused as an attraction again, so the government said they can't do that either.
Basically, these whales will either be euthanized, or live with increasingly neglectful care as Marineland continues to bleed money unless someone else with the capability of caring for captive whales is willing to take them.
Marineland should declare bankruptcy if they have legal obligations for animal care that they no longer have the funding to satisfy. Then the government can liquidate the (substantial) remaining assets and use that to find the animals a good home, instead of letting the company tell us what it decides it can and can't afford to do for the animals because they'd rather put that money in their own pockets and let the animals die.
But we never hold companies to such standards. We let them get away with literal murder when they later cry about how they had to, until we shrug it off as just "companies being companies".
I think we need better standards. Don't give them an inch. Hold them responsible. Hold their feet to the fucking fire. They bought these animals. They used them. They monetized them. They made their owners rich. Their (intentional) lack of planning for what to do when the animals were no longer profitable anymore should not be rewarded by letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die.
Their (intentional) lack of planning for what to do when the animals were no longer profitable anymore should not be rewarded by letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die.
They had a plan to ensure the animals had a home before the sale of the land was complete. It wasn't guaranteed utopia but it wasn't a guaranteed hellhole either.
When choosing between euthanasia and re-homing, the park chose life. Instead, now it's Whale Stew for weeks.
Vague corporate apologism and casual implications of edibility don't do anything to convince me Marineland did, or do, or ever will have any particular interest in finding better facilities for any of their animals.
I get that you don't see it this way, but from the perspective of the law they're just livestock.
I do very strongly agree that they never should have been allowed to be held captive, but that can't be undone.
I don't know anything at all about this company but I very much doubt that their assets are sufficient for them indefinitely. They may have assets but they almost certainly have debts. Caring for these whales would be a huge financial undertaking. Almost all the same costs the park has had while it's been entertaining guests.
I don't really have any solutions I'm sorry, I'm just opining that using the parks remaining assets to care for them isn't viable.
from the perspective of the law they’re just livestock.
Yeah that's a problem. That's why I make an effort to let people know how unacceptable the situation is. Because we need better laws. It is our government's responsibility to write better laws, and maybe if we continue highlighting and criticizing the issues being raised here, they will.
I don’t know anything at all about this company
Well there's your problem. I do. There's an awful lot of speculation in your post for someone who doesn't know anything at all about this company. They own a thousand acres of prime land in the tourist area of Niagara Falls, within sight of a world-renowned natural tourist attraction that is basically a license to print money and they've been operating on the backs of their animals for many profitable decades.
They have only recently started subdividing and mortgaging this incredible piece of land as they move towards the inevitable shutdown and sale. This is what I refer to as "letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die". The original and former owner of Marineland, John Holer, was a real uniquely offensive piece of work and if you don't know anything about him you don't know anything about the context of this park. He only died less than a decade ago, and in the care of the family, the park's business has been (thankfully) winding down since then. One of the most important tricks businessmen love to use is to cry poor and talk about their debts. When they do that, you have to remember that their single largest and most important debt a business always has, is to their owners. This is a family owned business. It is usually the owner themselves crying about their "debt" but most of that debt is inevitably to themselves. What they really mean is that they want to squeeze out every last drop of "equity" they feel entitled to. They take on new debt specifically to do that, to keep the lights on and the doors open while they're hauling away bags of money. Then for a huge suitcase of cash, they sell the ownership forward to someone willing to dismantle things further and the cycle of looting accelerates.
Finally, when there is nothing left to take they tell us a sad story about how the business was not successful (ignoring the chain of owners who walked away with millions upon millions for their brief efforts) and maybe they'll grudgingly admit that one or more of those looting owners "mismanaged" some things, and they'll tell you that's why they simply won't be able to follow through on all their debts and obligations and responsibilities at this point. And they'll leave people they don't give a shit about holding the largest amounts of debt they are suddenly unable to repay. Sometimes it's some foolish lenders they were sneaky enough to con into funding the ends of their adventure who were told they had a healthy operating business that was going to be ongoing for years. More often, it is the employees who are intended to be left holding the bag. Suddenly "discovering" you are bankrupt allows you to avoid paying employees what they are owed in wages and severance and benefits and pensions, which can add up to many millions of dollars. But that's only the easiest option. The highest and most cherished possibility though, is to arrange the finances in such a way that it's the government who is left with the responsibility, so the cleanup is left to all the people of the regional tax base, or the provincial one, or if possible even the national one. That's the holy grail. Make society pay what the market won't so they can make sure they get every last cent they possibly can out of their business now that they don't want to do it anymore. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.
Doing these things can be risky, if they do it wrong, they can get accused of fraud and even may end up in jail. Do you think that will stop them from trying to do it though, if they think they can cover their ass and have plausible deniability about what they've done and why they've done it? Shutting down a large and profitable business before it actually becomes unprofitable, by making it unprofitable, is an art form and is a process executed with calculated expertise. Don't let them convince you they haven't thought of or planned for this.
Successful businessmen are really great at pretending to be failing businessmen whenever it suits them, and it always suits them to do so when somebody wants money out of them. In the words of Bill Gates on the Simpsons, "You don't think I got rich by writing checks, do you?"
People have been protesting this company for decades. "The Walrus and the Whistleblower" is a great documentary on Marineland, following the story of a local activist who spent years in legal battles against Marineland. Nobody is going to stop fighting while there is still any opportunity to pursue justice for those animals.
It's too bad you feel like the battle is already lost, but I don't think that's any reason to stop fighting and surrender to something you know is wrong.
This was 30+ years ago, when I was a wee lad. There was a fair visiting my town and they gave goldfish to to children in a certain attraction. Literally a plastic bag with the goldfish.
Somebody for the city hall came and forbid them, because children can't take case of little fish (and, I guess, they were all living with no adults /s).
Short story, they just stopped feeding the fish and a few days later they just dumped them somewhere.
They created the cost with their actions. The government should take every penny of value down to the CEOS kids toys and then foot any costs not paid for.
animals born in capitivity often cant survive in the wild, and plus theres also potential inbreeding that they dont want to introduce into a wild population. they dont have the same survival skills as a wild cetecean. thats why there so many tigers in capitivity, they were inbred
Is that a problem to stop hand feeding them and just release a fish into the pool they live in? Basic hunting shouldn't be that difficult to learn especially in safety and when you're hungry.
Regardless of the potential risk, this option is the only one that gives them a chance of living a meaningful life when the other options are: - A zoo in china - Literal euthanasia
But it's not really a chance at life and cruel. Starving to death is not a nice way to go. And I can't believe people are suggesting it. As good as people feel about releasing the whales the survival rate is not good.
Euthanize means lethal injection. It's a common way to kill animals for various reasons (too sick, too violent...), obviously it's never voluntary on the part of the animal.
Is letting them go not an option here? How is it either they kill them or they send them to China? Like I realize that releasing captive animals isn't always ideal, but considering the alternative here.
i had this idea that a program can edit files in an encrypted environment. WinRaR with higher level of encryption would be the best way to describe it. but i was wonder if the files on a linux HDD or SDD are encrypted.
I do have this idea that you can save encrypted files to a cloud server and pull it out and unencrypted by a light weight program
Storing files encrypted and decrypting them on-demand is called "encryption at rest". Linux supports it but is not enabled by default. You can also encrypt /boot to get FDE (Full Disk Encryption) to ensure that the kernel or bootloader is not tampered with. Look into LUKS
This is not entirely correct. Many distributions do enable encryption by default. Also, encrypting the /boot partition does not guarantee the integrity of the boot sequence, you need to enable and correctly configure Secure Boot for that.
It takes the files that you want to store in the cloud and encrypts them into a bunch of individual files (like encrypted archives) and uploads them to the server. When you access the files it automatically pulls down the archives that contain the files that you want.
You just see a regular directory that's being synced with the cloud, but the cloud service provider only sees you uploading a bunch of encrypted files with nonsense filenames.
Cryptomator for Windows, macOS, and Linux: Secure client-side encryption for your cloud storage, ensuring privacy and control over your data. - cryptomator/cryptomator
Diethylene glycol (DEG) is an organic compound that is commonly used as an industrial solvent in antifreeze mixtures and brake fluids. But, in India, DEG is ending up with worrying frequency where it should never be – in cough syrups for children.
The pharmaceutical variant has a strictly controlled presence of DEG, if any, unlike the cheaper commercial kind, which has far higher levels of the compound, making it unfit for human consumption. Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.
Known as the “pharmacy of the world”, India accounted for 3 per cent of the world’s total pharmaceutical exports in 2023. It is particularly known for exporting affordable drugs, especially to Africa and other developing regions.
In May 2023, following the scandals abroad, the CDSCO mandated a testing protocol for cough syrups in designated Indian laboratories before export.
But no such testing was mandated for the domestic market, which has many small manufacturers producing low-cost medicines. It has now asked all state governments to submit a list of cough syrup manufacturers, while initiating a joint audit of these companies.
The failure to prevent repeated cough syrup scandals has also brought up a whiff of alleged corruption. Mr Sukesh Khajuria, a public health activist who has been helping families of the 2019-20 victims in and around Jammu seek justice, alleged that the Indian government had failed to rein in corruption within the country’s drug regulatory set-up.
“Pharma companies have hidden partnerships with the party in power,” he claimed.
A 2024 report published on Scroll, an Indian online news website, said that 35 pharmaceutical companies in India had contributed nearly 10 billion rupees (S$146.4 million) to political parties. Of these, at least seven companies were being investigated for poor-quality drugs when they made their contributions.
Well. If the state doesn't fix it from a licensing side, I guess it'd be possible for a company to fill the gap. Like, certify drug manufacturers.
The difference between certification and licensing is that a certifier can't prohibit a company from doing business if it isn't certified. But...it does mean that a purchaser, at least as long as they know what certification to look for, can look for a given certification.
You can make a certification company that places any restrictions it wants to certify a product or company, so that eliminates roadblocks to getting that side of things moving. 'course, the certifier has to build reputation for the certification to mean much.
Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.
i'd note that there's zero technical reason why DEG would end up in PG. reaction of water with ethylene oxide gives you ethylene glycol, diethylene glycol and higher analogues and these are then separated by distillation. propylene glycol is made from propylene oxide instead, and it's more expensive than ethylene oxide. diethylene glycol has little use on its own, at least compared to other glycols
however,
The physical properties of diethylene glycol make it an excellent counterfeit for pharmaceutical-grade glycerine (also called glycerol) or propylene glycol
"Hard questions." Bull shit. The "question" is to make great profit selling to the most populous country with proper safe guards. Or to make astronomical profits by selling a knowingly tainted product that kills people.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he would oppose the "hard cutoff" currently planned by the EU, aiming to stop registering new internal combustion engine cars by 2035. The goal was already under review and looking fragile.
Classic fuel German cars are pretty pricy these days while Chinese cars even with tariffs can be cheaper. That's not a good sign for the German industry.
Until around 2003, Germany was the global market leader in photovoltaic systems. Today, the country plays virtually no role in this industry anymore.
That's what happens when you elect lobby-friendly conservatives to government for decades, who refuse to invest in the future and even actively seek to prevent innovation because it harms their powerful business friends.
That's what the CDU did back then, and that's what they are doing today. The only strange thing is that people still don't seem to understand that it is essentially the CDU whose disastrous policies have caused the German economy to fall so far behind in pretty much all key industries.
All correct, but please don't forget that the SPD also had a hand in it. Especially in case of the solar industry, Sigmar Gabriel finished what Peter Altmaier started.
Yes, absolutely right. Unfortunately, for exactly the same reason: lobbying and the resulting policy of continuing as before until it is no longer possible to continue because the world has moved on without us.
Unfortunately, the photovoltaic and automotive industries are only the most prominent examples of the short-sightedness of this policy.
But why? Like, I get why he's doing it, it's because he's bought by the car and oil industries, and for some weird reason the VW Group really doesn't want to make electric cars, but what's the please-elect-me-again reason? Are they just really hoping enough people who hate electric cars are going to love them for this? 'Cause that votersegment is disappearing fast.
Sorry mr Kaellenius, but the fact that you now make 100k EUR giant screens on wheels with loose interior trim has nothing to do with them being electric.
Signed, someone who actually used to like the cars MB made.
Also the EQE never got a wagon version but the T-modell is super popular for the normal E-class. And the EQC was crossover only, no normal car version at all...
BMW meanwhile went from a beautiful generation of cars to something truly ugly the same time they started making EVs properly and Volkswagen/Audi UX has been shit for at least half a decade now, I HATE operating any of the cars they've made this decade.
Idk what I'm gonna buy when 2000s and 2010s German cars are no longer maintainable, but I don't think it'll be German.
La prova versio de la nova Plena Ilustrita Vortaro nun estas libere alirebla en la reto. Bertilo Wennergren okupiĝas pri la renovigo de la plej grava Esperanta vortaro preskaŭ plentempe ekde 2020. Ni petis lin rakonti, kiel la nova vortaro diferencas de la antaŭaj versioj, kaj kiam la prova versio iĝos definitiva.
The fucked up thing is we don't even know what nationality or origin of the others who were murdered. Likely will never know since they were blown to smithereens and doubt anyone went to collect DNA.
Update 22:51h: The vote originally scheduled for 14 October will not take place because there is no majority for the proposal. It is likely that the EU Commission will now propose to extend the Chat Control 1.0 regulation currently in force that permits providers to scan our messages (if they choose). An extension of this indiscriminate bulk scanning regime is not acceptable. Scanning under this regulation needs to be targeted and limited to suspects where requested by a judicial authority. - patrick-breyer.de/en/citizen-p…
In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU's controversial Chat Control regulation today after facing massive public pressure.
President Emmanuel Macron has asked Sébastien Lecornu to return as French prime minister only four days after he stood down from the post, sparking a week of high drama and political turmoil.
Macron made the announcement late on Friday, hours after meeting all the main parties together at the Élysée Palace, except the leaders of the far right and far left.
Lecornu's return comes as a surprise, as he said only two days ago he was not "chasing the job" and his "mission is over".
Not necessarily. It would provide an attack vectore for sure, that being the data connection between profiles, but if it is implemented in a controllable manner (See qubes os), it's fine. The only issue I see with GrapheneOS in this scenario is: There is no uncompromised host for verification, so I don't really know myself how something safe could be implemented, however I would also think devs don't really want to, since there are ways which OP has already described some of.
Sorry, my point was when you have control over what gets shared and you basically decide the files yourself, you can also control what kind of data gets shared, so theres not just a straight up hole.
Not specific to grapheneos, and also battery friendly on LOS is localsend, and on gnu+linux I use instead localsend-go since it offers a CLI (what I use) and a rudimentary TUI which is missing some functionality but good enough (I prefer using it as CLI). But localsend also includes a windows app BTW. On gnu+linux some prefer kdeconnect, but I find it more battery intensive than localsend on the phone, and the extra functionality is not what I expected, like I originally guessed I could write sms from a gnu+linux box, or read past one, and that's not what sms control means.
Don't these alternatives work on grapheneos for some reason?
Airlynk — browser peer-to-peer file sharing without servers
I built Airlynk because I was frustrated with every peer-to-peer file sharing tool I tried — connections would fail, transfers would stall, and NATs or firewalls always got in the way. Nothing I tested was reliable enough for real use, and I wanted a solution that actually worked.
So I decided to build it myself. Over several months, I crafted Airlynk to work entirely in the browser, using WebRTC for direct peer-to-peer transfers. I designed it to be simple, fast, and server-free, with fallback relays only when absolutely necessary. Chunked transfers and progress tracking make even large files move smoothly.
The journey taught me a lot about peer-to-peer networking, browser limitations, and user experience. My goal with Airlynk is to make file sharing effortless for everyone, and I’m excited to keep improving reliability and security based on real feedback from users.
Airlynk — browser peer-to-peer file sharing without servers
I built Airlynk because I was frustrated with every peer-to-peer file sharing tool I tried — connections would fail, transfers would stall, and NATs or firewalls always got in the way. Nothing I tested was reliable enough for real use, and I wanted a solution that actually worked.
So I decided to build it myself. Over several months, I crafted Airlynk to work entirely in the browser, using WebRTC for direct peer-to-peer transfers. I designed it to be simple, fast, and server-free, with fallback relays only when absolutely necessary. Chunked transfers and progress tracking make even large files move smoothly.
The journey taught me a lot about peer-to-peer networking, browser limitations, and user experience. My goal with Airlynk is to make file sharing effortless for everyone, and I’m excited to keep improving reliability and security based on real feedback from users.
Like, all the Muslims in India were forced into Pakistan, or killed.
It seems completely unnecessary to need to state the religion of a large group of Pakistani demonstrates, but why the fuck use an emotionally loaded word like "Islamist" to do it?
These people were demonstrating against the bullshit deal Palestine was forced to accept, when everyone know Israel will immediately violate it.
Do you really believe all of the protestors was part of that party? Muslims pray in mosques without being islamists. During the Arab spring which was not a religious movement in Tunisia we started the protests after the prayers because it is the easiest way to gather without being dispersed fast
Using the word worshipers insread of peotestors. Using formulation that make it look like that islamist group was the only people who protested, mentionning that the protests happened after the "cease fire" which israel isn't respecting , why there is no testimonies from a protestor etc
I legitimately don't know, but if you read the article, this wasn't their plan or their protests.
They're just reporting how many of their members have been infused by police for protesting, and how many have been killed.
Like, if I go to a BLM protest, there's gonna be some assholes I don't agree with there too.
Putting different groups against each other to derail a protest isn't anything new. Neither is acting like a giant protest is only worth as much as the worst people to support the cause.
I understand why the AP is doing it. And I understand why you're doing it.
Hope this is okay here but I am more and more skeptical of short form videos and hope there is a community where we can go to drop slop and have it identified.
Most AI video tools aren't perfect, so you can only spot the most obvious fakes. If someone takes time to edit a fake video, it becomes very hard to detect. The best way to judge is to check the source, the motive, and whether you trust the person who shared it.
Smaller content creators with fewer views are generally more genuine.
If I see someone with several thousand views, I'm instantly skeptical. If their channel is part of their work, I pay attention too. I'm fine with AI assisted content as long as there's an actual human behind the keyboard who truly took time to think and used their brain.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The Frank Zappa video is fake AF. Just google like "Frank Zappa Al Bundy quote" or any of the other topics. None of them are there. The google "AI" says Zappa was never quoted about Al Bundy.
Also the video itself looks too sharp for when this guy died. And the million russian hashtags? Phony.
edit: Holy shit just look at the account. It's all pure "AI" disinfo. smh.
Trump cited export controls that China imposed on rare earths from that country. Trump also threatened to cancel his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping because of the dispute.
Stock markets dropped on Trump's bellicose Truth Social post that said China is "becoming very hostile" in seeking tough export controls on rare earths.
🙄 .....because that tactic has been working out so well thus far. Pretty convinced it's the only international political strategy he knows in addition to bombs.
To be fair, the tariffs are having their intended effect. They're working quite well for the ultra wealthy for whom they were designed. The inevitable financial fallout is a problem for the future, but it doesn't really matter because workers and consumers will be left holding the bag as usual.
Remember when they were called "rare earth metals" before he called them "rare earths" in a demented stupor that one time. And now it's just accepted terminology. I hate my country
The term "rare-earth" is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are only found in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. They are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth's crust, but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore at great expense.
Basically the whole thing has always been a misnomer. They arent rare, nor are they found as metal naturally. But I suppose rare earth elements or metals sounds better than “abundant but hard to find rock thingies”
“Some very strange things are happening in China!” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post.
“They are becoming very hostile, and sending letters to Countries throughout the World,
Wow, that's crazy. What kind leader sends threatening letters to all their trade partners. Definitely not something that Dear Leader Trump would ever do.
The Paris meeting on Thursday will focus on security, governance and reconstruction of the Palestinian territories after the war, according to a statement by the French Foreign Ministry.
On the Tibetan Plateau, nearly 10,000 feet high, solar panels stretch to the horizon and cover an area seven times the size of Manhattan. They soak up sunlight that is much brighter than at sea level because the air is so thin.
The specific place they are talking about, Gonghe County, is around 9,400 ft high (at least at the random point I picked within it off a map). The average height across the Tibetan Plateau is 14,800 ft, but that's an average, not a minimum.
You know how many times I’ve had to tell someone that document they created and have been working on for days was never saved even once and can’t really be recovered?
I'd say for most, the autosave will come in handy. So many times there's been a project and someone at the least minute freaks out over their document being gone
They could have easily implemented autosave and versioning on your local machine. They chose to gate it behind keeping your documents in the cloud for profit-motivated reasons.
Onedrive is Microsoft's attempt to make Home Windows users a revenue source by making it a subscription service. This has been SOP in smart phones for a decade now.
Makes me wonder if there is something in the terms that allows them to use documents stored on onedrive to train AI. Adobe is doing the same bullshit and keeps pushing you to send PDFs as Adobe cloud links instead of directly attaching the file to an email. They're doing everything they can to get your data on their servers.
I would be shocked if this hasn't had some set of controls to disable it in Group Policy for months now.
This is just rent seeking against Home users.
People with One Drive through corporate Azure sjbscriptions (rather than the free "you have a microsoft login" tier) already have fairly robust controls available for handling and securing private data. There's even special Azure tiers for government work that are even further secured.
This is only going to impact home users and conpanies without strong IT teams. Which is an egregious amount of people, don't get me wrong. It's also a horrible anti-consumer move. But this isn't "Microsoft fucks over their golden calf: business users".
As a us organization you can choose between different MS cloud tiers. I know about 3, the basic tier for private customers, tier4 for large corporations and tier 5 for us gov and military organizations. My guess would be that it has something to do with which 3 letter agency can access your cloud data.
You'd be surprised how many people actually need that. My boss is one of them and I constantly have to explain to him why shit like this is bad for us. We're currently in the process of upgrading all our PCs to Windows 11 and I'm trying to convince him to let me install Linux on all the computers that don't meet the hardware requirements. Fortunately we use an older version of Microsoft Office that doesn't come with all the bullshit, but there will eventually be a day where we will have to "upgrade" that too. And because of this, I'm also trying to convince him to switch to something like LibreOffice.
Uploading all of our shit to OneDrive is not only a bad idea because we have our own secure servers in house, but it's also a bad idea because we deal with a lot of files that could get us sued if it was leaked online. We don't even let our servers connect to the internet for that very purpose. And it's not a matter of if, but when windows starts uploading all of our shit to OneDrive it will be a complete disaster. And I'm sure there are a lot of guys doing IT at various other companies all trying to explain to their boss the same thing I am while they ignore the issue.
I've worked in business IT before, so I have a (very small) bit of background I can probably share from your bosses side.
If you're not recommending a distro that has a support contract (e.g. Red Hat), what you're creating is a bus situation - if you get hit by a bus, who is going to maintain the Linux terminals when they go down? Would that contract cover supporting LibreOffice? How will normal staff be able to figure out how to use Linux, and will there be a measurable increase in productivity from them, or will they be slow to adjust?
Regarding OneDrive (or more realistically, SharePoint and Microsoft 365), Microsoft has a service level agreement for this. I can't read it on my phone because it's in docx format, but I dare say that it does have some coverage for if data is leaked, otherwise most enterprises wouldn't even touch it.
Your boss likely doesn't have concern in that aspect because of the SLA assurance, and thus it makes more financial sense to move completely over to M365 and away from on premise servers that require constant maintenance, upkeep and power costs.
I'm not sure of the business size you're in, but I'd hazard a guess that its a small business if your boss is in a position to potentially change out the existing IT infrastructure. You're facing an uphill battle in convincing your boss to move to Linux because the desktop support for it is limited and likely expensive, and the alternative is to keep you and probably hire other Linux technicians to maintain those Linux systems when they go down.
Microsoft can't seem to figure out sync, ever since Briefcase, if you involve multiple computers you invariably end up with more and more conflicting copies. It's embarrassing.
Office itself is insanely bloated is a world with Markdown, open data formats, and easy access to scripting. They used some pretty unethical tactics to make OOXML a "standard" to stop governments from switching to an actual standard: ODF-based Libre Office.
I believe that the world is big enough for multiple file-format specifications. I don't think the Open Document Format (ODF) deserves to be the only format sanctioned as an "open standard.
I mean this softly, but I'm going to guess you haven't used OneDrive recently, and haven't used it where it's been set up in a competent manner. The default settings absolutely are not conpetent, espiecally for how messy computers for personal use get.
My workplace uses OneDrive to sync a specific set of user profile folders so we approximate having profiles and files that follow us without everyone needing a personal folder on a network drive that mounts at login.
The only issues we've had are profiles auto-downloading too mant of peoples files and eating drives on shared machines (so you just have your meeting room computers wipe all profiles every reboot and schedule reboots nightly), and I've had some issues where OneNote hadn't actually synced the notebook back to the cloud before I closed on one machine and opened on a different machine so I lost some notes.
Beyond that, it's handled even situations where I have the same file open siniltaneously on multiple machines smoothly. Syncs between login on multiple machines take 3 minutes max, and I can force it faster if I really need by pausing and resuming the sync.
I'm sure there's situations it's still not suited for, like editing and syncing large monolithic files (think video files over 1GB a piece). It probably sucks big time on personal machines where you're going to have a complete mess of every file type imaginable tossed in one big unorganized heap.
But configured correctly, for general business use, it can work very well.
Sovereignty is almost the issue that it needs to be, but our 'security' types totally trust MS at their word when they say "it's only stored in your country and can't be touched from here. Trust me, bro."
These are security types who know to ask "how do you know" 5 times, and don't even ask it once.
" Word will now save new documents to OneDrive by default — and that changes everything"
Wouldn't it be great if all your docs were stored out in the cloud? Just think, you wouldn't need a hard drive! And someone else could guard them for you, like, say, Deputy Dan. descope.kwwhitaker.com/wallofs…
Honestly, even as a privacy guy, this makes sense. SkyDrive was unique in giving people 30GB, plus 5GB if you turned on photo upload (even if you turned it right back off). So even without paying, my OneDrive is still 35GB. That's plenty for documents.
What Windows 10+ does with backing stuff up to OneDrive and sharing it across builds is smart, if not the best execution. I kind of have that between my Macs and iPhone with Safari bookmarks and passwords.
I would be asking how safe OneDrive is and if it had any major breaches, if I were a Windows user. I'm actually using iWork and iCloud though, and I trust that a little more, but OneDrive doesn't seem that problematic to me. There's a lot I don't like about Microsoft, but OneDrive doesn't earn any ire from me. Should it? (Probably not since I'm a Mac user and it's all abstract anyway.)
Counterpoint, I lost an unknown number of files (unknown because I have no idea what all I failed to recover) years ago when my OneDrive backup filled up and my attempts to clear out space in the cloud backup propogated to my local storage, deleting everything I had in my local documents folder.
MS will probably use everyone’s documents to train AI and build profiles on you. I’m not sure there are any guarantees that your information is stored or transmitted entirely E2EE.
It's probably hiding somewhere in the ribbon. I had the mispleaure of using word and outlook the other day, on someone else's computer. Somehow I managed to save as an odt, somehow managed to attach end send it, only for the iPad not to be able to open the odt. Just said fuck it and went back to my lunix machine
Is this just for home edition? Or other editions as well. I work at a school with education edition, and I have a co-worker who said when I was helping the with their file management problems
me: just save to Desktop for now. We will fix it later. Them: I don't think I have a desktop.
I can't imagine how many other offices having to train their staff about all these new features.
I've been watching this thread, expected to hear this, but not yet ... I know Google's office products are essentially the same problem, but they are at very least free (in dollars). I haven't used MS Office in years. We use Google at work. I use my NextCloud at home.
Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don't understand why people store docs on other people's computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can't tell them though.
My God, THANK YOU! I've seen this article in five different places and everyone is losing their minds over this, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that:
1) This ONLY affects people who are using OneDrive in the first place. 2) It's a setting that you can change any time. 3) If you want to keep the default but have a specific file outside of OneDrive just - exactly like you said - click "Save As" and store it locally.
It's mind boggling how much people switch off their brains whenever they see Microsoft doing literally anything, and the entire conversation devolves into "Microsoft bad".
The exiled Chinese civil society organization “Chinese Human Rights Defenders Families Network” has released a nearly 30,000-word specialized research report titled: “Collateral Childhoods: The Psychological Impact of State Violence on the Children of Human Rights Defenders.”
It marks the first systematic study [...] to unveil the situation and profound psychological trauma suffered by the children of human rights defenders in an environment of state violence.
Zhou Fengsuo, Executive Director of Human Rights in China (HRIC), who has long provided humanitarian aid to the families of human rights defenders (HRDs), stated that under the reality of authoritarian rule and high-pressure politics, the children of Chinese HRDs are often forced to endure the associative harm resulting from the persecution of their parents: their education is interrupted, their daily lives lose stability, and their psychological sense of security is repeatedly shattered.
The associated repression by state violence that these children suffer is akin to the barbaric ancient system of ‘guilt by association'. Because they lack adequate cognitive and defense mechanisms, the scars left by these traumas are often deeper and more difficult for society and the system to recognize.
Key findings:
Severe Deprivation of the Right to Education: Used as a Tool of Repression. The report found that children in nearly all cases experienced educational interruption or denial. Some were outright rejected by schools due to their parents’ identity, others faced forced displacement and multiple transfers, and some were publicly shamed as “children of political prisoners” by teachers and peers in the classroom. The education system, meant to ensure equal development, has been weaponized for political persecution.
Widespread Mental Health Crisis: Self-Harm and Suicidal Ideation. Multiple children and adolescents exhibited severe symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and hypervigilance. Furthermore, some reached a point where “they sought ‘liberation’ by abandoning life,” resulting in documented cases of self-harm and attempted suicide. Prolonged exposure to high-pressure, fear-inducing environments prevents them from achieving normal identity formation and socialization during adolescence, posing severe risks for their adulthood.
Frequent Fragmentation of Family Structure. In the majority of cases, one or both parents were subjected to long-term imprisonment, restriction of freedom, or forced exile. Children lost their primary attachment figures during critical developmental stages, relying on single parents or fragmented kinship care. This chronic separation led to severe attachment disorders and a pervasive sense of insecurity.
Continuation and Silencing of Intergenerational Trauma. The parents’ fear, shame, and powerlessness are often transmitted to their children through emotional atmosphere and behavioral patterns, forming a “silent legacy.” Some children even normalize torture and humiliation, prematurely adopting the role of “protecting their parents,” thereby losing the safety and freedom of childhood through premature adultification.
Exile Abroad: Not an End, But a New Predicament. While some children were fortunate enough to leave China, they faced new difficulties abroad: language barriers, cultural isolation, identity anxiety, economic hardship, and the persistence of trauma responses. Exile marks a relative start to safety but simultaneously represents a continuation of isolation and compounded adversity.
Wildmimic
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