Thevenin @ Thevenin @beehaw.org

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153

Joined

2 yr. ago

Accelerationists have never been right, their argument is self-defeating.

The heart of the accelerationist argument is equating red and blue, claiming the blues' inability to completely undo the damage of the reds is intentional and makes them no better -- that the purpose of a system is what it does.

But by that logic, the purpose of accelerationism is to enable fascist ascent, and that makes them indistinguishable from fascists.

The initial contract is plausibly just for 12V car batteries, but if Zoolnasm's goal is 10GWh/yr, they definitely have their eyes set on larger-scale applications.

Also, if they're actually capable of 190Wh/kg, that's better than current-gen automotive LFP. That's a pretty huge "if," though.

I'm guessing (hoping) you're joking here and having a laugh at us all taking you too seriously. But I've seen enough of lemmy to doubt that.

If your accelerationist ideology is unironically promoting nuclear holocaust as its self-evidently ideal endgame, you're long overdue for your "are we the baddies" moment. Maybe (definitely) stay off social media for a bit as you re-examine how you got here and who's lied to you along the way.

Based on Drew Builds Stuff:

• Stuff Made Here, applying high technology and robotics to low-stakes challenges.
• The Thought Emporium (Also on Nebula). One day, they're artificially aging whiskey with ultrasound, the next, the host is editing his own genes to remove lactose intolerance.

Based on the intersection of building and the great outdoors:

• Quiet Nerd, who's been building a lot of camping equipment lately.

Some shots in the dark, based on exploration and documenting the unseen:

• Exploring the Unbeaten Path, urban exploration with some unique locations.
• Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, identifying plants.

Based on Baumgartner Restoration:

• Hand Tool Rescue, a channel where they lovingly restore antique tools and machines.

Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations -- or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we're gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.

While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is.

How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it's the teacher's responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

The average teacher does not have the luxury of choosing their audience. Ideally you'd only teach students who want to learn, but in reality teachers are given a class of students and ordered to teach them. If enough students fail their exams, or if the teacher gives up on the ones who don't care, the teacher is assumed to be at fault and gets fired.

You can theoretically change your exams so that chatbot-dependent students will fail, or lower your bar because chatbots are "good enough" for everyday life. But thanks to standardized testing, most teachers do not have the power to change their success metrics in either direction.

This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point. Even if it were, cancelling your technical writing class to replace it with an AI-wrangling class is not a curriculum modification but an abdication. Doing that can get your program canceled, and could even get a tenured professor fired.

The author was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Re-evaluating the systemic circumstances that incentivize cheating is crucially important -- on that we absolutely agree -- but it's a responsibility that should be directed at those with actual power over that system.

[Edit: taking the tone down a notch.]

If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won't be as fine.

People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.

Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.

(Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you'll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It's a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)

I think for a small, detailed figure that you're going to photograph, I'd recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.

Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it's smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations -- I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I'd go with theirs. Much more compact.

Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.

First, what kind of models are you curious about making? Big, small, decorative, springy, strong? Cosplay helmets, bike parts, tabletop miniatures?

This will inform whether you should look at tutorials for FDM (filament) printing or MSLA/DLP (resin) printing.

It's more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn't hold pressurized gas before, so it's difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won't leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records -- ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn't a pass/fail test, it's judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn't foolproof and the companies aren't trustworthy. So it's high time we stop acting like they are.

It seems that IPL effectiveness varies a lot based on the texture of the hair, not just color. It eventually worked on my legs, but not my face.

Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.

One of my favorite things about the game is that it's not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to "fire and forget" most of your tasks.

If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It's the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it's the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It's the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

Also, forget all the "hey, listen" stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It's great.

a bit melancholic sometimes

Viewer be advised: If you've ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

10/10

Playing hardball.

She doesn't have the bona fides for the presidency, but I'd love to see Katie Porter show up to a presidential debate carrying that whiteboard.

Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.

States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I'd even say that's what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others' permission, you don't have a state, you have a hundred states.

You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That's not their job. That judgement is our job.

(You can also argue that the state shouldn't exist, but that's a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)

But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

It isn't even about selling more cars at this point, it's about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.

Gotta do the same for the senate and state legislatures (including governors). Redrawing state lines is not simple.

Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.

To pack the court, Democrats need to secure:

• A House + Senate majority (something they haven't had since 2009-2011)
• A wide enough majority in both that no small caucus could hold the vote hostage for a personal agenda (something they haven't had since Jimmy Carter)
• A president with a platform built on disruptive change rather than stability (which they haven't had since FDR)
• A plan to keep Republicans out of office permanently so that they can never wield this new power in retaliation (even Lincoln messed up on that one)

They need more than just a git-r-dun attitude. Remaking the SCOTUS (rather than waiting it out) means throwing the old government away and starting over.