Newtra

Wow, I just scrolled through the front page and it was 100% depressing/anxiety-inducing news.

I don’t think I want this in my life.

Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.

With jobs, maybe. With careers, especially in STEM, you get lots of exceptions like extremely rewarding but low paying positions in academia, and tech companies that think they can just spend money instead of effort to fix their culture and broken hiring process.

Saying goodbye to their life in France, where they were paying around £2,574 (€3,000) in taxes every year,

So these people who were rich enough to own a second home wanted to spend more than 50% of their time in France, but were paying the vast majority of their taxes back to the UK?

No wonder the laws got tightened.

To accept it, you just move on with your life. Find the next thing you should do and do it. The more you dwell, the harder it will be to stop dwelling, so just break the cycle and go do anything else.

You will encounter plenty more people who are insistently wrong. Each one will affect you less than the last.

Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

100% this.

Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.

There’s a weird divide between self-determined identity and external classifications. Often, a culture forms around the label and the external label stops being relevant because the term has more social/cultural implications than practical implications. Some people internalize the label as that’s how they wish to steer their future interactions, and others ignore the label and move on with their lives.

You can watch all of Star Trek, and some parts of society will label you a Trekkie if they find out, but it’s up to you whether you choose to identify as a Trekkie, or just go about your life not making a big deal about it.

Assuming enthusiastic consent, good faith, and that you meant “sex/body they want” instead of “gender they want” (because gender is just a social construct):

On another hand, it would erase their identity as trans people.

I don’t think it would. Identities are built from life experiences, and having lived through transition they’d still be trans even if there were no traces of it on their body. A war veteran doesn’t stop being a veteran just because the war ended.

consider it a genocide

The definition of genocide depends on intent! Even in wars, etc. It’s only genocide if you’re specifically trying to erase/displace people/culture.

• Trying to cure gender dysphoria: it’s not genocide, it’s medical treatment.

• Trying to “fix” people to make them fit into society: it’s genocide.

turning them into what they want would mean there is no more trans people

There are identities that don’t stop being trans even if you give them the body they want:

• A non-binary person’s desired sex/body and social gender might not match. Even with the perfect body (if one exists), they might still identify as trans because that body doesn’t match their social gender.

• For genderfluid people, there might not be one singular perfect body. Even if their body constantly updated to suit them, they’d probably still identify as trans because they’d be constantly transitioning…

Nooooo! Not Naomi!

I don’t really follow her content, but I love her existence and all her efforts towards education and awareness on many topics.

I hope she’s able to find freedom again somehow.

The funny thing is that YouTube’s code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.

The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here’s the GitHub repo’s explanation:

Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you’re browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.

So it’s just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:

PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.

So basically something you can ask questions like “how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?” and “what are the big trends across the news sites I’ve looked at recently?”. But eventually it’ll automatically summarize and data mine everything you look at to help you learn/explore.

Neat.

I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.

Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.

I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.

This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.

People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.

Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey suck now.

There are old movies that have aged much better, like The Man in the White Suit and Colossus: The Forbin Project. These should be the ones we call classics.

In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.