sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for the first time since 2023 5 days ago: federation: confirmed
That's not exactly right. Any economist would correct you.
When money becomes more expensive to borrow through higher interest rates, it results in everyone taking out less debt (at least in theory), so the total money supply is lower (because a new loan is new money in the economy), and less money chasing the same goods means the value of the money increases.
It doesn't have to be businesses taking out loans for capital from banks (other debt instruments such as bonds only move money from investors to debtors without changing the money supply), it can also be individuals buying homes or racking up credit cards or taking out auto loans. All the money is the same, created through debt.
And reducing the money supply can and does work. The effect on employment is real. Imagine if you have a company that sells milk shakes. When people have lots of access to cheap debt, there's lots of dollars so lots of people can come buy a milk shake. And you might hire more people because you're selling more milk shakes, and with so many customers you can afford to raise prices. If they can't take out cheap debt, fewer people come around, you have to fire people because there's no work for them, and you won't want to raise prices, you might even need to lower them. Therefore, unemployment is an expected result, but not the desired one. The desired result is fewer dollars than the base case.
This is because of how money is created in our system: when you put a dollar in the bank, the bank can lend out multiple dollars. Presently the Federal reserve has a 0% reserve ratio, so banks can lend out infinity dollars for every dollar they have, only limited by liquidity, funding, risk management, and creditworthy borrowers. In a system without fractional reserve banking where you need a dollar to lend a dollar, absent other forms of money creation such as minting, the money supply would not grow and would be more likely to shrink, and prices would be likely to stay stable or drop.
- Comment on Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point | Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity 3 weeks ago: federation: confirmed
I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:
- I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
- A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.
So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.
The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.
This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.
These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.
That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.
The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.
You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.
The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.
- Comment on Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point | Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity 3 weeks ago: federation: confirmed
That's always dangerous to say, because it misses a bunch of the equation.
You can run your lights during the day and your heat when there's lots of sun.
Green washed technology would cause ecological Armageddon if adopted at proper scale because the energy needs to go somewhere for when you need it, and that scale of energy storage isn't cheap or clean.
- Comment on Yes dad, at least a dozen times already 3 weeks ago: federation: confirmed
"them namekians shot off my legs.
Just kidding. Namekians are weak."
- Comment on The Twitter workforce is pathetic 3 weeks ago: federation: confirmed
Deleted my twitter account in 2016 after never really using it anyway.
Deleted everything but YouTube in 2021.
I feel good about my choice.
- Comment on "You can’t just throw new people at that problem": Bethesda devs doubt future Elder Scrolls and Fallout games will have the same "quality level", after losing seasoned staff to Xbox cuts 3 weeks ago: federation: confirmed
If you make lots of money and save a lot, and your roommate is unemployed and spends tons of money, your apartment might be profitable, but yes ur roommate still needs to balance their budget.
Allegedly, Minecraft has been subsidizing the entire Microsoft games division. If that's actually the case, the question becomes: why? If the game studios aren't profitable except one, isn't it greedy to expect Minecraft's studio to keep paying for them?
Don't get me wrong: I do think there's a greed problem here on Microsoft's part, but it isn't trying to get unprofitable subsidiaries to become profitable. It's the fact that Microsoft bought half the games industry hoping to get massive pricing power by owning many of the best game franchises of all time so they could get us all to rent their library through xbox game pass. The fact that it's failing is unfortunately good on the balance of things.
In that sense, the greed worth attacking isn't the hard times of layoffs when they fail, it's the attempt to leverage game libraries to get us hooked on game subscriptions. That they failed and are now in a bad way is horrible for devs in the short term, bad for gamers in the short term, but ultimately is better for everyone when game subscription stays a niche.
Microsoft already started jamming the price up, if we ended up with a few megacorps renting libraries out to us that's exactly where things were headed.
- Comment on "Machines that weren't game machines before will become game machines": Take-Two CEO predicts that streaming will help fix the industry's hardware pricing problem 1 month ago: federation: confirmed
I think he's right, but also wrong.
Gaming is going to become smaller. Lower specs required, tighter experiences. Not because people subscribe to a GPU somewhere.
- Comment on Microsoft Is Quietly Deleting 32 GB RAM Recommendation for Windows 11 1 month ago: federation: confirmed
Even among the hardware requirements, that's not the one people cared about!
- Comment on its a jarring realization that deserts, mountains, and worse climates are mroe hospitable to human civilization than Lush/Green looking northern forests 1 month ago: federation: confirmed
If things were reversed, and Siberia and Canadian shield for once ideal places for civilizations, I suspect that they would still be heavily populated today in spite of the weather.
- Comment on its a jarring realization that deserts, mountains, and worse climates are mroe hospitable to human civilization than Lush/Green looking northern forests 1 month ago: federation: confirmed
You do have to remember that the climate has changed a lot since civilization was born. The epic of Gilgamesh talks about the great cedar forests of Syria. Northern Europe was a giant chunk of ice. And once a place has ontological inertia, there's only been a few times in history where that changes, such as the bronze age collapse.
- Comment on Self-hosted fully working ST:TNG voice computer interface 1 month ago: federation: delivered, unconfirmed
"I'm thinking of investing in this crypto scam, should I do it?"
Micheal Dorn: "you should not. Crypto scammers are without honor."
- Comment on Sorry, we accidentally lost it in a fire 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
"Everything was fine. There was punch and pie."
- Comment on Following a Lemmy community doesn't bring in new posts (v4.14.2) 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
You're in luck, I've learned a thing or two about this.
NodeBB categories do not follow activitypub group actors. Form category actors are not community groups and so aren't really compatible. NodeBB follows account style actors and remove group posts are not imported the same as local posts.
In order to get group support working on a wide variety of platforms, the software needs to have a wide variety of dialects that it knows how to deal with.
- Comment on Why are most household appliances single voltage? 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Small appliances rectify AC into DC before using it and therefore what you end up with is a DC supply that can support multiple input voltages and frequencies.
By contrast, larger appliances typically use the AC directly. A motor is designed to be able to connect directly to local AC power, and the voltage is quite important and so is the frequency, because a change from 50 hertz to 60 hertz will make a motor go much faster and a change from 60 hertz to 50 hertz will make a motor go much slower, and resistive loads such as furnace elements which are designed to be able to be connected directly to mains power our engineered with a specific resistance.
For motors changing frequencies, the way you would end up having to retrofit such devices is to rectify the DC signal and then reconstruct it as the proper voltage and frequency using pulse with modulation. That's going to be a fairly expensive thing compared to just connecting some wires across mains. Even changing voltage is using a transformer means that you're going to need transformer capable of potentially converting multiple kilowatts of power, and that's not an inexpensive touch either.
- Comment on Laid off Bethesda Montreal staff allegedly told they'd get "smallest severance legally possible" the same day as those Fallout announcements 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Buddy of mine wanted to go work for Ubisoft Montreal. Took a computer programming course.
I recommended that he should be making video games right now as he wants to make video games because there's going to be thousands of other people who want that job and a lot of them will have made games and he never has.
He's now learning how to be a carpenter. Probably the better bet.
- Comment on I'll have one isekai with fries please 2 months ago: federation: delivered, unconfirmed
I think you got that backwards. The reason that the jerk from that episode hadn't had his way with her yet was that doing so would cause the slave crest to be damaged.
- Comment on Like Every single fucking time, and it's not only about Ancient Greeks 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
I recently heard about an effort to grab some of the verbal stories from Africa and write them down, and that seems like a perfect treasure trove.
- Comment on Like Every single fucking time, and it's not only about Ancient Greeks 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Not to mention, not all of those myths turn out to be entirely mythic. We found the minoans and what is likely ancient troy by listening to the stories and looking where they told us to look.
- Comment on Watch a Mad Scientist YouTuber Make Lightning in a Bottle From Mercury and Neon 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
This guy is amazing. He does work that's so entertaining but really helps you learn more about the crazy things he's doing.
- Comment on Imagine if those works survived 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Honestly, the fact that works from thousands of years ago survive and have spread around the world is incomprehensible in terms of what would have to happen over time, particularly prior to the printing press.
The human race really is amazing.
- Comment on I like my Rii K06 keyboard. I have one small problem I'm hoping for some help with. The IR remote will turn off my TV but won't turn it on. 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
I believe this is the answer. If you can turn off the TV but you can't turn it back on then you're probably just using the wrong code.
- Comment on "We were already running a tight ship": Elder Scrolls 6 devs are worried about Xbox's layoffs causing even more delays to the long-awaited RPG 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
These things are not like normal businesses. You end up with something so irrationally large that it would be immoral to let a single person make any decisions, which makes no sense for a creative endeavor.
- Comment on Canada is a Warning to the Rest of the World! 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
People don't realize how bad things are in Canada right now. Not sure how most people keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies, though the massive homeless camps I suppose show that a lot of people don't.
- Comment on Switzerland’s solar railway has been a success. What happens next? 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
And the giant money incinerator!
- Comment on [Episode] Hell Mode: Yarikomi-zuki no Gamer wa Haisettei no Isekai de Musou Suru 2nd Season - Episode 1 discussion 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Sad because hell mode is one of my favorite LNs, they're doing my boy dirty.
- Comment on What the hell is this horseshit? 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
I mean, I care.
- Submitted 2 months ago to federation_audit@social.fbxl.net | 3 comments federation: confirmed
- Comment on Ackshually, groups are perfectly natural for a mastodon-style microblogging site. 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
Ok, it outbound federates after follow on FBXL Lotide (which makes sense considering I've made FBXL Lotide federate with everything), so that just leaves lemmy proper.
- Comment on We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
I mean... I'm not American...
- Comment on We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme 2 months ago: federation: confirmed
If this was about guns, they would ban hardware stores. It's just about controlling everything so they can parcel it back out to friends.