benjhm

@benjhm@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BHP, Vale agree to pay $30bn damages for Brazil dam disaster⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in 2011, I with my young family took a local bus north from Mariana, which diverted through several villages including that one Bento Rodrigues just below the dam, soon to be washed away. Through gaps in the trees we could glimpse those huge orange lakes just behind earth dams - it was obvious even to a casual tourist that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the bus was run by the mining company, like all services around there, I suppose that’s why people didn’t complain more.
  By the way I was told Brazil didn’t even make much from iron mines, as most of raw ore was exported to China, which got the real value.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carbon emissions are now growing faster than before the pandemic⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Emissions grew in 2023, that’s not the same as ‘are now growing’. There is a good chance global CO2 emissions fall in 2024, mainly due to trends in China. Of course it takes time to gather data, but NS should be more careful with the headline.
  The spinscore link has useful refs - but keeps mixing up CO2 emissions with “CO2 equivalents” including methane, landuse and minor gases. Methane rising is a big issue, but might potentially be turned around faster. Regarding landuse, deforestation was exacerbated last year by El Niño feedbacks - it’s hard to separate the anthropogenic part of these fluxes.
  Rather than simple headlines which encourage fatalistic doom, it’s more useful to explain how some factors progress better than others. They are right to highlight growth in road transport and aviation (even if some growth still covid-rebound), although more effort still needed in all sectors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance are on Feddit.dk, but you won't see them on your own instance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
  Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy wouldn't really takeoff to replace Reddit until it's content is search indexable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ireland’s datacentres overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined | The Guardian⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France | Paris mayor swims in Seine as river is cleaned up just in time for Olympics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of time when, during the Beijing olympics, the sky miraculously cleared of smog and turned blue - showed what they can do when it’s a priority, but didn’t lost long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Analysis: China’s clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024 - Carbon Brief⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s great, I’m optimistic about the peaking. Nevertheless 53% coal is still far too much, and May is easy compared to cold winters. A lot of coal is also used to make steel and cement, maybe also declining, but could be good to see relative numbers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just had an idea that people smarter than me have probably had long before I heard of Lemmy.....but I don't see it implemented, so I'm sharing it anyways!!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I see that says ‘has to be local only, not federated’ (same issue also discussed on github).
  ‘Local only’ suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
  So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
  Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon ‘lists’ and various ways of organising and transferring them).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just had an idea that people smarter than me have probably had long before I heard of Lemmy.....but I don't see it implemented, so I'm sharing it anyways!!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
  But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poland-Belarus: Tsikhanowskaya warns against closed borders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ukraine is huge and has loads of track and trains that gauge, so do Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova. There’s even a ukrainian-gauge line running west to Katowice, could make sense to extend it, and make another to Gdansk. Otoh a transversal standard-gauge line connecting Romania to Poland via Chernivtsi and Lviv could also make sense.
  Western europe should welcome the technical expertise of Ukraine and Belarus railways, they move a lot, efficiently.
  Hey, not so long ago, there was even talk of a canal linking the Dnipro to the Wisla, recreating the old ‘viking rus’ trade-route (although have to consider also impact on wetlands… I recall used to sit next to the IPCC rep from Belarus - he was passionate about methane emissions from wetlands - but suffered from politics …)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poland-Belarus: Tsikhanowskaya warns against closed borders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, she’s right, more people in Belarus voted for her than Lukas* and his pals, they shouldn’t suffer for p’s tricks, although it seems to me the majority are rather too passive (with some great exceptions, of course).
  Anyway isn’t there another factor here - are there still long freight trains with chinese containers frequently arriving in Brest? If not, how else are they getting to europe? If so, I’d guess both belarus railways and polish lorry drivers get a lot of money out of that trade, isn’t that a factor of leverage ?
  Belarus is good at trains, I hope not so far in the future we’ll see them run again from Odesa to Riga via Minsk, and with people free to move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy Active Users looking good⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m using Alexandrite, find it good

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is high⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Of all the placard photos to choose to highlight, Nature could have found better than “science = fact” which seems to me more a proclamation of faith than encouragement of experiment.
  Regarding the somewhat strange differences between countries, I suspect there may be a linguistic issue - words like “science” and “trust” have different scope in different cultures and systems - hard to ask the same questions everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some Thoughts on Coupling⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
  If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
  See also vivaldi community

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-Earth Socialism: The Game⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I like this game, has potential to help people think, especially about land-use, but also has issues.
  However we discussed this in some detail 11 days ago (e.g. 22 comments on solarpunk),
  it could be good to continue in further depth, but would feel odd to re-paste the same comments. It is a problem for Lemmy (and other social media) sites, that a ‘deep’ long-term topic loses prominence too quickly, compared to ‘breaking’ news. So my question is rather general, how could we blend /gather comments across communities and across time? Meanwhile, enjoy the game (I don’t want to discourage new comments).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russian Dreams of De-Dollarization Stutter as Chinese Banks Threaten To Cut Off Putin’s Only Remaining Economic Lifeline⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was talk, back in 1990s (iirc?) of europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. I think it’s a pity we missed that opportunity. I’ve crossed the Russian-Chinese border on a few occasions, years ago, back then it felt culturally that was a european border. Now, the way it’s going, seems more likely Siberia will end up attached to China.
  (by the way, wrt OP, China has many many banks…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IMF warns of Maldives foreign debt crisis, after China borrowing⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well if China’s “collateral” is infrastructure in Maldives, most of it will be lost to sea-level rise anyway. Maldives political division is/was not just pro-China vs pro-India, it’s deny vs understand climate change.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tucker Carlson interview with Putin to test EU law regulating tech companies⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that whatever careful process EU implements to restrict spread of fake news etc., authoritarian states will copy its facade and terminology, to justify their own censorship of real news ( in Russia people go to prison for calling a war a war).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russian electoral commission rejects anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin's presidential bid⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At least he (and those who assisted) tried, helps to show there was potential opposition, makes it more obvious to denounce the sham elections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s use of student data could effectively ban Chromebooks from Denmark schools⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can’t set anything, as we don’t have ‘developer’ access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar LCOE now 29% lower than any fossil fuel option, says EY⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Should be so, hope you are right (didn’t find rates in the pdf). However, these are all temporary, can change a lot on the timescale of such investment. I recall Brazil had a development bank with special rates to get around this problem, but that way is potential source of corruption. Chinese economy is also unstable. Need a risk model. Although not perfect foresight - that’s only a concept of IAMs - real investment made by people acting on promising trends then retiring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar LCOE now 29% lower than any fossil fuel option, says EY⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Levelized using which interest / discount rate ? As I understand, wind-power has recently been hit by high interest rates (which is relatively worse for renewables with high capital outlay ve low running costs).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coding Addiction: How Programming Affects Your Brain⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Too true.
  I still remember when java5 came out, many new features, great potential for a massive refactoring of my interactive climate model. Within that, I had an idea called “parallel worlds” for comparing scenarios, whereby for efficiency data was shared for parts of the system, and split across parts that varied as user adjusted parameters. So I pulled apart the whole codebase, and joined it back together again… - about two years later, by which time colleagues had given up interest.
  [ story simplified to relate to point of OP - not only task in two years! ].
  Now I develop a derivative climate system model in scala, but evidently it’s more interesting to develop some new complex part of the science code, than fix a graphical interface for beginners. But moods vary - some days lacking energy for refactoring, could be satisfied ticking off a few small tasks in a todo list. Yet after some time, brain craving for another big new complex idea…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, for example if I could reply to a mastodon post from my lemmy account - the poster would see that there (not here - but could show up on my profile page), and might follow it, so it could gain followers. To write such a reply, I’d need to somehow view the original post while logged into lemmy. My comments here do federate to mastodon, and if somebody searched for related words (at least from the instance from which I followed my #lemmy account) they should find this. Your “virtual community” seems like a mastodon list (I have a dozen such topic lists, that system could be better, but is improving), indeed it would be helpful to consider that alongside a lemmy community for similar topic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else

  So to reply to Nutomic’s closing remark on github:

  I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.

  Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that’s interesting, I’ll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I succeed to follow my own Lemmy account from my Mastodon account, it works (initially seems empty, but new posts/replies show up later). From there I could potentially boost or reply. If somebody clicks on my comment in Mastodon, they’ll find the whole Lemmy thread. This should help (more numerous) Mastodon users to discover Lemmy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual “status” posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
  As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can’t do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Trick to Going Faster in Software Development is to Take Smaller Steps⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This principle works most but not all the time. I develop a climate-system model that evolved with many small steps over 23 years. So it has many patchy fixes as climate policy structure changed, gases and sectors added etc. Then converted from java to scala module by module (out of ±50) , each step checking the plots looked as before. Result is it works, but parts are messy with legacy options and outdated code style. So sometimes it’s necessary to radically rethink the structure, take big bold steps before it works again, that’s hard. Scala type system, with hints from compiler (and “metals”) help make such refactoring easier (wouldn’t want to do this in python).