benjhm
@benjhm@sopuli.xyz
- 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!!! 2 days 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 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 3 months ago:
I’m using Alexandrite, find it good
- Comment on Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is high 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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).
- Comment on The Trick to Going Faster in Software Development is to Take Smaller Steps 6 months ago:
Some of us will even remember when compilers ran on big central computers, and you might have to wait 15–30 minutes to find out if your code was syntactically correct (let alone if it worked.)
My father remembers when he wrote code printed on a set of punched cards, they traveled several hours on an evening train to a warehouse with a big government statistics computer (that was too busy during daytime), the result came back by train next morning. Syntax error? try again tomorrow…
- Comment on Roots of Mother Appalachia 8 months ago:
I’m by the river Meuse in Wallonie, which still cuts through the Ardennes, another end of same old mountain range as the Appalachians, continuously eroding while mountains uplifted (just as Indus and Brahmaputra cut through Himalayas now), before the Atlantic ocean existed. Makes you think about time, pity schools don’t teach this stuff.
- Comment on Wine from sour quince 8 months ago:
Ah, that time of year again, seems a pity to waste them, but very hard and sour, and I’m told we shouldn’t eat any pips. Polish friends slice them thin, put in a pan alternating with layers of sugar, leave some days to suck out the juice (osmosis), drain and mix with vodka for a tasty aperitif, thick and cloudy due to the pectin (?). I’ve not heard of fermenting them directly, but would be glad to know if anybody has a good method.
- Comment on Can Plankton Ferry Carbon to the Bottom of the Ocean? 8 months ago:
Phytoplankton fix loads of CO2, especially where there are plenty of nutrients, but most of it gets recycled in the surface ocean (and so back into the atmosphere), only a small fraction gets down to deep layers. Copepods, being heavier, help some to sink through, so it seems they’re proposing to study more what makes these thrive, but it’s not clear from linked info what’s specifically new in this project, nor that there is any practical intervention proposed.
Once I had a tank with marine plankton which brought the CO~2~ in the headspace above down to just 5ppm…, sometimes the most revealing experiments are not the ones you intend.
- Comment on A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations 8 months ago:
Biogenic cloud-seeding molecules are important, but this is not new - iirc back in the 1980s even president Reagan picked up on this to suggest that the “pollution” from trees was worse than from cars. There are also phytoplankton in the ocean that release cloud-seeding nuclei. Such effects are already included in complex earth-system models to some extent, so it’s not a magic ‘new’ factor, rather a refinement of the feedback strengths.
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 8 months ago:
We were discussing similar in 1998, ‘warmest year for a millenia’, detail has improved but implication already clear then. Quarter century later, curves start to bend, still trying. Plan how your life can help, don’t panic then burn out.
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 8 months ago:
I wrote a similar conclusion back in 1996, not so much changed in that discussion, it’s a distraction.