It seems you are being downvoted, but I see this similarly. Elon musk applying pressure in German elections or UK politics via X/Twitter is basically exactly the problem with foreign interests controlling your social media; so I kinda hope the ban does set an example for other countries.
Maybe, once the inflammatory platforms like X & Facebook are banned in the EU, then we can also get a social network that is not fueled by VC growth and engagement metrics; but can be run by a nonprofit or something. A man can dream.
I hope one day these platforms are governed by the people using them. "Users" are humans who have little voice in the decision making of their digital nations.
What are you talking about? X introduced this fantastic feature called Community Notes that allows users to collaboratively add context and fact-checks to potentially misleading posts. It relies on a crowdsourced system where contributors can write notes that are displayed if they receive enough support from users with diverse perspectives. And Meta recently announced that it is planning on introducing a similar feature.
I think EU will not ban these platforms but mired them down with never ending stream of lawsuits, and eventually force a withdrawal - similar to how some US companies don't serve EU due to GDPR etc. A proper firewall should create the space for domestic services to re-emerge - and yes, we have a chance that these could be democratic from ground up. Lets hope so.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have been putting their heads so far up into Trump's rear they are probably looking out of his mouth by now. There is absolutely zero chance for actual democratic systems to emerge in a country where the top 1% own 35% of literally everything there is to own, cronies in the government, and apex corporations mended to the will of an 80 year old convicted felon
yes i think it kind of looks that way I am afraid. US literally has an oligarch duly elected and assuming office in a few hours. We are in the era of robber barons, maybe similar to late 19th Century America, where J P Morgan was obviously the only man who mattered, despite the performative democracy.
That doing an interview with a controversial politician is "applying pressure" and is seen as "a danger to democracy" (quoting German media) is all you need to know about the German media landscape and German politics.
>but can be run by a nonprofit or something
There are high profile celebs on German "state" television unironically being in favor of a state-run social network.
I replaced my bed time routine. Instead of watching YouTube for 30 minutes I, I read a book for 30 minutes.
I was surprised just how much you can read with this amount of time investment. I read 12 books during that year; with 600 pages on average. It’s much quicker than you’d think!
I am actually panicking as much as you are about it, but, thinking about it, maybe it is just bias?
Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
But these days, no one really cares about a nuclear war, it seems, even if one of the nuclear power is currently fighting a war; and it’s appearing to lose it.
It's not doing great, but it's not really losing, either.
It is successfully using its nuclear arsenal to deter aid for the country it's invading. A lot of materiel is sent, but its uses are limited. A massive attack on the capital would be entirely justified, and is well within their capability, but is forbidden for fear of escalating to nuclear weapons.
Because of that, they are continuing to prosecute the war, and making minor gains. They cannot continue that forever, but in another month, their target is likely to be hamstrung even further. They may yet win, or negotiate a peace that they can pass off as a win (which would include Ukraine never joining NATO).
People may not have that immediate fear of nuclear war that characterized the 50s through the 80s. But the threat is in play, and it's being kept out of daily discourse only because the US refuses to challenge it.
MAD came extremely close to kicking off at least twice during the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis and that time a Soviet officer chose to ignore a malfunctioning early warning system). We can’t conclude from the fact that it didn’t kill us that it wasn’t a serious possibility.
Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.
> Like, people in the 20th century were living in constant fear of mutually assured destruction for dozens of years. Is that better or worse than the guaranteed collapse of the ecosystem? I couldn’t tell.
The fallacy in your argument is that climate disaster is already happening. We have already rendered hundreds of species extinct. It is not a future risk.
The nature and severity of climate change risks to other species is something I can be sad about, without it being also a risk to us.
Likewise in reverse, there are ways a nuclear war could be relatively good for almost every species except humans, our livestock, and our pets.
Given the trends on renewables, I think we're going to solve the climate… but also a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated trends start implying silly things starting in the early 2030s, so expect something else to become a problem soon enough.
I'm still in fear of nuclear holocaust. That problem hasn't gone away even if it's not top of zeitgeist now that other existential threats are so popular.
I would say it is working as intended if the regulators are able to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal.
Bottle caps are under the top 10 single-use plastic products most often found on European beaches [1], IMHO that’s good enough reason to mandate they be attached to the bottle.
Where will it all end? Somewhere perfectly fine, probably. But still, I wonder about the far limits and edge cases to this logic. If it was in all cases considered preferable to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal, that sounds like the cumulative effect would cease to be mild and would in fact be a bad thing. Maybe that could be fixed by regulation regulations?
if it would be cheaper to clean beaches we would just do that. if it would be cheaper to put some manners into beachgoers, we would do that. if it would be cheaper to "police" beaches, we would do that too.
regulations also have costs, such as annoyance, inconvenience, enforcement, etc.
we will see how these will turn out culturally. (as in which "external rules" will turn into internal ones.)
Caching the retrieved results for future follow-up page 2 queries is nontrivial. It’s also not clear if it’s worth it, the number of requests going to page 2 are in the lower percentages at best, maybe even <1%.
So what you typically do instead is to just issue a new query and request 20 instead of 10 results, drop the first 10, and voila, there is your page 2.
I do not know if this is how google websearch does it though.
At the same time, the generated electricity also seems insane to me.
We live in a complex with 84 units, each with a solar roof, outputting about 12 kWh per unit per day. Maybe the owner just has a massive house, as they are outputting about 5x as much as our 2024 solar panel models …
It can definitely make a big difference. DC’s latitude is 38 degrees. That’s about the same gap to Miami (25 degrees). Think about shining a flashlight perpendicular to the ground vs at an angle.
Beyond the dynamics of direct irradiance, there’s also weather to consider- if you live in a significantly cloudier area (which might be possible, assuming you live in Canada or Germany/netherlands/etc based off that latitude), that will obviously affect output.
And then there is also things like building-to-building shading, in case you live in a dense area… lots of things can affect this kind of calculation.
Try playing around with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts calculator:
The approach in the paper has rough edges, but the metrics are bonkers (double digit percentage POINTS improvement over dual encoders). This paper was written before the LLM craze, and I am not aware of any further developments in that area. I think that this area might be ripe for some break through innovation.
Very good video. The quote that stood out to me was „This is what happens when a country has basically given up on taxing the rich“.
I wonder why this is happening all over the planet. Shouldn’t there at least be some countries that try to remedy this? Why do ALL the countries have given up on taxing the rich, when, just ~100 years ago, we had massive taxation on wealth even in the US?
Maybe, once the inflammatory platforms like X & Facebook are banned in the EU, then we can also get a social network that is not fueled by VC growth and engagement metrics; but can be run by a nonprofit or something. A man can dream.
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