• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle





  • Humanius@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldNot everyone needs to have an opinion on AI
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

    Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
    There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

    I’m just curious to see where it all goes.





  • Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

    As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

    • During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
    • During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

    Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.


  • Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
    Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

    Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

    • The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
    • The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

  • My read on this is not as much of a cynical one. I believe the point of surveillance is simply to protect the institution of the state.

    The goal of the state is ultimately the continued existence of that state. Otherwise there really is not that much purpose to the state. Surveillance is a tool to suppress actors (read: terrorists) who might want to undermine that institution.

    In order to determine who benefits from the continued existence of the state, it mostly depends which state you are talking about.
    A state like China exists almost solely to benefit those in power, and thus the surveillance state is used to suppress the citizenry. But a Western democracy, while it also to a certain extent protects money and power, also exists to to benefit the general population.




  • More like they have an ancient sewage system.

    Basically, if the sewer system gets overwhelmed, for instance if there is a large amount of rainfall in a short time, then the sewage overflows directly into the Seine.
    They have built infrastructure leading up to the Olympics to capture this overflow in storage tanks, but you cannot build infinitely large storage tanks so at some point it will still overflow.

    And 2024 has been a very wet year thusfar, so…





  • If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.

    If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.

    Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
    Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.

    Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.

    (Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)