chroem-

No thank you: I don't care for content that's searching for evidence to support a preconcieved position. There is too much dogma and not enough pragmatism in this space.

I already get enough of their content on HN to recognize dogma when I see it. Quite frankly, it's a circlejerk where everyone else is wrong unless they follow the ST-scene's ideologically-founded prescriptions, and if you post evidence to the contrary you'll often get shouted down.

That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!

That's a semantic argument that doesn't address the real problems that skimping on commuter infrastructure can cause. San Francisco and Seattle have both achieved some of the highest housing prices in the nation thanks to chronic underinvestment in highway infrastructure.

You can't conduct commerce on a bike. Anti-car policies are also closely coupled with inflated housing prices, since they effectively reduce the available housing supply by requiring employees to commute from within public transit distance of their job.

Does the California power grid still need to perform load shedding during peak usage, or have they added additional capacity?

So is the argument that the article is trying to make that there's nothing wrong with the current state of affairs?

Are you able to achieve a 10000x efficiency improvement vs natural photosynthesis by using those technologies? If not, the idea is still completely unfeasible.

US farmland occupies 895 million acres (3.6M km^2) [1]. Average solar irradiance on most US farmland is about 200 W/m^2 [2]. By being generous and assuming vertical farming is 100x more efficient than natural photosynthesis, the energy requirements come out to 7.2 terawatts of generating capacity. In contrast, the US currently has 1.1 terawatts of generating capacity. [3] Vertical farming isn't just uneconomical: it's completely absurd.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Yeah, just burn terawatts of fossil fuels to generate light for growing your crops instead of using solar energy and natural photosynthesis.

If you choose to ignore the example I just gave, that's on you, but luckily I can provide additional examples from the last few years:

- bans on legal ownership of certain types of firearms while simultaneously weakening firearms penalties for the primary types of gun violence: gang and drug crimes

- using lawsuits and legal harassment to shut down right leaning personalities, businesses, and institutions

- selective prosecution by activist DAs, depending on political alignment

Shall I list more? And, again, these are supposed to be things that you feel are justified, but the right does not, because that's the purpose of lawfare.

Punishment is in the eye of the beholder: the left and right don't care about the same issues, and that's the principle that makes it possible to hurt your opponent through lawfare without hurting yourself. Eliminating federal protections for abortions annoys the left without hurting the right. Conversely, banning religious services during covid while promoting protest gatherings bothered the right, but not the left. You wouldn't be able to list the lawfare issues that bothered the right, because that's the point. Lawfare is only lawfare to your opponent, not to yourself.

The premise of lawfare is that you enact laws and legal precedents primarily with intent of undermining your opponent, rather than to benefit anyone in particular. The American right just realized that they can do this too.

Or perhaps the takeaway should be that lawfare can invite more lawfare.

Those legally gray firearms databases were not a good precedent.

Energy input in the form of compressor work. It's not even remotely similar to Maxwell's Demon.

You know, somehow I just have a hard time getting behind the most numerically murderous ideology in the history of the planet. Communist periodicals have just as much business being on HN as their nazi counterparts: none.

Don't be so dismissive: it's a legitimate concern. These are the same western governments that are already trying to clamp down on internet content they don't like: e.g. pornography, encryption, etc.

learn a voxel grid representation

But isn't that what photogrammetry does?

What's the difference from regular photogrammetry?

they wield immense power to set the narrative that essentially drives democracy

What you're describing has a name and it isn't democracy: it's oligarchy.

Look at how inefficient and harmful for the environment software has become. Devs and corporations are throwing away CPU cycles like it's no big deal when they use large, overly abstracted software tech stacks. You don't need a 3GHz CPU when 500MHz will do the job just as well with greener coding practices. It's time for common sense tech reform in order to protect the environment from this kind of corporate waste.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/business/energy-environme...

https://davidsuzuki.org/living-green/air-travel-climate-chan...

etc.

There is a grassroots campaign for more restrictive legislation on air travel, but it's early there's lots of progress for us to make still.

Airliners account for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions [1], yet we are working to ban passenger air travel to protect the climate. 5-9% is huge in comparison, and we should legislate restrictions on wasteful computing before the climate emergency gets any worse.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

Statistically speaking, in the United States you are more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to die in a school shooting. The vast majority of gun violence is drug and gang related, however since 2020 progressive jurisdictions have lessened drug/gang firearms penalties and enforcement, because of their perceived disproportional impact on BIPOC communities.

And yet the technology was reserved exclusively for the Soviet political elite and never saw use with regular citizens.

AWS was able to increase my quota after escalating. GCP was not.

If I could offer a word of advice:

Be less quick to "fact check" anything that disagrees with the conventional wisdom.

No, it was extremely bizarre. They gave the option of escalating to sales, which I did, but all they did was deny my use case again for a lack of business justification. I think they're trying to prevent people from cryptomining, so they're just blanket denying access for small GPU quotas.

Why are you so eager to dismiss this as FUD? Are you a google employee? Here are the screenshots of the response I received.

https://imgur.com/a/K66bX6W

Yes, you do. I went through this exact process in Fall 2021. I invite you to attempt to set up a personal GCP account for hobby use in the current GPU shortage, and share your experience.

By default, Google will not allow you to access GPU instances on regular GCP. The GPU quota is initialized to zero and you have to open a support ticket in order to request GPU access, justifying why your use case deserves access. Evidently, "personal research project" is not a valid use case, so that leaves Colab as the only other option in the Google ecosystem.

AWS has a similar quota policy, but they seem less strict about use cases.