magicalist

instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.

Not an expert, but I would think greenhouse light pollution is not necessary for agriculture? It seems like obvious waste (money spent generating light that isn't going to photosynthesis), but I assume it's cheaper not to shield the lights than to shield them, so it's a matter of ROI and requiring people take care of their externalities.

Is there an economic argument that light shields will make agriculture in that area too expensive?

This thread is a perfect example of why HN has a "no politics" guideline

From a quick perusal, your account appears to only comment on politics.

I couldn't find anything easier.

Seems like they're trying to tease excitement for new emoji in the next Android release (there was also an earlier linkless post in May[1]), so I'm assuming they don't want anyone scooping them and will push to the Noto repo on or after the day of release.

Seems like the post really should at least have used a future tense for "handing over raw .OBJ files to the community".

[1] https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...

> Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.

Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.

"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".

First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?

Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.

Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.

In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25230-esr-report-utc185.pdf

Yeah, looks like that article was from an I/O announcement of these new emoji (which I don't remember, but I also didn't watch much of the keynote), and they've decided to tease this until it finally lands in the next version of android.

What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:

I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.

Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.

Sounds like you help people. Unless the OP edited their post, they said

close HN, reach out to people, get help

that seems like perfectly compatible advice. I'm not sure why you're inferring a "professional" in there and then quibbling about it.

It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

You have at least two comments in this thread lauding the GPL and its effects. So aren't you advocating for the intellectual prison as well?

If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving

So...the worse things are the better because we have more things to improve? Wouldn't it just be better if things weren't worse?

Can't entirely tell if this is supposed to be inspirational or contrarian (I think maybe the first one?), but every bit of shit in a situation being something we can look forward to overcoming by crawling through it isn't the most heart stirring way to look at it and also seems a bit dismissive without engaging with the actual subject.

It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.

Yes, it's always been accepted that someone has to support it, but someone else, not me. But these are important dependencies so I'm sure someone will support them.

It's such a common situation that there's a six year old xkcd about it that felt about ten years late at the time.

If you didn't participate in it

But that's not what they said?

> I didn't get to participate in much of that

Did it not burn?

Part of it did!

Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time?

No.

More importantly, the original assertion:

the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash

is definitely not true.

Ok, but this post: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month

isn't the post of someone who just implemented a js engine (it reads like someone who asked an LLM to write a blog post about the git log of a different LLM which was apparently lifting code from a different js engine...)

It's a bit hard to understand what's going on here, but definitely hard to trust the project.

Seems like you ignored the GPs point to tell a NIMBY anecdote? They're questioning your premise, not asking what "NIMBY" means.

FWIW the burning of the library of Alexandria, and, indeed, its status as "the only collection of written knowledge" are myths.

Not if you're a publicly traded company and that's a major part of your revenue.

And by 2004 the browser wars where long over. That was the period when Microsoft left the web languishing on IE6 after destroying all competitors and then promptly disbanding their browser team. Firefox only got its name in 2004 and was released at the end of that year.

I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.

I mean it's a detail free second hand anecdote about someone's informal discussion of their bachelor's thesis. Which part of that is the basis of a good scientific conversation?

Her result was that the microplastic particles she studied were too large to interact with T cells.

Her "result" of what? Was there an actual experiment and what was its scope or was this by surveying literature?

Microplastics are of a pretty large range of size, and then there are nanoplastics below that.

I'm also not an expert, but a quick search shows a number of results of microplastics affecting T cells, some directly and some in terms of immune signaling, so this negative result doesn't seem that definitive.

(as usual, the difficulty is in teasing out in vivo effects)

the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.

Actually it says it _can_ delegate to the latest models. Seems reasonable to ask how the voice model does when it doesn't delegate (or while waiting for the delegated answer).

Wait, but Sundar Pichai was there pre google IPO as a Chrome PM, and Neal Mohan was there for 18 years. How are they examples of "doing your time" being a bad strategy?

If that's a real problem and fireable offence, then there's people at Google that should be fired ASAP for failing to delete this repository.

Unclear what you're referring to here. Was it "misrepresented what they would be releasing"?

If that's the case, I disagree that the repo still existing is on its face evidence against that theory. It could be a perfectly fine tool, but if you lie on a release checklist, depending on what you lie about, it's easy enough to imagine a fireable offense. There are multiple ways that "it's easier to ask forgiveness" can backfire if there are legal things or organizational things you are knowingly avoiding.

Again, this is just speculation. I wouldn't personally fire someone for releasing a library that got popular, but its also speculation to suggest that's the only reason he was fired.

It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.

It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.

and is official [1]

FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.

[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/issues/780

Releasing vibe coded handling of google account credentials seems like the biggest problem with this.

Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.

I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.

For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.

That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.

The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.

(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).

The Iran war really brought them to the surface, a lot of them were very unhappy with the Trump administration about that.

So, like...Thomas Massie and Rand Paul?

There were only four republicans in the House and four in the Senate to vote to limit war powers, and I don't think you could claim Murkowski or Collins are isolationists.

Or did you mean this subset was "very unhappy" in like a completely impotent and meaningless way, but they'll have been 100% against it six months or 2.5 or 4.5 years from now?

> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs

Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.

Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.

Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a German student activist's definitionally anodyne proposal to engage with society and barely referenced in the decades since has probably been coopted more than a little to concoct a new boogeyman for the right wing.

I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.

Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...

But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.