HN user
You accuse them of being hypocrites for staying silent about some other wars, while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war ("I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you have to be a brainwashed sheep to do that)? Sounds hypocritical to me.
PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?
Europe sans Russia does not produce uranium - why people constantly paint this as an independent energy source is beyond me. Of all Russian energy companies, it was Rosatom that could not be sanctioned.
While the Fogbank story is a funny anecdote, I don't see it as a fitting example for atrophied skills. It's like writing a clean implementation of some software and it just doesn't match the legacy version until you realize that the legacy version had an unnoticed bug that made it behave the way it does.
Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
The author clearly means professional publishers, who have editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack trust. The reply also misses several other points the author makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.
When I ask an LLM to help me decide something, I have to remind myself of the LotR meme where Bilbo asks the AI chat why he shouldn't keep the ring and he receives the classic "You're absolutely right, .." slop response. They always go in the direction you want them to go and their utility is that they make you feel better about the decision you wanted to take yourself.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
A program that helped people evade real censorship is "feeding them US propaganda" and social media awash with state-sponsored trolls tearing our societies apart is "an alternative geopolitical narrative" - bit of a spin, isn't it?
Weird, I remember Western media ran full transcripts of his speech after the Ukraine invasion and every other time he crawled out of his bunker in the Urals. Would you like to enlighten us which important viewpoints of Putin get censored in the West?
I don't see any problem-solving being done, I only see the US dismantling the world it created, where - let's not kid ourselves - America always came first. The problems the US faces would be better solved with international cooperation, but the US is flushing its softpower down the toilet and destroying all goodwill amongst its allies.
Your upvotes are issued by sheep and wolf in sheep's clothing telling you to not censor propaganda from a country that's been waging war against you.
Actions speak louder than words and China is supporting Russia.
Germany's emissions fell by 13% since the energy crisis started. Driven by reductions in the energy sector.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/finale-daten-fuer-2024...
Scratch further and beneath the ad business you'll find more incentives to allow fake engagement. Man is a simple animal and likes to see numbers go up. Internet folklore says the Reddit founders used multiple accounts to get their platform going at the start? If they did, they didn't do that with ad fraud in mind. The incentives are plenty and from the people running the platform to the users to the investors - everyone likes to be fooled. Take the money out and you still have reasons to turn a blind eye to it.
The biggest problem I see is that the Internet has become a brainwashing machine, and even if you have someone running the platform with the integrity of a saint, if the platform can influence public opinion, it's probably impossible to tell how many real users there actually are.
The LLMs that take 10 attempts to un-zero-width a <div>, telling me that every single change totally fixed the problem, are cracking the hardest math problems again.
They didn't even. They announced a time-plan to stop buying Russian gas eventually. Russia weaponized gas deliveries and stopped delivering. In fact, even before the war and any "unfriendly" action by Europe, they underdelivered to keep the gas storages (which they owned) low and drive the prices up. This alone should make anyone not want to buy Russian gas again.
The fact that these threads are always full of lies with all these twisted narratives show you who's doing the talking in all of them really. This thread was a few minutes old when someone had to mention that "The US blew up the pipeline" and this shit doesn't even collect downvotes or gets flagged, it rises to the top.
I clicked on two accounts posting lies and saw Russian software companies mentioned in their scant posting history, which in itself is not a crime, but also a fitting signal.
They got 8% of the votes in 1987, up from 6% in 1983, didn't even make it past the five-percent hurdle in 1990 - so what justifies the obsession with the Greens, when the large majority of Germans rejected nuclear energy after Chernobyl? Why must all nuclear energy threads on HN pretend a fringe party ruled Germany with an iron fist?
The only thing worth discussing here is how a domain with like 10 snapshots on archive.org - half of them nginx errors - has this submission trending on Reddit and HN.
I think Russia did, successfully for quite some time, attempt to direct anger towards the countries supporting Ukraine. Russia would drop a bomb on Ukraine and 90% of the comment section would hate the West for it. The goal was to fuel defeatism and infighting. The latter they encouraged from the start. Reading Reddit, you would have thought Germany had attacked Ukraine from the western flank. In the days and weeks before every major pending Ukraine decision in the US, you could see a noticeable uptick of Russian-friendly talking points. Before the US election, a suspicious amount of Redditors claimed that Trump would give Ukraine more weapons than Biden. These days, they are encouraging the Europe is weak rhetoric. If a toy drone gets spotted somewhere, the only acceptable response is nuking Moscow and EU should disband if they don't dare - that inane take to me is also trolling.
Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers.
And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.
I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
Is what makes you feel so terrible when you're sick, that's why you don't want to get it involved. Like a car driver would rather not see the seat belt and air bags do their life-saving thing.
Fun fact: Up to the Civil War or WWI, more soldiers died of illness than of battle wounds. So much for the fabled immune system. And if WWI killed more soldiers in battle, the flu still won that round, because the Spanish Flu killed heaps more later. Now we still remember WWI for its bloodiness, but without Covid-19, who would remember the Spanish Flu?
There can't be a blanket consent. You cannot consent to contracts you've never seen. You can't waive your rights away. Browsers could only implement a blanket deny, but that wouldn't stop websites from showing cookie banners, because they want you to click Accept All.
Did JD Vance care about these subtleties in Munich?
There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for a long time. Under the Schröder government, only two or three reactors were shut down and they were the oldest, had a meager output and weren't even profitable anymore. And the only way Russia influenced that was by mishandling Chernobyl. It's laughable to claim a country whose only high-technology export is nuclear technology is pushing others to abandon it.
They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.
Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.
A sunburn is what you want to avoid and it's easier to get when you stayed indoors the whole year and only go outside when the sun is out full blast. I personally think this modern lifestyle is one of the reasons people get more skin cancer despite being outside less. There are studies that show that chronic sun exposure isn't that bad.
The way I see it: If you live where your ancestors lived for thousands of years and if you make sure your skin gets gradually attuned to the sun each year, you probably get more health benefits. But beware if you're of Northern European ancestry living in Southern USA or Australia or if you work an office job and only seek the summer sun with pale skin.