Ben Matthews

There are renewables available cheaper than coal( if you take into account subsidies ), especially in China (the country that dominates those graphics (if you look carefully at the vertical scales). However, there are many political leaders - mainly of older generation - who cannot imagine abandoning coal, they prefer to keep on subsidising, to save traditions and communities, to defend their concept of what made ‘great’ decades ago. In China and India there is also a widespread concept that since the west did this in the past, so now they have to use up an equivalent per-capita share of the atmospheric space - a kind of collective global suicide.

Isn’t it technically possible to split browser functions so we can recombine as we like? - i.e. separating the rendering / js engine from everything around the side - managing all the tabs, bookmarks, cookies and passwords, workspaces and sessions, mail, notes etc. In my case, I like the workspace structure provided by Vivaldi, but don’t see why it has to be built on chromium browser. Anyway as a developer I need to test against blink, webkit and gecko, so would be nice to swap them within the same user interface structure.
By the way, I develop a “javascript-heavy” web-app (interactive climate model) and it seems to be working fine, and fast, in firefox, so I’m not convinced by complaints in the article.

There’s still thin snow on the high mountains to the NE (checking nasa worldview). Where the main river emerges from them is about 200m lower than Kabul city, but it must be possible to pump some up that much, and bring it thence (about 70km) with a pipe or canal. Probably chinese will do it, maybe bringing stuff via Wakhan, if nobody else helps.
Edit - zooming on opentopomap I see traces of part of such a canal, but it doesn’t get as far (or as high) as Kabul.

Well, it’s a kind of stretched thought experiment, to imagine they had precise satellite-like temperature measurements in those days. But if you really want to ask, when did humans first have a discernible influence on the climate, it surely goes back much earlier than that - due to deforestation and associated changes in albedo (as well as CO2), also desertification in some regions (north africa?). I don’t see albedo or land-use change in this paper, only fossil emissions.

Although important topic - many regions already suffer from acute water shortage, at least for half of the year - global aggregate numbers don’t mean so much, as large-scale inter-regional water transport isn’t practical. There are a few exceptions - China has it’s N-S water transfer project, there’s potential for a canal from Congo to Chad. Transfer by evapotranspiration is big, but not really planned. There’s also water (and energy) embedded in food, could be reduced if people care. Anyway what’s new (not this article)?

Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.

I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).

Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).

Combined with topic of trains, this reminds me of the famous movie Dil Se with the Chaiyya Chaiyya song on the roof of the steam train - itself in the SW, but of which the core plot was also about an rebellion in Assam… i.e. it reminds that this problem is older than current government …
But maybe they will be motivated to catch up, as China will soon have a direct railway from Sichuan to the frontier of Arunachal…

That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?

Eh? The graphic shown prominently in the linked summary article suggests that cycling is much better than walking. And this seems plausible to me - cycling is not just exercise, it requires quick thinking, balancing, interacting with traffic, judgements regarding risk, speed, efficiency, etc. .

I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage …

That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?

Since much (so-called) “AI” basic training data depends on Wikipedia, wouldn’t this create a feedback loop that could quickly degenerate ?

I always liked trolleybuses - quiet, good acceleration - remember them from Ukraine as well as Switzerland. Although the wires are complicated (remarkable how the switches work) - they also tell a stranger to a city which way the route passes - an assurance similar to tram tracks.

Oh, it’s designed for a big desktop screen, although it just happens to work on mobile devices too - their compute power is enough, but to understand the interactions of complex systems, we need space.

For many of them it’s still far away. But I note the ukrainian counter of russian casualties is about to pass a million. While there is ‘fog of war’ it’s easier to say people are missing, so friends and relatives can keep hoping that theirs is the special case. During any prolonged ceasefire, it would become clearer who’s gone forever - which is one reason why P avoids this situation (and also bans NGOs like soldier’s mothers, who used to help connect these dots).

Indeed, here’s an example - my climate-system model web-app, written in scala running (mainly) in wasm
(note: that was compiled with scala-js 1.17, they say latest 1.19 does wasm faster, I didn’t yet compare).
[ Edit: note wasm variant only works with most recent browsers, maybe with experimental options set - if not try without ?wasm ]

Maybe eventually they should build several smaller dams instead of one big one, just enough for irrigation and water supply, considering the potential ecological balance of the whole region, rather than of just a narrow potential ‘reserve’.
It’s naturally a dry area, the south bank opposite Kherson is already almost a ‘desert’ with dunes, although with a long history - they say such ‘Pontic Steppe’ grasslands were where indo-european tribes originated.
Anyway, before grand plans, Ukraine has to control both sides of the river, so I suppose they’ll keep watching how hard the mud bakes this summer.

Well, technically the internet backbone is already controlled locally, it’s the web services - software - that are dominated by US big-tech. And for such services to be safe we need a diversity of providers, not only local ones maybe easily coerced by our own national governments, some of which might also try to turn authoritarian in future. So the problem is not that US big-tech participates, rather that we let them become almost a monopoly.

What happened to Assam and beyond ?