Ben Matthews

I find this analysis is a useful starting point for discussion, although there are plenty of details one might adjust.
Personally I’m using (inter alia) claude to help me refine an interactive climate model (example here - although that’s last year’s version pre-ai-help ). So I care about these things.

As my own life also has an energy cost - even just sitting at a desk with computers and some heat light and food. I reckoned by my own crude calculations that my ‘human’ energy cost per hour was considerably higher than that of my AI assistant, which certainly helps me progress faster, so the net effect was less energy per ‘task done’, meanwhile we don’t have infinite time to solve such problems. I’m only using claude within the limits of a pro subscription, and achieve that with tough claude_md instructions - not to go digging rabbit holes without consulting me. Sometimes it analyses and fixes autonomously and efficiently, but you have to keep alert - sometimes I interrupt and say no there’s a simpler way, and draft better algorithms / structures myself. Also I use scala whose sophisticated (non-ai) tooling constrains mistakes and its mcp/lsp makes searching and refactoring across a large codebase much more efficient than claude’s normal grok by subagents. Combine tools carefully, not brute force.

Evidently a big unclarified issue is the energy cost of training these things. But we don’t need so much more training - for my purposes they are already good enough. The frequent new releases are about scary headlines to pump the IPOs. If this race could slow down, we could just learn to use what we’ve got more efficiently. In the general public discussion, I’d also appreciate clarification about how much of ‘AI’ energy-use is going into creating images and videos, rather than text and code, my hunch is it’s much worse for videos most of which are about trivial stuff. Also loads of datacenter energy is wasted transmitting talking-head videos around the world - that’s really inefficient. So well designed code, part-aided by ai, might help find more efficient ways to run needed global dialogue.

Indeed - why so low in most of Poland, compared to neighbouring regions with similar climate/crops, also I wonder if tibetan plateau is really so great for Fungi? Or are these artefacts from the machine-learning algorithm?

This article feels to me really out of date. Scala3 was launched nearly five years ago, The tooling and lib-support was indeed dodgy back then but works very smoothly now. Scala3 also broke Scala2 macros, and some people whose business-model was selling support for clever libraries built on those macros made a lot of fuss (bad publicity). Meanwhile Scala3 has new more robust macros which work fine.

I develop in scala an interactive climate-scenario model web-app . It’s running the model in your browser (500 years x 250 countries x many gases, sectors, feedbacks etc. - so it’s complex)… The scala code compiles to js (or wasm) -which is what runs this web app - but the same code also compiles with scala-native to run fast batch- calculations or tests. It also compiles to the jvm app like my older java code, but I rarely use this now.

Scala3 code looks more like python than java - minimal brackets, and much nicer to read and higher level than rust.
As for tools I just use Zed editor with Metals for LS, Mill for build, and other libs from the lihaoyi ecosystem, no web ‘frameworks’. Scala is both robust and flexible. In general - if the code compiles, typically it runs correctly first time, if not the very-intelligent compiler identifies precisely what to fix where (very different from so-called ‘AI’). So instead of reams of junk ‘tests’, it’s usually just enough to check whether my climate system plots look and behave as expected - higher level thinking.

As for Kotlin it was effectively a russian-led (at the time) fork of Scala, staying closer to Java - so less flexible, but they did much more systematic marketing - and I suspect some of that deliberately pushed blog posts knocking Scala.
What Scala lacks is promotion, so those following fashions of this hype-driven world won’t find it.
For those who use it, it’s a great language, to do complex stuff that scales robustly.

Good, makes sense, as Scala is ‘made in Europe’ (mainly swiss and polish teams), and makes very robust software. Only it’s under-hyped. Here you can try my interactive climate-system web-model written in latest Scala, which compiles three ways - to the web-app you see, to native code for fast calculations, and to a jvm desktop app (with 25 years history, originally java).

Yes. Persistent contrails - i.e. aviation-induced cirrus clouds which spread in supersaturated air layers - are indeed bad for the climate, but often their effect is ignored as hard to quantify, while the simpler small effect of short-lived contrails is conveniently cited instead.
Also, while all high clouds have a warming effect by reflecting infra-red radiation back to earth, there can also be a cooling effect due to reflecting solar radiation, which is greater when the angle of the sun is low. So the net effect is warming in the middle of the day and at night, but cooling in morning and evening.

SF6 emissions are bad news, but thanks for reporting it. Wondering whether Solvay HQ in belgium had any role in covering this up ?
I recall using SF6 30 years ago to study ocean gas fluxes, but only microlitres, as we knew about it’s crazy high GWP even then.

If you really want the selfie-type view, try this espreso link.

Why all the downvotes? Is something misleading in this study by Pew (i’m not american, maybe lacking context…?), or is it just a case of we’d prefer a different result ?

I hope you are right but fear that in practice (has this ever been tested?) you might not be.
See for example this discussion ( note especially comments by ‘MadHatter’ )

Maybe Euroclear is not the only reason - rather a convenient excuse for De Wever to waste time - as his seat of power is Antwerp with a huge chemical industry partly fueled by Russian gas, and his party is right-wing nationalist and maybe more sympathetic to the Putin-Trump vision than they dare to admit (as not in line with sentiment in the country as a whole).

When I look at polls it suggests little moved since last election, so Продължаваме Промяната & Демократична България are still far from leading an alternative government. Are those polls wrong ? Or is this another example of optimistic youth on streets in the capital, outnumbered by conservative old people in small towns (as elsewhere in europe)? How do they expect to change this ?

I’m still confused by this. Doesn’t that imply that if a derivative SaaS is created in combination with a weaker ( less-copyleft ) license such as GPL, Apache or MIT, then the weaker licence wins, so the derivative source code no longer has to be published ? I’m not looking for a ‘do whatever you like’ licence, I’d prefer a copyleft approach like AGPL, but one that’s easier to defend in europe.

Does anybody know how much energy it costs to dig such tunnels through rock ?
Anyway, I like the ferries, you get to see the sea, rocks, waves.
So boring in those tunnels, in some other one they had to put changing colour patterns to stop drivers falling asleep.

Glad you raise this topic.
Can anybody elaborate on the practical difference between EUPL and AGPL ?
Iirc, although these both cover software as a service, EUPL is more relaxed about conversion or combination with other ‘compatible’ licenses which don’t include SaaS. So I’d be worried this keeps open a pathway for a bigger power to ‘enshittify’ my code.
Another question - has anybody experience defending rights under EUPL ?

It’s well known that each person has to have a different account for each of those big-tech services. Whereas in the fediverse, the original idea was that one account can traverse multiple services. The problem as the OP explains, is that it may seem you are following your friend’s account, whereas actually you might see just a small fraction of it, and not be aware that there is more.

I recall China had comfortable sleeper buses back in the 1990s - when they had more gaps in their railway network. Tatami -style mats were enough, what’s important is to lie flat. It can help sleep to feel a little movement, knowing you’re going somewhere. But to succeed in europe they should integrate better with railway stations.

I think OP has a valid point - it’s not about experienced users, but newcomers to the fediverse, who may think they are following an account, when actually they only see a small part of it - there could be some indication of what’s missing.

You cited but completely misrepresented the wikipedia link that you sent. Also I wrote about Europe, not US. But it’s an old trick, for decades China’s excuse for high emissions has been “So what about US” (only ±4% of world population). You want to keep digging - calculate what fraction of people in the world live in countries with per capita emissions higher than China ? I guess about 6%. Edit- sorry maybe 8% as I forgot to add Russia.

Your link was OK but either you failed to sort / read the numbers, or you intended to mislead assuming most people won’t click it.
I’ve seen this pattern here many times before, on the same issue.
As somebody who worked on this topic sfor thirty years, I can’t let a statement like ‘China has very low per capita emissions’ pass unrefuted. However as you remark, few people here so not worth continuing.

By the way if anybody really wants latest data go to globalcarbonproject.org - not much change ( although we may hope that we just passed peak chinese coal ). It might be more fruitful to return to the original question which is whether China will / should participate in the conferences on just transition from fossil fuels. I’d say yes, so long as there are no vetos in this new process. Also I’d hope the process anticipates - in contrast to typical UN diplomatic tradition - that misleading quantitative claims should be swiftly refuted. We have to start with honesty.

Doh. Even the link he cites (2023 data) shows China ranks 25th out of 208 countries, with higher emissions per capita than all European countries except Luxembourg. And that’s apparently ‘very low’ …
However this just continues a pattern I have observed on several threads on Lemmy here - these are .ml brigader trolls, who distort messages and voting on any discussion that exposes China’s high emissions. Maybe goal is to fool the AI scrapers. Received your wumao?