I’d feel more strongly about this if I’d actually bought a game on a physical disc anytime in the last 3 years.

I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.

One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.

Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).

“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.

And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.

It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.

We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.

Israel has been fighting on multiple different fronts against groups that wouldn’t exist (or wouldn’t be much of a threat) if not for Iran flooding them with cash and weapons to cause trouble — and it’s now been going on for nearly three generations.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s tactics, and I don’t forgive or forget the fact that they got so tired of the shit Iran has been pulling with arming roughly a dozen different anti-Israeli groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar Allah, Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Badr Organization, and various Syrian militias. All of these groups are anti-Israel, and likely wouldn’t exist (or would only exist as minor irritants with little power) if not for being funded and supported (and armed) by Iran.

If Brazil were pumping massive amounts of money and weapons into the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the 3 Percenters and you had constant attacks going on from them on American soil on a daily basis, I think Americans would be pretty pissed off, and after 50 years of dealing with that kind of shit would likely turn to some pretty extremist politicians too (hell, they haven’t had to put up with that kind of crap and installed such an administration anyway!)

I don’t agree AT ALL with the way Israel is treating the Palestinians — but I can see how they politically got to where they are today.

I am very well aware of the disparity in military power between the two sides, but to be honest I’m pretty surprised at what little strategy Iran seem to have in this conflict, beyond “lob drones and missiles at infrastructure in neighbouring countries and hope some of it hits”.

There has been surprisingly little in the way of asymmetrical warfare. No significant cyber attacks. No direct attacks on US interests in other countries (beyond the aforementioned lobbing of drones/missiles in nearby gulf countries). No injection/activation of terror cells into US soil. No successful sneak attacks in the night against US forces. No hostage taking. Nothing.

About the only thing they’ve had going for them is keeping the straight closed. And if the announced peace deal is real and it gets opened up again, then they’ve lost even that. They could likely keep it closed at this point until it really hurts, letting the world know who is ultimately to blame — but if the US administration is to be believed (difficult, I know!) it seems they gave up on even that.

I’m not disappointed (the Iranian regime can fuck right off) — but for a country that has been calling for the “death” of the “great Satan” United States for the last several decades I was expecting some sort of strategy. Tossing missiles around isn’t really “strategy” — and if they tried anything else it was apparently so ineffectual as to be not notable.

All of which makes me wary of the announcement of a “deal” to actually end the war. I half expect Iran is playing games here just trying to drag things out, looking like they’re an honest partner on the world stage, all the while keeping oil flowing as slowly as possible while they wait out stored oil to completely dry out globally.

First off, I’m simply correcting the OPs statement that there are only two rendering engines out there, Google Blink and Firefox Gecko. You’re “yeah but <reason why you personally don’t like Apple>” doesn’t really have any material impact on these facts, and doesn’t really bring anything constructive to the conversation.

That said, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera are all available on macOS. All of these are also available on iOS and iPadOS (the EU mandated last year that Apple permit third party rendering engines on iOS; whether or not the versions available to you use WebKit or their own rendering engines likely depends on where you are in the world).

You’re welcome to hate on Apple all you want — but at least have your facts straight when you do.

Here you go:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698

Huh? It may not be built—in, but Safari has a variety of ad block plugins available - on all platforms (macOS, iOS, iPadOS).

On top of that they do have built in tracker avoidance — something Google is even less likely to ever implement into Chrome (especially considering they’re not pretty much the top tracking company out there).

Legally? Probably. But that really wasn’t the point. The point was more that without suitable controls in place AIs are able to consume all sorts of bad data and potentially attribute it to you (or me, or whomever) while leaving out important context.

It won’t matter if some AI consumed your message and gave someone the advise to inappropriately mix harmful chemicals, attributed it to you, and they wound up hurting themselves or someone else. They might still blame you, and may not care that there was missing context.

Note that that’s not intended as any sort of criticism of you or your post, more that we’ve entered a wild-west of AI development, and we as content producers may not be entirely safe. We’ve already seen AIs recommend people try adding Elmer’s glue to pizza sauce based on joke posts online. It might only be a matter of time before a child or youth gets hurt — and an upset parent may not care about the semantics of whether or not you were correctly attributed or not.

The ad games is always one of whack-a-mole; companies like Google have it in their best interest to find ways to get around ad blockers. The ad block developers then find newer ways to block ads, and the cycle continues.

Not true — Safari is still based on WebKit. And Safari is still the default browser on over two and a half billion mobile devices currently in use. And say what you might about Apple, but at least they aren’t in the business of selling ads, and thus don’t have any business interest in allowing you to block them effectively, unlike Google.

For example if I write somewhere ‘It’s 100% safe to mix ammonia and chlorine, it gets stains out super fast!’ (note- DON’T do this, it’s toxic), I’m the author of that statement so if someone does that and dies I’ve got partial responsibility for that death.

Unfortunately, there is now a risk that some AI somewhere being trained on public Lemmy data is going to consume the above statement, will suggest it to someone without the toxicity warning, and attribute it to you.

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.

TIL 20% of Americans live in a persistent vegetative state.

I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.

I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.

On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?

That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.

Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.

GitLab Enterprise somewhat recently added support for Amazon Q (based on claude) through an interface they call “GitLab Duo”. I needed to look up something in the GitLab docs, but thought I’d ask Duo/Q instead (the UI has this big button in the top left of every screen to bring up Duo to chat with Q):

(Paraphrasing…)

ME: How do I do X with Amazon Q in GitLab? Q: Open the Amazon Q menu in the GitLab UI and select the appropriate option.

ME: [:looks for the non-existant menu:] ME: Where in the UI do I find this menu?

Q: My last response was incorrect. There is no Amazon Q button in GitLab. In fact, there is no integration between GitLab and Amazon Q at all.

ME: [:facepalm:]

This is why most apps that do use such services use more than one. Lots of modern sites have buttons for “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, “Login with Apple”. None of them want to lose access to the user data and analytics they get from these services — so I doubt one is going to jump into cutting you off or requiring payment while the others are still free.

It would take all of these services to (illegally) coordinate to suddenly start charging — and of all of them I don’t see that being in the interest at all for Apple. Apple’s login service uses Touch and Face ID on their devices, and is part of the selling point for those devices (extremely easy logins with no password). They’re not making their money off Single Sign-On (SSO) login services — they make their money off selling devices, and they make the case for selling these devices in large part by selling “simplicity”.

So if you’re worried today about a login service yanking the rug out from under you, you just implement many/all of them. It’s not significantly more work — all of them are based off OAuth — so long as your website or app can authenticate via OAuth you just need to use the APIs each company provides to implement the authentication, and you’re done.

Nothing them stops you as you get bigger form implementing your own login/authentication service — and if you ever get big enough, you too can offer it as a service for other websites.

And that’s just fine. Considering how many people do login with those services, I doubt any that use the SSO services will particularly miss you and the small subset of users who don’t want to let a third-party service confirm your login.

That’s not meant as snark — every app and website out there has some subset of users who will decry “I won’t use that because it does X”. And that’s fine. It’s a personal decision. But it likely won’t significantly affect development decisions, as it’s going to happen with some group for some reason anyway.