alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 330 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

    Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

    As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

    It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

    The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.




  • the study: Majority support for global redistributive and climate policies

    We study a key factor for implementing global policies: the support of citizens. The first piece of evidence is a global survey on 40,680 respondents from 20 high- and middle-income countries. It reveals substantial support for global climate policies and, in addition, for a global tax on the wealthiest aimed at financing low-income countries’ development. Surprisingly, even in wealthy nations that would bear the burden of such globally redistributive policies, majorities of citizens express support for them. To better understand public support for global policies in high-income countries, the main analysis of this Article is conducted with surveys among 8,000 respondents from France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. The focus of the Western surveys is to study how respondents react to the key trade-off between the benefits and costs of globally redistributive climate policies. In our survey, respondents are made aware of the cost that the GCS [a global carbon price funding equal cash transfers] entails for their country’s people, that is, average Westerners would incur a net loss from the policy. Our main result is that the GCS is supported by three quarters of Europeans and more than half of Americans.

    Overall, our results point to strong and genuine support for global climate and redistributive policies, as our experiments confirm the stated support found in direct questions. They contribute to a body of literature on attitudes towards climate policy, which confirms that climate policy is preferred at a global level17,18,19,20, where it is more effective and fair. While 3,354 economists supported a national carbon tax financing equal cash transfers in the Wall Street Journal21, numerous surveys have shown that public support for such policy is mixed22,23,24,25,26,27. Meanwhile, the GCS— the global version of this policy—is largely supported, despite higher costs in high-income countries. In the Discussion, we offer potential explanations that could reconcile the strong support for global policies with their lack of prominence in the public debate.









  • and the press release from Fandom, which previously owned them for some reason:

    San Francisco, CA - May 10, 2025 - Fandom, the world’s largest fan platform, is selling Giant Bomb to long-time Giant Bomb staff and gaming content creators Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb. Financials of the deal were not disclosed. Giant Bomb’s programming, which was paused in order to work out the terms of this deal, will resume as quickly as possible. More details will be communicated soon by Giant Bomb’s new owners.

    Statement from Fandom

    “Fandom has made the strategic decision to transition Giant Bomb back to its independent roots and the brand has been acquired by longtime staff and content creators, Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb, who will now own and operate the site independently. Fans are at the core of everything we do at Fandom and we’re committed to not only serving them but also supporting the creators they love, and the sale of Giant Bomb represents a natural extension of that mission. We’re confident Giant Bomb is in good hands and its legacy will live on with Jeff and Jeff.”

    Joint Statement from Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb

    “Giant Bomb is now owned by the people who make Giant Bomb, and it would not have been possible without the speedy efforts of Fandom and our mutual agreement on what’s best for fans and creators. The future of Giant Bomb is now in the hands of our supporting community, who have always had our backs no matter what. We’ll have a lot more to say about what this looks like soon, but for now, everyone can trust that all the support we receive goes directly to this team.”




  • What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?

    this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.

    if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.