Humanius

I’m no political analyst… and I do fear the possibility of a CDU + AfD coalition being possible… But from what I’ve seen over the past few days the CDU and SPD seem to be pre-sorting for a CDU + SPD coalition, which is also possible if the polls are to be believed.

I wouldn’t quite lose hope yet.

Edit: I’m still highly annoyed though that Germany let the government collapse now, right as Europe needs to get its act together and make preparations for another Trump term.

I’m guessing they probably have rules against plagiarism, or passing off other people’s work as your own.
So then I guess it would be down to whether using AI (without disclosure?) is plagiarism or not

It shouldn’t even be that complex…

I might be mistaken, but ultimately a password manager is basically nothing more than a database of passwords in an encrypted zip file, right? That could entirely be self-hosted with off the shelf open source applications stringed together.
All you’d need is a nice UI stringing it all together.

Edit: I’m not sure why people are downvoting me. Is that not what a password manager essentially is?

… and the people involved were arrested

I like to think that these videos are the only thing keeping Patrick Boyle sane from his career in finance.

His channel is great. I love his dry sense of humour.

People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

I’m just curious to see where it all goes.

Discord and Whatsapp
I’d love to use Signal, but virtually noone in my sphere uses it.

Looks like a low effort troll to me.
Don’t take the bait

But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

• During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
• During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

• The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
• The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

Large countries like to boast that their absolute number is bigger, it’s a tale as old as time.

If you really want to make comparisons (and I’d argue it’s really not that important) you should probably look at medals per capita, or medals per athlete sent. Obviously that gets a bit distorted with countries with small population, but I think it’s a more valuable number.

By the medals per capita metric the USA is 47th, and China is 75th.
https://www.medalspercapita.com/

I can’t find a good list for medals per athlete sent.

If he hasn’t shown genuine remorse than changes my stance.
Given what I had read on the matter I was under the impression he had shown remorse. Particularly the “biggest mistake of [his] life” remark.

So I’m not overly familiar, but I can try to summarize what I know.

Steven van de Velde is a Dutchman who went to the UK and raped a 12 year-old. He was sentenced to four years in prison for this by a UK court. Later he was extradited to the Netherlands, so he could sit out his sentence in the NL. However in the Netherlands, unlike the UK, sex with a minor is not automatically considered rape and needs to be proven in court. (Note: That is my understanding of the difference in interpretation) Because of this his conviction was reduced to “ontucht”, meaning sexual misconduct. (Even though what he did would probably also be considered rape in Dutch court).
As a result, he was out of prison after 13 months.

Now, Dutch attitude to these kinds of things, in my experience, is generally (but not always) that if you have paid your time, and have shown remorse for your actions, then it should probably not affect your future career prospects. The justice system is supposed to rehabilitate after all. (That is my experience though, and my experience may be biased, so don’t take this as gospel)

Hart van Nederland did a survey, and apparently only 27% of respondents think he should not be allowed to compete. 63% of respondents think he should be allowed to compete, and 10% don’t have an opinion either way. (Note that Hart van Nederland is not the most reliable of sources, but it gives an indication)

From what I have seen in Dutch circles this controversy is a lot less pronounced than it is in other countries. That’s not to say it is entirely uncontroversial, but it’s not quite to the same degree as I’m seeing internationally.

Personal opinion:

I don’t think his sentence should have been lowered to “ontucht”. I think what he did is morally reprehensible, and he should have sat out the full sentence for raping a minor. That is a failure on behalf of the justice system though, and van de Velde is not personally to blame for that.

That said, given that he has shown remorse for his actions, and has finished the sentence that the legal system imposed on him, I don’t think he should have been barred from competing in the Olympics on behalf of the Dutch team.

Edit: As Flying Squid mentioned I might be mistaken that he has shown genuine remorse.
If he hasn’t that changes my opinion on the matter.

So they can bitch that people booed, but he won’t acknowledge the reason is he raped a literal child?

Mathew Immers is not the guy who raped the child. That is Steven van de Velde.
Immers is van de Velde’s beach volleyball partner.

Wasn’t the TGV sabotage attack also targeted at the fiber-optics lines? Wouldn’t be surprised if they were related.
Or maybe these people just really dislike fiber-optics, and are in the pockets of big copper /j

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.

Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.

The German state doesn’t recognise Palestine as a state currently, so probably not.
Only a few countries west of the former Iron Curtain recognise Palestine (Iceland and Sweden, and as of this year Norway, Ireland, and Spain)