Ben Matthews

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).

At the same time, Ethiopia is also creating a huge new lake, capturing the headwaters of the Nile, it’s far away across mountains to the NW, but maybe one day they’ll be transferring water ?

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…

They need that rainfall, in the region as a whole, but need more storage capacity to release it over the whole year. Much water used to be stored as seasonal snow as well as glaciers, that capacity is melting away, so people have to adapt, and some to migrate (including a few to relocate from potential reservoir basins). Of course, the people who contributed most to the greenhouse gas emissions should in principle pay for that adaptation, but it’s too late to count on or wait for that, or to say we continue traditional lives, we didn’t want such change, it’s happening.

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 ?

This study is indeed disturbing, drawing on multiple lines of evidence suggesting melting may happen faster than previously assumed, I’ll study more.

However, there never was any magic safe (global-average-surface-) temperature level, to save polar ice sheets. Melting, and the penetration of heat, is cumulative, so to a first approximation it is the integral of the warming that counts (maybe we could talk about a heating budget, similar to the concept of carbon-budget to avoid a specific temperature).

Although diplomats may stress that the concept of safe level is baked into Article 2 of the Climate convention, that orginally applied to “concentrations” not temperature. Back in the day (early 2000s) I among others pushed (this wasn’t easy) to adopt temperature as a goal closer to real impacts, pointing out that required peak+decline concentration pathways.
Nevertheless we always knew that a stable (higher) temperature does not bring a stable sea-level (on a multi-century timescale) . While for some other types of impacts - e.g. ecosystem adaptation, it may be the rate (derivative) rather than the integral that matters more. The ‘level’ concept was a compromise to coalesce policy (within which - round numbers like 2.0 or 1.5 C also arbitrary).

Maybe it could help motivate the global debate, to specifically (dis)agree goals of sea-level rise we try to avoid ? That’s a more tangible level ( at least until we get into regional sea-level-rise variations…) , but due to the double integral, it’s harder to implement.

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 agree with the gist of much of the article. Although a fan of the original web, and developer of a climate web-app, I think small screens make people into consumers, while creators or investigators need a large screen, and that should be for dedicated periods of the day, not carried everywhere.
And we wish our kids had never had these things (gift from grandparents - hard to reject).

However the article title is over-simple, impractical - how would you even define what is a smartphone, in the spectrum of devices ? (maybe that’s cause of downvotes ? )

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 ?

There are more specific ad-server / tracker IPs that can be blocked at DNS level, tools like Pi-hole work that way (although if big countries did this, I suppose they’d quickly find workarounds to blend those addresses with useful ones).

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 ]

Je suppose la problème fondamentale c’est qu’il faudrait de la coordination avec d’autres pays vers lesquels ces milliardaires pourrait se déménager, mais actuellement la politique de certains de ces pays est capturé par ces mêmes milliardaires. Néanmoins, il faut préparer, pour qu’on puisse saisir le meilleur moment des oscillations politiques mondiales, quand cela s’aligne.

This seems highly significant (at least as a precedent that others may follow), to me great news, but if that’s so why did I only see it reported here, on a ‘local’ community in Lemmy?

Such tricks were was predictable, as VSCode extensions, letting arbitrary JS run on your system, are an obvious security risk.
Recently I used Zed editor instead, it’s smooth, but this also has extensions, only these are fewer and in rust ( maybe a higher barrier, targeting less users, so far… ). What’s the solution here - is there some intrinsically safer sandboxed system ?