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dgmib

@ dgmib @lemmy.world

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143
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Slovakia has just shut down its last coal power plant

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  • We’re both correct.

    LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

    LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

    For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

    And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.

  • Slovakia has just shut down its last coal power plant

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  • It's expensive and dirty fuel.

    It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

    Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

    Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.

  • In a global first, Gambia could reverse its ban on female genital cutting

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  • I thought the Quran made no mention of FGM, and that the practice was discouraged (or outright forbidden) by Islamic fatwas / religious scholars.

  • Removed

    OpenAI’s GPT Is a Recruiter’s Dream Tool. Tests Show There’s Racial Bias

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  • Job seekers next ChatGPT prompt:

    Here’s a job posting and my resume, can you tell me what to change to make me sound like a perfect fit for the role?

    ChatGPT:

    • Change name from “Latifa Tshabalala“ to “Kevin Smith” …

  • A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

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  • Trucks and SUVs are getting heavier to skirt emissions controls.

    In 2010 the Obama administration passed laws tightening emissions control requirements for new vehicles. But the laws were written to allow emissions as a factor of vehicle size, larger vehicles were allowed to have more emissions.

    Unfortunately, the plan backfired. Instead of reducing emissions, vehicle manufacturers just started making vehicles bigger.

    It isn’t primarily the fragile egos that are driving sales of these vehicular monstrosities. It’s corporate profits and greed. Manufacturers aren’t making smaller models because they don’t make as much money on them, not because there isn’t a market for them.

  • A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse

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  • AI is a genie that can’t be put back into its bottle.

    Now that it exists you can make it go away with laws. If you tried, at best all you’d do is push it to sketchy servers hosted outside of the jurisdiction of whatever laws you passed.

    AI is making it easier than it was before to (ab)use someone by creating a nude (or worse) with their face. That is a genuine problem, it existed before AI, and it’s getting worse.

    I’m not saying you have like it, but if you think laws will make that unavailable you’re dreaming.

  • Linux hits 4% on the desktop 🐧 📈

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  • I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.

    I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.

  • Bitcoin miners win legal battle to keep mum about energy use [US]

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  • The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.

    Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.

    Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.

  • This is painfully true

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  • If a website using home realm discovery adds anything more than one extra press of the enter key or mouse click of an ‘ok’ button, get a better password manager.

    If you’re annoyed by that one extra click that’s fair. Click counts matter.

  • This is painfully true

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  • It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

    It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

    This has several benefits:

    1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.
    2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.
    3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

    Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn't work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.

  • Biden Administration Is Said to Slow Early Stage of Shift to Electric Cars

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  • Not judging, just genuinely curious, why do you not want an EV as a daily driver?

  • Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO

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  • If it was just about monetizing scraping for AI models, they could have easily had different pricing for AI uses than they did for 3rd party apps.

    If it was about the lost revenue from the lack of ads on third party apps, they only needed to give existing 3rd party apps a longer period of time to transition their business models. 3rd party app users would have been paying way more than Reddit was losing from the lack of ads.

    No Reddit wanted to kill off the third party apps. They used the AI scraping as an excuse to shut them down. They wanted to force people onto their shitty app.

    I don’t know what their actual reasoning for that is, but there’re basically two possibilities I can think of:

    1. Their executive team and board of directors is ridiculously incompetent.
    2. Their shitty 1st party app is harvesting significantly more data about you than the 3rd party apps did, and they can sell that data for more than the $2-5 per user per month they would be getting if they gave the 3rd party apps time to transition to a paid business model.

  • Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI.

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  • When was the last time anyone read the T&Cs of a social media website?

    They basically all have a clause to the effect that you grant them a permanent, irrevocable license do whatever they want with anything you post.

    You might still own the copyright to any content you produce, but by posting you’re granting them permission to do basically anything with it, including reselling it.

  • The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes

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  • Don’t need to involve a blockchain to make cryptographically provable authenticity. Just a digital signature.

    The only thing a hash in a blockchain would add is proof the video existed at the time the hash was added to the blockchain. I can think of cases where that would be beneficial too, but it wouldn’t make sense to put a hash of every video on a public blockchain.

  • Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

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  • And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.

    The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.

    Only the very rich lose.

    The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.

    Which one are you?

  • Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

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  • The economics of Bitcoin mining are a bit weird in that it impossible to make it more energy efficient.

    The system auto adjusts the computational complexity of mining bitcoin so that it always costs a little less than one bitcoin to mine a bitcoin, and at scale the only variable expense is electricity so as the price of bitcoin goes up, so does the amount of money that must be spent on electricity.

    Current 6.25 Bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes. So globally about $2 million must be spent on electricity every hour.

    In a little over 2 months the block reward cuts in half to only 3.125 bitcoin every 10 minutes. That will have the side effect of reducing the money spent on electricity for mining bitcoin so long as the price of bitcoin remains the same.

  • EU bans ‘misleading’ environmental claims that rely on offsetting

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  • This is great to see.

    80% of carbon offsets are creative accounting at best and bold-faced lies at worst.

    If you don’t agree I’ve got a a bridge I mean some Carbon Offsets for sale.

  • Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

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  • People don’t have a problem with subscriptions, they have a problem with companies like Ubisoft charging ridiculous sums to play low quality games.

    Subscriptions would take off just fine if they were reasonable and fair, and not trying to exploit their customers.

  • Tesla drivers had highest accident rate, BMW drivers highest DUI rate, study finds

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  • I’m not intending to defend Musk or Tesla here, but this study is literally just insurance incidents by brand and makes no distinction between Teslas on autopilot and under human control.

    Teslas tend to attract a certain kind of driver that likes their performance characteristics who are not typically known for being the safest drivers.

    There’s no doubt that a lot of Tesla drivers abuse the autopilot capabilities, and the Elon Musk hype machine is at least partially to blame for that, probably more.

    But this isn’t evidence one way or the other about the safety of Tesla’s FSD.