I see, I see

Good news is that they already have dropped the up charge entirely and an increasing number of chains are doing so around the world. From the article:

Notably, all three chains dropped their surcharges before the class action was authorized. Starbucks removed the upcharge in November 2024; Tim Hortons followed in January 2025, and Second Cup in February 2025. The lawsuit, filed by Montreal law firm LPC Avocats, seeks retroactive accountability for charges collected during those periods.

Animal agriculture is especially worse because it plainly demands much more agriculture to happen due to it’s inefficiencies. It requires growing huge amounts of animal feed where most of the energy is lost. Even it’s best case is bad compared to the worst case for eating plants directly

Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

[…]

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this

In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”

In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.

[…]

Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”

Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/the-anti-livestock-people-are-a-pest-how-un-fao-played-down-role-of-farming-in-climate-change

Graph from the article:

Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it’s just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate

In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens

>>> print("proof by counterexample in a python REPL")
proof by counterexample in a python REPL
>>> x = 2; print(x)
2
>>> print("this is not ignored"); print("it's just mostly useless"); print("but you can use as many as you want")
this is not ignored
it's just mostly useless
but you can use as many as you want

Not sure I get the joke?

Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It’s projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time

This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here’s an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper

I have worked on open source projects. I cannot fork sheer number of projects going towards LLMs alone. This is a losing proposition. Open source is not an individualistic action. This is a collective action, and we need developers of open source to live the values of open source

someone else can pick up from here

A big point of my comment earlier was that making a project increasingly LLM generated makes it harder for someone to pick up as quickly. A huge amount of complexity can be added insanely fast. In this rsync example, the entire testing system was changed overnight (while generating issues in the process). The projects become harder to work on in general

EDIT: also to add, this still has the issues of not knowing where the un-copyleftable code lies and/or having to rework large portions of the project are if you want to keep that

deleted by creator

That framing is missing a lot. Open source software is way more than about using the code. For me, it is not the bugs and quality that concern me most about things like this (though I do have concerns with that too). It’s about the broader issues with LLMs in terms of cooperate power, environmental impact, etc. Calling it out is less about any one project and more about stopping the whole open source ecosystem from spiraling into an LLM-dependent mess. LLMs themselves can easily become the death of FOSS in a broader sense

LLMs flip the power dynamics of development on their head. For starters, the outputs are likely no longer copyrightable in many jurisdictions, which undermines copyleft licenses (rsync is under GPL for example).

The kind of code that LLMs generate also tend to add complexity rather fast where it becomes more and more difficult for any human to understand it. Becoming dependent on LLMs makes development more of a question of computing power rather than effort. Companies will be able to spend more than you. FOSS will not be able to compete nearly as well. It’s also an inherent dependency on big tech companies who will be happy to exploit that the second they can or cut you off it you start to hit their bottom line. Software cannot be free in terms of freedom if modifying it in a reasonable amount of time starts to almost require a tool controlled by someone else

Using “Open Source” (which has somehow become “public weights” to most) / local LLMs are hardly freedom from this either given that they will always be behind given the massive financial costs to make models, unlike traditional software. If you find any advantage or way to reduce resource usage to make a better model, the bigger tech companies will just quickly scale that up far bigger than you can and meet or exceed what you have. It still just as well makes your ability to modify software dependent on the hardware you have. How free is open source software if it becomes increasingly difficult to modify without an expensive GPU?

No other way to review long patches besides LGTM says only profession that keeps doing that

Almost all of the latest commits on the project now :/

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

There are also a number of companies doing culture meat for cats. Cats very much can eat more than just animal products, so using other ingredients for some portion of it would not be an issue

So if i created my own keyboard from scratch on a open hardware microcontroller, could i implement this?

The USB controller that interrupts the CPU lives on the other side of the connection, so you’d just be building hardware that responses to the polling. If you’re curious what that looks like, Ben Eater has a cool video looking at what that looks like for a USB 2 keyboard https://youtu.be/wdgULBpRoXk

There’s also the case of Bluetooth dongle keyboards not working in UEFI (except that one) but USB always do. Is it this or just the UEFI not having drivers?

I am no USB Keyboard expert, but through the power of looking it up it seems like most of these do not operate as a HID (human interface device, like mouse and keyboard) so need driver support, but some start up with a basic HID proxy which might be you have one that works. From an older thread about BIOSes rather than UEIFs

A keyboard using Bluetooth cannot access the BIOS. Logitech Bluetooth keyboards get around this by having a dongle that pairs with the keyboard in a more basic, non-Bluetooth mode until the driver kicks in and switches modes. Microsoft might be similar mode with their keyboards and dongles, but I cannot confirm that.

https://superuser.com/questions/242457/use-a-bluetooth-keyboard-to-access-edit-the-bios

Technically, interrupts are still often involved… just from the USB controller on the state of the polling instead of the keyboard directly on a keypress

Some keyboards implement the USB Boot Keyboard profile specified in the USB Device Class Definition for Human Interface Devices (HID) v1.11 and are explicitly configured to use the boot protocol. These are limited to 6-key rollover (6KRO) and will interrupt the CPU every time the keyboard is polled (even if there is no state change) unless the USB controller is programmed to tell the keyboard to respond with negative acknowledgments, which the USB controller discards in hardware without interrupting the CPU, when there are no state changes to report

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_human_interface_device_class#Keyboards

Any economic system is going to face enormous pressure with the mass demand not being addressed, capitalistic or not. The demand side of the equation is going to be changed if you want to avoid an uprising. We’re not talking about some small level of reduction in production

For instance, if you wanted to move to a grass-fed only beef production, you could only supply at most around a quarter of all current beef production while using 100% of grassland (which would create deforestation pressure). This is while simultaneously increasing methane emissions and number of cattle slaughtered. If you want to avoid a methane emission increase, you’d need to go far lower production

We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf

As long as animal agriculture exists in any scale it’s the invariable outcome. As long as there’s mass demand, there will continue to be mass production

Starting this off with: I am not an epidemiologist and most of the epidemiologist I’m seeing online aren’t yet too concerned

That being said, they have not found any rodents on the ship, though that does not mean they didn’t just miss them in their search. The version on the ship has been confirmed to be the Andes Virus (ANDV) which is human-to-human transmissible in a way that most hantavirus are not

It’s hard to say exactly how the virus will behave outside of a cruise ship (which are known for spreading diseases more than other locations), but we can potentially look at a past outbreak in 2018 in a small town for an idea

In this work, we described the isolation of the strain responsible for the largest ANDV PTP transmission outbreak, which occurred in the small town of Epuyén and began on November 2, 2018. This strain, ARG-Epuyén, exhibited a high capacity for PTP transmission, necessitating the implementation of quarantine measures to curtail further spread [8]. The median reproductive number (the mean number of secondary cases caused by an infected person) was 2.12 before control measures were implemented and subsequently dropped to below 1.0 by late January

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12201636/

Possibly, but this all reads to me more as a pivot. If it’s controlled opposition they’re after, they’re taking a very long term look at it since they started expanding plant-based meat things they do in 2017. They also more prominently tout in on their website than a side mention. From their website:

Maple Leaf Foods is a leading Canadian consumer protein company, making high-quality, innovative and differentiated fresh, prepared and plant protein products

This is also coinciding at a time that they spun off their pork production into a separate company and shuffling things around. They’re also talking (publicly at least) to investors like they very much believe in plant-based meats as the future instead of just a hedge