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michael9423

302 karma · joined February 25, 2024

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michael9423··on Penguin 'Toxicologists' Find PFAS Chemicals in Remote Patagonia
That’s a great idea. Have you compared the effects of your product with non-modified soluble fibers? Afaik, soluble fibers not only from oats but also from vegetables and beans already have solid effects on toxin-binding in their natural state.
michael9423··on Britain's postwar sugar craze confirms harms of sweet diets in early life
That does not make sense statistically. A decrease in total HFCS consumption would lead to a decrease in new diabetes cases if it was the actual root cause.

Sugar is not the cause of diabetes.

michael9423··on Does veganism have an ultra-processing problem?
I don't think you can speak for all vegans and vegetarians.

I was vegetarian for a couple years until meat cravings became so strong I started eating meat again.

84% of vegans and vegetarians return to meat: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animals-and-us/201...

Many because they crave it.

Several vegan influencers have been caught eating meat and fish secretly. Conversely the same - some carnivore influencers have been caught eating fruit and other plant products.

Only 2% of US-Americans are truly vegan or vegetarian (and even those tend to cheat here and there).

michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
Wind turbines do not produce a lot of energy in total so you need a lot of them.

Thousands of tons of concrete are poured into the soil for the foundation of one wind turbine, and the foundation is likely never removed, creating ecological implications.

And wind turbines also can not be recycled and go to landfills.

With nuclear energy, the newest 4th generation reactors are closed systems that consume their own nuclear waste, so there is no final disposal problem.

michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
The thing is that nuclear research has been stiffled for decades. It is possible to create nuclear reactors that consume their own waste.
michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
This is considered 4th gen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
Here's the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342671383_Metal_dis...
michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
Yes, technically there is nothing that is 100% clean. But with nuclear and water, you more or less control the area of contamination and you don't have a permanent production of toxic waste that goes everywhere and is impossible to get out of the environment again.

I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

michael9423··on 20% more powerful perovskite solar panels enter commercial use
In my previous comment elsewhere that got flagged, I said, among other things, that the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water.

Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment. Even the silicon panels contain lead.

There's a pretty dark side to renewables that not many want to see.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

michael9423··on Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
How can he be sure he's a theoretical physicist if he doesn't know reality exists at all?

The truth is, instead of reality, he would be better off questioning theoretical physics, which indeed does not exist outside the heads of academia.

His "questioning of reality" only happens philosophically (in other words, it is an academic farce), once he gets up to do some grocery shopping he sure knows what to buy so he can eat in order to survive. There is your objective reality.

Humans understand reality if they do not bury their heads in the sand. But academia can get in the way.

michael9423··on Make Firefox Private Again
Librewolf does #1 and #2 already. But generally, there's no market for that.

Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.

And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.

Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."

Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.

People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.

And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.

michael9423··on Google is killing one of Chrome's biggest ad blockers
Brave does integrate uBO. It can be activated under "manifest v2 extensions" in the settings.
michael9423··on Fake Paper Generator
To clarify, my comment was directed at chatGPT itself, not your project.
michael9423··on Fake Paper Generator
I'm angry at ChatGPT and the like polluting the web, academia and people's minds.
michael9423··on Fake Paper Generator
It's not at all funny. It's dumb, and from the headline alone - "A dairy delight" - I already knew it was the lame and predictable ChatGPT language model with all it's repetitiveness, puns and consciously designed idiocy.

"dairy-inspired exploration" - word salad garbage

"we will humorously consider" - good to be reminded again, I was already falling for it

"the implications of a lactose-laden lunar surface" with acutely annoying aliterations.

michael9423··on For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default
You know perfectly well that point 1 is completely irrelevant in the world of open-source.

A UK Ltd. is less transparent than Librewolf, an open-source project run by many volunteers without the incentive to make any money.

Point 3 is no longer true, the installer comes with the option to enable auto-update and on Linux, it also auto-updates, depending on distro, etc.

The risks you are talking about are not inherent to Librewolf, but to Linux and open-source, and thus are not legitimate criticisms of Librewolf.

michael9423··on Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128
I think ads should not be allowed for anything at all in the digital world, including TV. In a world without ads, products would be known due to reputation. Ads are an assault on the limited resource of attention.

People say how can new products reach people, but the solution to that problem isn't ads but platforms/websites that catalog new products and allow for easy discovery.

Ads actually make the problem of finding new products worse because you only see a fraction of new products if you consume ads, primarily those from companies that already have lots of money to invest into ads.

michael9423··on Nearly 2M metric tons of wild fish used to feed Norwegian farmed salmon annually
> A single cow produces around 220 pounds of methane and around 200 pounds of ammonia per year. That's equivalent to 5ish gigatons of CO2, again per cow per year, so this really makes no sense.

Ignoring the myth of harmful CO2 for a moment - Ammonia is an important nutrient, maybe one of the most important chemicals that make it possible to feed humanity. Another example of environmentalist ideology trying to destroy the foundation of modern civilization. Ammonia is so important that it's produced synthetically in large amounts.

Your ammonia calculation is also merely copy-pasted and comes from factory farming and can't even be used to judge freely grazing cattle. Additionally, the naturally present ammonia goes right back into the soil as fertilizer for the gras. There is no "CO2 equivalency", this is another naive fallacy of the environmentalists. It's just theoretical statistics used for political propaganda purposes.

michael9423··on Nearly 2M metric tons of wild fish used to feed Norwegian farmed salmon annually
Near me is a conservation area where agriculture is not allowed, but cattle grazes there all year round. It is sold locally. Plant-based food is often farmed on an industrial scale which pollutes the environment with glyphosate for example.

It is not about food type, it is about how it's produced.

> And if you really want that hamburger, enjoy it without any guilt!

That's very gracious of you, to allow this.

michael9423··on The state of carbon dioxide removal
Thank you for that paper. It shows that the proposed negative effects of CO2 do not exist.

Let's take the study by Rodeheffer. Even 15,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere did not change the results of a thorough 90-minute test. If this is not indicative of the benignancy of CO2, I don't know what is.

Let's take the another study by Allen that showed "SMS performance was 15% lower for 945 ppm and 50% lower for 1,400 ppm relative to 550 ppm"

This was not a controlled study, but just an association study in different buildings. All the studies that use a good setup do not report marked lowering of cognitive function.

Then you can look at the paper by Herczeg and the mental performance is not really much different between 600 and 4000 ppm - merely 5% difference in errors found in the test. With only few participants, this is not significant. Since this is a short-term study, adaption to higher CO2 levels needs to be considered.

michael9423··on The state of carbon dioxide removal
> 1000 ppm is at the level where us apes have measurable reduction in reaction time and other cognitive impairments.

The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation. High CO2 in rooms is a marker of reduced O2, and a lack of fresh air.

If you add 1000ppm CO2 to fresh air, it actually boosts cognition due to the Bohr effect.

michael9423··on The state of carbon dioxide removal
The global greening does show that from the perspective of a healthy, fully greened planet, the CO2 concentrations are actually too low still. Plants favor a CO2 concentration of at least 1000 ppm. That's why in agriculture, extra CO2 is used to stimulate plant growth.

I think this should be noted, since the slogan by alarmists is usually "save the planet".

michael9423··on 40 out of 60 German climate greening endavours fraudulent
Actually the article supports this information. The number is just a bit too high.

Quote: "With the pledges from 2022 and the ongoing projects, the grant for cycle highways and the loan for the environmentally friendly bus system, Germany is financing cycle paths and a bus system in Peru with around 199 million euros."

michael9423··on South Pole Water Infrastructure
drying and burning.
michael9423··on Manifest V2 phase-out begins
It seems to me that this is not a honest attempt by gorhill to actually adapt uBO to V3. Rather he wants to ridicule it.

Adguard is working on an actual replacement of their Ad-Blocker that comes as close as possible to the V2-version:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker-m...

I can understand his frustration. uBO will lose what makes it special, the ability to serve as a wide-spectrum content blocker. He wants to make a statement.

michael9423··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Not really. If everyone would use a chromium version that radically blocks trackign and ads, google wouldn't control anything.
michael9423··on Manifest V2 phase-out begins
"This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension."

Soon, more than 50 million users of uBlock Origin will have their extension deactivated and directed to "alternatives" chosen by Google. This will be the end of an era where users still had control.

gorhill, probably understandably, refuses to update uBlock Origin to comply with V3, as a result he will use the majority of the userbase. The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.

I wonder whether it would be a wise decision by gorhill to replace uBlock Origin with a V3-compliant version when V2 is phased out.

michael9423··on EU countries must implement right to repair laws within two years
I don't think it's a good implementation. Takes up lots of space of the screen.

Also:

"With your permission, we will use AT internet and Hotjar cookies to produce aggregated, anonymous data about our visitors' browsing and behaviour on our website."

They could use something like plausible and that won't even need any cookie notices.

michael9423··on What We're Working on in Firefox
End users do not care about the browser engine. But as I said, Brave is trying. It won't be successful in the way FF could have been.
michael9423··on What We're Working on in Firefox
15 years ago, lots of things were possible. Most people were using firefox, it had like 30 or 40% market share.
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