themaninthedark

Agreed, we(collectively) do seem to assume and teach that the environment is/was in homeostasis before modern man when that is very much not the case.

However we do have measurable effects on the environment i.e. acid rain on the east coast due to the iron and steel foundries. We eliminated/reduced that heavily by implementing controls, same with the hole in the ozone.

I don't think that the path forward for repairing(if assuming all manmade)/changing what is going on is banning things as that is difficult to implement on the world wide scale that it would need to happen.

Case in point, China is one of the largest GHG emitters in terms of number but when it is brought up, the argument is they are smaller per capita and most of the emissions are due to them selling to the west anyway. If we said "Ok, let's stop manufacturing there", now you have the free trade people upset. Also the people who believe that you need trade in order to prevent war. Also everyone really likes cheap stuff, the man on the street may not care about who their senator is but they really like it when they can get very big TV for cheap. So it's politically untenable.

I think that we could do some Geo-engineering to reverse/fix the situation; carbon sequestration in the ocean, greening the Sahara. But then you have people worried about the second order effect, it costs money and who will pay and you may be doing it on someone else's land...Europe doing a big push to green the Sahara would be bad optics because of colonialism.

I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned.

There are differing views on evolution, between slow and gradual and punctual equilibrium( a sudden breakthrough that triggers a biological arms race), this article is looking more at the very short term and saying if a species goes extinct another species does not immediately or fully occupy the space...which I guess needs to be stated but I would think that it was already understood...

The article is more focused on oceanic and coastal diversity but I agree about the mosquitoes.

I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.

I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.

Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.

Depends, ever merge from a cloverleaf?

Edit Add: Or an on-ramp that goes uphill?

It's required by law...

"“See that?” whispered Granger. “It'll be you; right up at the end of that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene. Suspense. Long shot. Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia. Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!”" - Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

When I brought up J6, it was not because I wanted to discuss the ideology but because this is the first time to my knowledge that we prosecuted over 1,500 people for a single event. Looking at the NPR database; Violence is 417 cases, Property destruction is 55 cases, Conspiracy is 48 cases. Assuming no overlap between those, you have ~980 people that fall into the "useful idiot" or "stupid mob" category.

Should they have been there? No of course not.

If my point can't be understood because I am using J6 as an example, please substitute J6 with Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter.

The change we are seeing with technology is not the amount of data we are storing but that we are able to process this data and build it out into a model.

hypothetical We saw you on a camera on J6 in the Capital but also have cell data showing you traveled down with other people. Don't have them on camera but the cell data shows they were close to you at all times, so we can charge them.

I wanted to link to a video of a protest I saw a little while ago; it showed protestors in Black Block swarm some cops then all run under a group of people that had umbrellas. When the group moved, all the black block clothes were on the ground so the responsible parties couldn't be tracked. However this time the police drone captures some footage of them before they changed into the black block, so they were able to make arrests.

This would be able to take it further, now you could see who the protestors trained with and charge them with Conspiracy.

Not for fishing, it's a control system.

Think back to the capital riots/insurrection/what-ever you want to call it; they used similar systems to identify and arrest those participants. Heavily publicize how many people and who; doesn't matter if you a 63yo grandmom or a pastor, we will find you and prosecute. Showing that you are prosecuting the "normal" people is part of it, show that and you make them less likely to show up to the next thing, less likely to provide support.

The Capital has many cameras owned by the feds, so they could easily do that. Chicago, Atlanta, LA not so much. When anti-ICE action takes place with protestors in black block, going under umbrellas, makes it hard to identify and prove. With strategically placed cameras, you can see what cars came in the area. You get statistical data that shows if they are there normally there. Get enough abnormality and you get enough for a search warrant.

We can finally have the degrowth that the environmentalists keep talking about!

Embrace the AI, it will lower your carbon emissions!

Because we are keeping all the other dealers out...

>Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance...

Lol, do as we say not as we do!

>In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen.

https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelli...

Right but the military wants to be able to use a tool they are paying for in all cases, not just ones the manufacturer thinks they should.

If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.

Edit add: What is targeting? What is surveillance?

If someone in the intelligence analysis department uses AI to generate a report, then someone else uses that report for targeting did they just break the terms? Where is that line?

Much easier for the Pentagon to say no.

Shouldn't it be a good thing that we are presuming someone innocent rather than guilty?

Interestingly I have seen the opposite where if a guy is accused, it is automatically assumed he is guilty. Especially with sports players, which lead to the Duke Lacrosse false accusations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_rape_hoax

Manslaughter is the word you are looking for, they don't intend for the person to die.

Funny how all that concern they have never manifests for wind and solar power.

Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.

Right now all the new refrigerators seem to have 2 year warranties, even the ones from Costco. At least they give you extra extended.

Last fridge I had was a Kenmore Elite with 10 year warranty, it failed to the same compressor issue that has been plaguing the LGs. It was replaced once under warranty but that failed 3 years later.

Just got a GE; first one was DOA, didn't cool at all. My thermometer is saying it's replacement is currently sitting at 44F when it is set at 34F, I have had it for 2 weeks....

Maybe Trump is secretly for "the green agenda" and this was all part of the plan to stop oil.

He had that big falling out with Elon so that he can't be accused of pandering to him when electric car sales go through the roof.

I have also heard that this is really "big oil's" plan, they always manage to cause a huge price spike just when green energy is about to take over the market, somehow this stops the green revolution and forces everyone to go back to using fossil fuels.

What would job numbers look like if the federal government wasn't doubled?

I say this as someone who thinks Bush was an absolute idiot and would love to see the government shrunk.

TSA is basically a jobs program, what happens if we get rid of it?

Really?!

Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.

I used "disrupted" as that is the language that is used to describe these actions. When you disrupt something, you increase the likelihood of something non-standard happening including accidents. I believe the narrative was that if drivers can not pay attention to the road and keep control of their vehicles, then they should not be driving.

This was something that people decried about during the BLM and Stop Oil protests, see below for some of the accidents caused by those actions:

>M25 Police Motorbike Crash (November 2022): An Essex Police motorcycle officer was injured in a collision involving two lorries during a rolling roadblock. The roadblock was set up because Just Stop Oil activists were trespassing and climbing onto overhead gantries along the M25.

>Greenpeace bridge protesters blamed for crash on Fred Hartman Bridge https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/greenpeace-bridge-pr...

>Crash data raises safety questions about bridge protests on I-40 https://www.carolinajournal.com/crash-data-raises-safety-que...

Are we allowed to call it terrorism now? Or just when it is farmers? I know that both climate activists and BLM have disrupted highways as well....

Children of the Magenta Line seems very topical, especially wrt AI

>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.

>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.

-https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/children-of-the-magenta-...

Children Of The Magenta Line -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

>They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.

To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.

Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC

I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.

>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.

The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...

>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.

Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.

Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.

Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?

In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.

https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.

Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.

At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.

And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would like to have a word with you for saying that rockets were first developed by Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky

IBM was a US company, just because the Nazis used their computers doesn't make computers bad.

Just because something was once used by bad people or for bad things doesn't mean that it is bad.

After all, books were written by Hitler and the Nazis and I would hope that you aren't willing to paint all literature as being in the same light.

I think it was more the notion that those who don't have it that bad pushing for a revolution with the idea that their lives would be more comfortable, they will end up with more things or power.

I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.

Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815196

Microsoft GDID telemetry includes full browsing and gaming history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787239

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck

Until that handshake deal isn't respected despite you doing everything right i.e. know supplier, know broker.

https://youtu.be/as2KoDtsS_0?is=3H1TVc2PZPbGLdPK

Don't forget War for the Overworld!

Don't know much about driver maintenance but if it is working why remove it?

What I read in the link was that it was removed because LLM was making suggestions to improve the code/bring it up to modern standards but since it was rarely used no-one wanted to review it not that it was buggy.

>In recent months we have seen a lot of old kernel code removed stemming from that AI/LLM noise.

This is the opposite of what my parent was hoping to see, extended support for old/obscure hardware because we have LLM.