Week 37

Bloomberg: "The Energy Department plans to award $1 billion to stimulate demand for hydrogen, Energy Sectary Jennifer Granholm said Thursday"

"Nikola Announces Expansion of Dealer Sales and Service Network Into Canada in Partnership with ITD Industries"

H2 Central: "UAE – Masdar Tells Hydrogen Summit A ‘Green Wave is Coming’"

The Guardian: "[2023/01] Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists.. Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics"

"@Hypx@mastodon.social

Bosch ramps up trucking’s hydrogen future.. Fuel-cell production in Germany—and soon in the U.S.—will first supply Nikola Class 8 FCEV trucks. The global mobility supplier is leaning into hydrogen as trucking’s best hope for decarbonization and TCO"

"@merc@techhub.social

Batman presumably owns DC comics using a shell company.

Think about it. They can't hide how Gotham is a hellscape with massive wealth inequality and crumbling infrastructure. But they frame it as a rich heroic vigilante fighting a one-man war. The villains are almost never the ultra rich (other than Penguin, who is more of a poseur). Instead the criminals are frequently doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc.

Most of his opponents keep escaping from Gotham Asylum. But, instead of raising taxes to improve its security and improving the effectiveness of treatments, DC comics frames it so we're supposed to cheer for the vigilante who roughs up the escaped mentally ill people then returns them to the same underfunded asylum over and over"

Renewables Now: "Japan's IHI enters 1-GW hydrogen export project in Queensland"

The Age: "Amsterdam was choked with cars until mass protests in the 1970s against their dominance and vehicular 'Kindermoord' (child murder) forced that to change"

"@fediversereport@mastodon.social

We now have the following national governments with a Mastodon server:

• Germany: https://social.bund.de

• The Netherlands: https://social.overheid.nl

• Switzerland: https://social.admin.ch

As well as the EU with

• https://social.network.europa.eu

Let's hope that other countries will follow this.. pattern, and all launch a fediverse server at social.[governmentwebsite].[TLD].. [as it] makes it immediately clear to people they are communicating with an official government account"

"@glyph@mastodon.social

I've seen vague public testimonials about how great Copilot [MS "AI" code helper tool] is, but everyone I've spoken to directly about the day to day experience of how it's impacting engineering culture are telling me stories of junior engineers churning out boilerplate with less understanding than before, overwhelmed staff & senior people desperately trying to block common errors in code reviews, failing, and having to do big rewrites or just blanket reverts. the dynamic is toxic and the tool is a net negative"

Netanyahu: "Israel is at the focus of an unprecedented international project that will link infrastructure from Asia to Europe... Its vision reshapes the face of our region and allows a dream to become reality. The initiative includes the construction of railways, the laying of a hydrogen pipeline, the energy of the future, the laying of fiber optic communications cables"

Reuters: "TotalEnergies announced a call for tenders for the annual production of 500,000 tonnes of green hydrogen on Thursday, as part of the French oil major's plans to decarbonise its European refineries"

Richard Bergman: "This is simply an extraordinary study. Researchers gave $7,500 (CAD) to homeless people in Vancouver. The result? The program saved money. It helped many of them to move into housing faster, which saved the shelter system 8277 dollars per person"

Janes: "NATO flies Phoenix UAV along Finnish-Russian border for first time"

FuelCellWorks: "UK Pours £25.7 Million Into Hydrogen-Based Red Diesel Alternatives"

LA Times: "California is moving to outlaw watering some grass that’s purely decorative"

"@patrickhadfield@mastodon.scot

Liz Truss blames everyone else in new book"

"@nickheer@c.im

Only Microsoft can build basic file syncing software that consumes two full CPU cores while doing nothing, and uses 1.19 GB of disk space. One of the world’s richest corporations is responsible for this heap of shit"

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FuelCellWorks: "Ursula Von Der Leyen's Bold Claim: Europe Is Outpacing China and the U.S. in Hydrogen Energy"

Bitcoin being an energy hog is one of its many disadvantages. The most important one is its limited money base - money base needs to expand, otherwise you will get deflation. Some think this feature makes bitcoin "politics free" bcz politicians "print and debase money" but no money is politics free. Gold became currency because the king made it so. It has no intrinsic moneyness attribute. Bitcoin is libertard cosplay, that's all it is. AND a waste of energy.

"@lopp@lopp.social

Bitcoin's energy consumption doesn't make it a grift, con, or scam. Bitcoin is an incredibly transparent system with regard to how it operates"

Public sphere is overrun by private interests

The Atlantic: "America Has a Private-Beach Problem.. Accessing the least-crowded section of New York’s Lido Beach requires either money or insider knowledge. Anyone staying at one of the hotels on the beach can walk through the lobby, and those living in the adjoining town can waltz in through a separate gate using a residents-only electronic access code. Everyone else, though, has to come in through a public entrance half a mile away and walk over the sand. In theory, some portion of every beach in the coastal United States is reserved for collective use—even those that border private property. But exactly how big that portion is varies widely, and in practice, much of the shore is impenetrable"

Reshare

NYT: "Pope Says a Strong U.S. Faction Offers a Backward, Narrow View of the Church.. In unusually sharp remarks published this week, Pope Francis said some conservative American Catholics wrongly ignore much of the Church’s mission and reject the possibility of change...

Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at 'a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude' opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment"

"@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social

Watching Greenland burn and Libya flood and France turn to desert, some in the last few years and some in the last few days, reinforces the lesson: there is no precedent for the climate catastrophe in any meaningful human memory. The last time the global average temperature was as different as we’re about to face was 12,000 years ago, before the state and before the city and before writing.

There’s nowhere that will be predictably stable or safe. There’s no preparation that can address the flux. I am unmoored and bereft in a way I can’t articulate"

"@bobwyman@mastodon.social

NIH researchers 'found that living in an area with high levels of particulate air pollution was associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer'... Fossil fuel combustion is a major source of PM2.5. **Fossil fuels kill.**"

It's strange..

#ACDC #BeeGee #Mashup

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It's like Hakeem Jeffries is his own sign-language interpreter.

"@burgerdrome@aus.social

I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it's trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it's downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it's being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my useage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology"

"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt

🇦🇺 ⚡ 💧

Hysata, an Australian startup that achieved a 95% efficiency in water electrolysis for #hydrogen production (41.5 kWh/kg), was awarded US$13.5 million to build a 5MW demonstration plant"

Fuelcellworks: "Bavaria Bolsters Hydrogen Ecosystem With Expanded Funding Program For Another 50 Hydrogen Filling Stations"

"Hysata opens new electrolyser manufacturing facility in Port Kembla with $23m vote of confidence from Australian and Queensland Governments"

Taking this shit out of source codes will be FUN

"@protik@cyberplace.social

Think about the money Software Engineers will make de-LLM-ing the codebases once the hype is over"

Remember the scene in Toy Story where Buzz Lightyear jumps in air wanting to fly, but with a succession of accidents stays in the air for a while, and declares he is flying. Another toy says to him "you are not flying, you are falling with style". That is precisely what's going on with these neural net "AI" approaches, LLMs - they are stupid, but they are stupid with style, their output sometimes looks intelligent, either by chance (stochastically) or through a phenomenon known as psychic's con.

They are basically stupid

Melanie Mitchell: "Can Large Language Models Reason?.. [I]f LLMs rely primarily on memorization and pattern-matching rather than true reasoning, then they will not be generalizable—we can’t trust them to perform well on 'out of distribution' tasks, those that are not sufficiently similar to tasks they’ve seen in the training data... If LLMs Are Not Reasoning, What Are They Doing?.. Several researchers have shown that LLMs are substantially better at solving problems that involve terms or concepts that appear more frequently in their training data, leading to the hypothesis that LLMs do not perform robust abstract reasoning to solve problems, but instead solve problems (at least in part) by identifying patterns in their training data that match, or are similar to, or are otherwise related to the text of the prompts they are given.

For example, a study by Razeghi et al. showed that some GPT-based LLMs (pre-trained on a known corpus) were much better at arithmetic problems that involved numbers that appeared frequently in the pre-training corpus than those that appeared less frequently. These models appear to lack a general ability for arithmetic, but instead rely on a kind of “memorization”—matching patterns of text they have seen in pre-training"

The Apple USB-c change will ultimately be beneficial for the consumers. But let's remember Apple was bitchslapped into it, by the EU. Unfettered capitalism gives you walled gardens, lock-in. Only regulation can shake things up, encourage corps to do the right thing.

Looks like trouble

u.ecmwf_wind(30,-60,10,M=100,N=60,show_ike=True)

Mozilla Foundation: "While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines"

H2 View: "Solaris set to deliver 90 hydrogen-powered buses to Venice"

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power" — Mussolini.

The Guardian: "Chile president gives staunch defence of democracy, 50 years after Pinochet coup.. 'Problems with democracy can always be solved … and a coup d’état is never justifiable – nor is endangering the human rights of those who think differently,' said Gabriel Boric in a speech outside La Moneda, the presidential palace bombed by British-built Hawker Hunter jets during the 1973 coup"

"@jwz@mastodon.social

Breaking: Scorpion stings frog.

As I keep saying: maybe using a web browser owned by the world's largest advertising company is a bad idea"

"@malwaretech@infosec.exchange

For anyone unaware, Google Chrome is currently rolling out an update that track your interests based on browsing history, then share them with 3rd party websites. The notification page makes it sound like they added a new privacy feature, but in actuality they automatically enrolled you into their tracking system and you have to go and manually opt out"

When cloud co marketing uses the word "serverless" that's not exactly true, they do have an app server. What they mean is co offers machines with predefined services, preset APIs (could lead to lock-in, careful), not blank hosts.

Many other read-only type services can be implemented in this static site style.. without app server.

Link

That's right

Who da man

Yes yes I used this "inverted index" concept, simple to code, 50 lines of py. I split the index to different files one for words starting with a-, one for b- etc that way retrieval downloads small piece of index for search term.

Site search done.

Unzicker has a new book out, I'm looking forward to reading it.

"@dangillmor@mastodon.social

Apple's resistance to USB-C has always been about money, not its customers' convenience. Money as in paying absurdly high fees for proprietary technology -- including the Lightning tax it charges to third-party sellers"

Reuters: "French watchdog halts iPhone 12 sales over too-high radiation"

@carnage4life@mas.to

Apple says 'privacy is a human right' but would rather collect $10 billion a year from Google than set DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in Safari.

The Jerusalem Post: "Linking Saudi normalization with a prerequisite of peace.. Riyadh has consistently said its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t officially changed. It backed the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, a plan that called for peace in return for a just and comprehensive peace with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution"

QZ: "An antitrust lawsuit against Google goes to trial on Sep. 12"

The Conversation: "Ever-larger cars and trucks are causing a safety crisis on US streets"

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Ars Technica: "The room-temperature superconductor that wasn’t.. The summer of room-temperature superconductivity was short-lived" #LK99

OnlySky: "Why libertarian cities fail"

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Schools clearly bet on the wrong technology - ed solutions need to be based on true open architectures. DoEd can buy commodity hardware (cheap as they will buying in bulk) and keep Ed software as "images" on a DoEd server. Images are snapshots of a machine that has everything kids need, you burn this image on each machine, give that to students. A few visiting gov IT people for each school occasionally can fix issues as they arise. Do not depend on some questionable bidness "on the cloud".

"‘Chromebook Churn’ report highlights problems of short-lived laptops in schools Chromebooks are not designed to last...Schools have piles of working Chromebooks that have become e-waste because they’ve expired...

Chromebooks have a built-in 'death date,' after which software support ends. We expect milk to expire, but not laptops. Adding to customer confusion, expiration dates are based on the certification of a given model, not the purchase date. This means that consumers or schools can buy a used or refurbished Chromebook thinking they’re getting a great deal, only to be surprised when their new laptop expires after a year"

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Link

Browser side programs are usually in Javascript. But Imma test a new tech - Python in the browser #PyScript.

A lot can be done via static files, even big ones. Some do not realize but client can even read parts of a file on the web server, it's part of the standard,

from requests import get
url = "http://download.thinkbroadband.com/5MB.zip"
get(url, headers={"Range": "bytes=0-100"})

That gets only first 100 bytes. In theory one could even read parts of a whole database if client knew how to seek/jump between the right parts of the db file.. This is for read-only apps sure, still, covers a lot of ground.

No need for a whole app server to offer search, static files can work too (this blog's setup). IDEA: Create a search index offline, push the index files on the the static site, client, with its code, can read specific parts of the index, combine, sort them, and present results on its end.

The hell with this "cloud".. Another dependency will be removed.. Time to DIY

WTF happened to site search? Place search box on your page, connect to ext search (Goog) showed search results for that site. Now bust.

#Bitcoin

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CBS News: "Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave"

They apparently make the fake one from horseadish and some starch

"It is estimated only 1% of American wasabi and 5% of Japanese wasabi is real"

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WION: "Following reports that China, one of the company’s major markets, had prohibited government personnel from using iPhones as Beijing intensifies its continuing tech war with the US, Apple shares plummeted during after-hours trading on Thursday, following the company’s greatest single day loss in a month, according to a report by Forbes"

"[Clean Energy Latin America's] LCoH Brazil Index reveals that it is currently feasible to manufacture green hydrogen in select strategic locations within Brazil at a levelized cost ranging from $2.87/kg to 3.56/kg. However, with optimization and incentives, these costs could potentially decrease to as low as 1.69 dollar/kg, making them highly competitive when compared to gray hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, known for its environmental impact"

Ars Technica: "Chrome's invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the 'Privacy Sandbox,' is.. getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven't been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it's built directly into the Chrome browser.. Google seemingly knows this won't be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page"

Over 200 mil in the red. Why did it bomb so bad? Was it Woke? Because it looks like film went broke. 😂 😂

u.mov_profit(budget=294,gross=380)

Out[1]: -213.0

Ugh.. looks bad.. Lost munee

u.boxofficemojo("Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny")

Out[1]: 
{'Domestic Opening': '$60,368,101',
 'Domestic': '$174,385,511',
 'International': '$207,888,377',
 'Worldwide Total': '$382,273,888',
 'Release Date': 'June 28, 2023'}

"@croissant@zeroes.ca

Long COVID, which occurs in 10% of infections and which is not fully prevented by vaccines, is becoming an exclusion criteria for any kind of insurance — including travel, disability, and life.

The actuaries know."

Aero Testing Intl: "H2FLY.. plans to open its Hydrogen Aviation Center at Stuttgart Airport next year. The Center, which is co-funded by the regional ministry of transport will provide fuel cell aircraft integration facilities and liquid hydrogen infrastructure.

H2FLY was founded by five engineers from the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart and the University of Ulm.. The company was acquired in 2021 by Joby Aviation, the California-based eVTOL aircraft developer"

Interesting Eng: "First liquid hydrogen-powered piloted plane soars into sky.. H2FLY, the Stuttgart-based firm acquired by Joby Aviation in 2021, completed four such flights in its HY4 demonstrator aircraft fitted with a cutting-edge hydrogen-electric fuel cell propulsion system and cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen..

Replacing gaseous hydrogen with liquid hydrogen effectively doubled the maximum range of the HY4 aircraft from around 466 miles (750 km) to approximately 932 miles (1,500 km), showing great promise for a future with cleaner and more sustainable air travel"

F24: "G20 summit closes with Russia, Brazil and India boasting success.. Modi formally closed the summit by passing on a ceremonial gavel to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose country will take the bloc's presidency in December. 'We cannot let geopolitical issues sequester the G20 agenda of discussions,' Lula said, an implicit reference to wrangling over the Ukraine war"

Politico: "West goes easy on Russia to save the G20"

AP: "Biden, Modi and G20 allies unveil rail and shipping project linking India to Middle East and Europe.. President Joe Biden and his allies on Saturday announced [the] plans.. an ambitious project aimed at fostering economic growth and political cooperation... The rail and shipping corridor would help physically tie together a vast stretch of the globe, improving digital connectivity and enabling more trade among countries, including with energy products such as hydrogen"

The planes attacked the building on 9/11. Many died, both during and after the terrible event.

We are talking about Chilean Air Force bombing the presidential residence as part of a coup, photographed above. The date was September 11, 1973, and the left-wing president Allende was toppled. Pinochet would become president and usher in neo-liberal reforms, jail opponents, opress political dissent. "Chicago Boys" were asked to help, thanks to them, the new system would create inequality and subsequently cause the 1982 monetary crisis.

September 11 for US was tragic too, but US reacted to it by telling people "to shop more", and invaded a random country to benefit Halliburton. Dare I say due to its actions US made its own 9/11 matter less. From now on we will only commemorate the Chilean 9/11, not the American one.

"@motorpuntoes@mastodon.social

#Coches | Los prototipos del BMW X5 de hidrógeno superan una nueva serie de pruebas, esta vez en las extremas condiciones de Dubai"

.. lest we interfere with crooked ass bidness in an "opressive" kinda way. No cannot do that. The right-wing way is to have the mofo to feast off public money even more, as if cheap energy, the infra they live on was not enough.

CBS News: "Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave"

See what I did there.. You thought one thing got another thing.. Boom!

Trump: "We know collective action can be incredibly effective. In July, UPS agreed to a deal with the Teamsters Union in which, on average, the annual salary of full-time drivers will be raised to $170,000, including healthcare and other benefits.

What the rich and the politicians they own have succeeded in doing since the Reagan administration, is convincing white working-class Americans that unions are the enemy of working people, and trickle-down economics (essentially tax cuts for the very rich) will, counterintuitively, lead to economic equality. These are lies"

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