This page’s “Life cycle CO2 equivalent (including albedo effect)” page says Nuclear is just a hair worse than onshore wind in the median case, significantly worse than both on- and offshore wind in the worst case (worst for both types), and slightly better in the best case. In best case, hydro actually beats nuclear.

Also, TIL tidal power isn’t commercially in use. I swear we were learning about it in school 20 years ago, and were not even told then that it wasn’t viable.

Including the effects of albedo seems rather straightforward and worth doing. Of course it neglects some more complicated factors, like opportunity cost of staying on fossil fuels in the meantime for the 20+ years it takes to build nuclear. A convenient part of the reason that the biggest proponents of nuclear tend to be those politicians and special interests who also support fossil fuels.

IMO every dev/publisher acquired by MS was already tainted and on its way out

I’ll assume you mean the more recent acquisitions, not ones from back in the day like Ensemble Studios. Which admittedly they shut down, but the games that they made live on, published by World’s Edge, and are better than ever.

But yeah, with the exception of World’s Edge, it’s hard to disagree. Blizzard in particular was probably so tainted before that being bought out can only have helped them. At least under Microsoft’s ownership there haven’t been any sexual abuse scandals. Bethesda it’s hard to say. They certainly haven’t done anything great since Microsoft bought them. But I’ll hold off judgment until like 12 months after the next mainline Elder Scrolls game comes out…or the 12 year anniversary of the announcement/teaser, if it still isn’t out by then. Activision…I don’t even know what they do, outside of CoD.

The Xbox this article talks about is much, much broader than the console. Xbox is the name of the division of Microsoft responsible for games. If Xbox dies, so do Bethesda, Activision, Blizzard, and World’s Edge. We lose Elder Scrolls and Fallout, Call of Duty, Halo, and all three of the top real time strategy franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft, and Age of Empires.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really care about 99% of what Xbox does and it could go away in a heartbeat and I wouldn’t care. But that last 1% would be devastating. Age of Empires 2 & 4 and Age of Mythology are my top 3 played games of the last decade. In fact, aoe1, 2, 3, 4, and aom collectively make up 9 of my top 20 games by playtime on Steam, thanks to various rereleases. I would be gutted if I’m that went away.

Plus, there’s the wider impact. Half those mergers never should have been allowed, but now that they have happened, the amount of game devs who would lose their jobs if Xbox died would be devastating. That’s all their lives impacted. Many would probably have to leave the industry entirely and hope they can find work elsewhere. Others would be in a precarious position with a glut of workers making it easier for new employers to exploit them.

No way am I clicking that link. 😣

Historia Civilis is fucking fantastic. Like I cannot express just how incredible their series on the Roman Republic was. They use these little squares that move around to show events, but the animation includes little wiggles and movements that give so much character. The storytelling is amazing, giving you such an incredible idea of the personalities and motivations of everyone involved, but not at the expense of accurately conveying history—they’ll often have an aside where they explain differing sources’ opinions or why they portrayed something that way. The impact of seeing some of the characters making their fatal choices, especially towards the end of the series, hit me just as hard as in some of the very best fiction movies or books have. Maybe even harder, thanks to knowing it was real, and the dramatic irony of knowing the outcome ahead of time.

Oh holy shit. My whole instance is on there.

Did Tesseract block things for users using that front end, or does having it installed somehow prevent federation from occurring/users on lemmy-ui seeing your posts?

I feel like I need context. Who’s banning people?

I can’t speak for Jess, but personally I’d love a reply to Cethin’s comment. Did you confuse “anti-consumer” with “anti-consumerism”? Because honestly that’s the only way I can see that your comments make sense.

I suspect that Google doesn’t account for anything. If I had to guess, I’d say it assumes a certain pace as the normal walking pace, and leaves it at that. Elevation, traffic lights, fatigue, and any other factors that might affect it be damned. So its time estimations for a hiking route are going to be a lot worse than its regular walking estimations. And all that’s before you account for, as you say, individual differences.

Fwiw most people I’ve seen recommend switching from Organic Maps to CoMaps. The latter is a fork of the former, made because OM was being run in a very untransparent way, including (but far from limited to) the discreet use of closed-source code.

I don’t hike, but my experience with regular walking directions is that Google is regularly wrong…because it overestimates how long a trip will take.

Its directions for driving and public transport (at least where it has cooperation of the local public transport agency, as it does where I live) are excellent.

Cycling directions are the only one where I’d say a normal person’s experience is likely to be a bad one, with it regularly taking you on dangerous busy roads rather than nearby quieter streets or bike paths.

So I don’t find it particularly surprising at all that someone who isn’t a regular hiker would make the mistake of relying on it.

Yeah that’s an insane amount. Nearly 1 in every 50 joules generated is currently going to generative AI. That’s incredible for a single purpose.

GDPR and Australia’s Privacy Act are enforced. Companies are restricted from data collection by those laws.

Yes…that is…the whole point…

Sure, but at that point why have any laws at all? What’s the point of Europe’s GDPR? What’s the point of Australia’s Privacy Act 1988? Why do we bother talking about any data regulation?

It’s an absurd complaint to have.

Here’s my thought experiment: nothing changes.

I have literally never used it. I have one very simple rule for chat apps that I hold to over everything else. The user identifier must be a username or email address. It must absolutely not be a phone number or something else that intrinsically ties it to a specific device. What’s App has failed that test since before Facebook bought it. In a world where we have multiple devices and move between them often, it has always been insane to me that other people don’t think there’s a problem with using a phone number as a unique identifier for an individual. And it only gets even worse when you start adding international travel, changing your phone number, etc. into the mix.

Yup. I’ve got two main stories in evidence of it, but I’ll just share one here because the other is much longer.

Both Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey were early members of the creator-owned streaming platform Nebula. Creators literally have an ownership stake in the business, and are paid out a slice of revenue based on their viewership.

But early on, when it was still taking the shape we know it in today, Grey and Kurzgesagt were members with an ownership stake. They left it a long time ago citing “creative differences” (or some vague nonsense like that). From little pieces that have come out on the rare occasions that existing Nebula creators have said something about it, apparently those two were less interested in the vision of Nebula as a place where multiple creators support each other in growing their collective revenue; instead they wanted to take more of a parasitic approach where they could profit off of the backs of other, smaller creators. Because the then-co-owners weren’t interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.

I can share the other if you’re interested, but chiefly, it demonstrates that Kurzgesagt is deeply mistrusting, a quality known to map to mistrustful people, and it shows Dettmer behaving in a very dishonest way towards a fellow creator who went by Coffee Break (now Coffeezilla).

He is an entertainer

I’ll preface this by saying I don’t particularly like the direction the channel has gone. He’s sold out big time, as described by many comments above (both literally, by selling the channel to VC, and metaphorically, by selling out whole videos and the integrity of their content to advertisers as the Tom Nicholas video explains). And his ties to grifters like Colin Grey and Philipp Dettmer (of CGP Grey and Kurzgesagt fame) definitely don’t work in his favour.

But that said, I think this comment you made is a bit reductive. He has a PhD in effective science communication. He can legitimately claim expertise in communicating science to the public via YouTube in a way most popsci content cannot. Obviously not the same as doing scientific research himself, but he also doesn’t claim to be doing that.

The article is about the US

The headline is about an event that took place in Australia. The article is just a crap one all around.

Holy shit that’s bad. The headline actually made me suspect that, because that’s exactly the cost of the fine here in Qld and I knew it was at least very close. But I clicked the article and it seemed to say it was about somewhere in America. I actually read the article and came away less informed than I started.

The law. It’s a legal requirement. I don’t have an insane paranoia.