Ben Matthews

I’ve been using zed for nearly a year now, it works well, quietly.
I don’t need AI, I have a complex project written in scala, whose compiler and tools (‘metals’) are already intelligent and much more logical than LLMs, many context-relevant suggestions pop up, and when it compiles it generally just works.
However I do wonder about the longterm business model of Zed without AI, and in the current geopolitical context I’d be interested in a european or global alternative.

Indeed, it’s to be expected, that the climatic regions best-suited to such agriculture will move, generally polewards. So there may be potentially new ‘breadbaskets’ - but mainly in Russia and Canada, if growing season starts earlier. But 40% of whea and maize, is not 40% of food - there are other (new) crops, and we could also adapt diets, maybe we don’t need so much wheat and maize (leading anyway to obesity?). In the tropics it all depends on water management, need to store more.

There are renewables available cheaper than coal( if you take into account subsidies ), especially in China (the country that dominates those graphics (if you look carefully at the vertical scales). However, there are many political leaders - mainly of older generation - who cannot imagine abandoning coal, they prefer to keep on subsidising, to save traditions and communities, to defend their concept of what made ‘great’ decades ago. In China and India there is also a widespread concept that since the west did this in the past, so now they have to use up an equivalent per-capita share of the atmospheric space - a kind of collective global suicide.

Isn’t it technically possible to split browser functions so we can recombine as we like? - i.e. separating the rendering / js engine from everything around the side - managing all the tabs, bookmarks, cookies and passwords, workspaces and sessions, mail, notes etc. In my case, I like the workspace structure provided by Vivaldi, but don’t see why it has to be built on chromium browser. Anyway as a developer I need to test against blink, webkit and gecko, so would be nice to swap them within the same user interface structure.
By the way, I develop a “javascript-heavy” web-app (interactive climate model) and it seems to be working fine, and fast, in firefox, so I’m not convinced by complaints in the article.

There’s still thin snow on the high mountains to the NE (checking nasa worldview). Where the main river emerges from them is about 200m lower than Kabul city, but it must be possible to pump some up that much, and bring it thence (about 70km) with a pipe or canal. Probably chinese will do it, maybe bringing stuff via Wakhan, if nobody else helps.
Edit - zooming on opentopomap I see traces of part of such a canal, but it doesn’t get as far (or as high) as Kabul.

Well, it’s a kind of stretched thought experiment, to imagine they had precise satellite-like temperature measurements in those days. But if you really want to ask, when did humans first have a discernible influence on the climate, it surely goes back much earlier than that - due to deforestation and associated changes in albedo (as well as CO2), also desertification in some regions (north africa?). I don’t see albedo or land-use change in this paper, only fossil emissions.

Although important topic - many regions already suffer from acute water shortage, at least for half of the year - global aggregate numbers don’t mean so much, as large-scale inter-regional water transport isn’t practical. There are a few exceptions - China has it’s N-S water transfer project, there’s potential for a canal from Congo to Chad. Transfer by evapotranspiration is big, but not really planned. There’s also water (and energy) embedded in food, could be reduced if people care. Anyway what’s new (not this article)?

Sure it’s possible for some people, my point is about the scale: a country of 350 million, of which it seems one half is being led to hate the other, can’t rely on emigration to a neighbouring country of 40m to escape the horrors of fascism. Even if the most potentially persecuted third escaped mainly to Europe (>100m somewhat dwarfs “wir schaffen das”, but just suppose …) that would leave the maga half to make a grand alliance with Russia (controlling most of the northern hemisphere food surplus), and professors in Toronto wouldn’t hold out long in that scenario… People have to stay to fight back, smartly (before this evolves to hard civil war).

It’s a well-written article. Given her specific expert knowledge, it may be a sensible choice to relocate just across the border, from where she may be able to fight back through writing, speaking, networks. However this is not a practical solution for many people. So what does she advocate for everybody else to do ?
I’m afraid that if people passionate about democracy migrate to gather themselves in just a few ‘refuge’ corners of the world, that leaves the vast majority of space, resources, and left-behind people under power of autocrats, or at best conservatives (who are already strong in parts of eastern europe, due to the exodus of younger progressive types to the west).

Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.

I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).

Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).

Good work.
I suppose that for those 1.4bn people inside China to access it, they also need to use a mirror site?
So I’m curious, how many people find such mirror sites, and why don’t the firewall managers just block those urls (the ips may be big cloud services, but the urls are not) as fast as the list evolves (maybe they track who uses them)? Could a decentralised peer-to-peer network scale more robustly ?

At the same time, Ethiopia is also creating a huge new lake, capturing the headwaters of the Nile, it’s far away across mountains to the NW, but maybe one day they’ll be transferring water ?

Combined with topic of trains, this reminds me of the famous movie Dil Se with the Chaiyya Chaiyya song on the roof of the steam train - itself in the SW, but of which the core plot was also about an rebellion in Assam… i.e. it reminds that this problem is older than current government …
But maybe they will be motivated to catch up, as China will soon have a direct railway from Sichuan to the frontier of Arunachal…

They need that rainfall, in the region as a whole, but need more storage capacity to release it over the whole year. Much water used to be stored as seasonal snow as well as glaciers, that capacity is melting away, so people have to adapt, and some to migrate (including a few to relocate from potential reservoir basins). Of course, the people who contributed most to the greenhouse gas emissions should in principle pay for that adaptation, but it’s too late to count on or wait for that, or to say we continue traditional lives, we didn’t want such change, it’s happening.

That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?

This study is indeed disturbing, drawing on multiple lines of evidence suggesting melting may happen faster than previously assumed, I’ll study more.

However, there never was any magic safe (global-average-surface-) temperature level, to save polar ice sheets. Melting, and the penetration of heat, is cumulative, so to a first approximation it is the integral of the warming that counts (maybe we could talk about a heating budget, similar to the concept of carbon-budget to avoid a specific temperature).

Although diplomats may stress that the concept of safe level is baked into Article 2 of the Climate convention, that orginally applied to “concentrations” not temperature. Back in the day (early 2000s) I among others pushed (this wasn’t easy) to adopt temperature as a goal closer to real impacts, pointing out that required peak+decline concentration pathways.
Nevertheless we always knew that a stable (higher) temperature does not bring a stable sea-level (on a multi-century timescale) . While for some other types of impacts - e.g. ecosystem adaptation, it may be the rate (derivative) rather than the integral that matters more. The ‘level’ concept was a compromise to coalesce policy (within which - round numbers like 2.0 or 1.5 C also arbitrary).

Maybe it could help motivate the global debate, to specifically (dis)agree goals of sea-level rise we try to avoid ? That’s a more tangible level ( at least until we get into regional sea-level-rise variations…) , but due to the double integral, it’s harder to implement.

Eh? The graphic shown prominently in the linked summary article suggests that cycling is much better than walking. And this seems plausible to me - cycling is not just exercise, it requires quick thinking, balancing, interacting with traffic, judgements regarding risk, speed, efficiency, etc. .

I agree with the gist of much of the article. Although a fan of the original web, and developer of a climate web-app, I think small screens make people into consumers, while creators or investigators need a large screen, and that should be for dedicated periods of the day, not carried everywhere.
And we wish our kids had never had these things (gift from grandparents - hard to reject).

However the article title is over-simple, impractical - how would you even define what is a smartphone, in the spectrum of devices ? (maybe that’s cause of downvotes ? )