Afaik Blink is a fork of WebKit. It’s good there is some independent development but also safari is closed ecosystem.

Thanks that is what I was curious about. So good news!

Think of it as “throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks”. That is the role of intellectuals or pundits, whatever you want to call the class that disseminates ideology / PR. There are lots of them and they spout all sorts of crazy stuff. Now basically it’s like the theory of evolution through natural selection. Except as individuals we are intelligent and can make decisions like “oh that sold clicks” or “oh that helped pass that law”. Who decides that? Well those who work for those that own everything and who see it as their job to increase profit.

So basically ideology is like a secretion of a specialized class that is filtered and selected to “work”.

So my theory is that after decades of wealth transfer and increasing inequality, dwindling middle class and lowering of effective quality of life, you need “stronger secretions” to control the masses. Because the old ideology doesn’t work any more. One word for it is late stage capitalism.

Another environmental aspect that plays into this I think is climate change - since we already failed to prevent what could result in our extinction or at least in countless genocides, what social contract remains? Why even pretend to be civilized when our civilization obviously has gone insane? Like a decadent indulgence in an orgy of hatred. Or just insanity like in “Don’t look up”.

Do LLM or that AI image stuff run on CUDA?

This is kinda scary. Sanctions are one thing, but do you really want your internet provider to investigate people and act like an intelligence service for the state?

It’s a bit worrying that the journalist doesn’t point out that it’s ALL chrome. Safari, Edge, they all use the chrome engine. A complete monopolization of web features. Most recently we’ve seen the problems with that in trying to ditch good innovations like jpegXL.

True. But I’m thinking a bit in terms of “solar punk”. Batteries and fuel cells require high tech materials and very complex global production lines for manufacture and supply of raw materials or instruments etc. It’s a bit of a house of cards. So I’m trying to think how you can “democratize” the base of a local economy. Genetically engineering plants for bio fuel is one way. That allows third world countries or local cities to maintain civilization even if global trade collapses.

Luckily because afaik that immigration bill was pretty horrible.

We need banks that specifically are meant to allow the workers of a company to buy their company and turn it into a collective. Not that the workers can sell the shares but they own it in the sense that they can democratically determine how profits are spend and what managers are hired / elected. Just a loan which just requires printing a little more money which we do all the time.

That would solve so many inefficiencies and amoralities in the current economy.

I think the ideal sustainable chemical fuel would be propane generated through genetically engineered algae. Propane can easily be compressed into liquid and transported and it burns clean.

Have something like solar panels filled with photosynthetic algae producing propane that is constantly extracted as a gas. Once we have done the genetic engineering of a “steady state algae panel” it would be quite low tech to have these on your roof and store them to heat with in winter. Or use for specific large machines where batteries are not worth the embodied energy.

Huh this video just dropped which is one possible solution to design a different work / live environment. If you imagine a village like that but large enough to have a school and some more amenities: Building a village designed for people (not cars) near Phoenix

But you’d still want public transport, bikes and delivery vans. But in Europe you also get a lot of cargo quadricycles to deliver goods.

Yeah, the single biggest thing we could do is ban industrial meat production and regulate food production to be more local. But the overall scale of change needed is staggering. We’re not going to do much really.

I’ve thought about this too but I’m not sure this would work. First you could hack the firmware of a cryptographically signed camera. I already read something about a camera like this that was hacked and the private key leaked. You could have an individual key for each camera and then revoke it maybe.

But you could also photograph a monitor or something like that, like a specifically altered camera lens.

Ultimately you’d probably need something like quantum entangled photon encoding to prove that the photons captured by the sensor were real photons and not fake photons. Like capturing a light field or capturing a spectrum of photons. Not sure if that is even remotely possible but it sounds cool haha.

Yeah it’s not a solution to everything. I imagine the standard “super light” robo taxi as a two seater with the seats facing each other. Without a driver seat you can redesign individual transport to be narrower which improves aerodynamics.

But yeah for families or cargo transport you still need larger vehicles. Or take two. And I also imagine this to be more of a “gap filler” besides public transport or bicycles. It would really require a pretty big redesign of how we live and work to reduce our energy and resource usage to zero.

Consider something like 50% bigger than a podbike.

3000 miles is not something we as a society should accommodate to travel by car. The whole problem is that everyone thinks we can keep doing the same lifestyle just with zero carbon. We simply can’t. We need to change how we live and work.

The problem is we can’t keep the same resources waste up. Lower range and smaller cars is what is needed. The perfect car of the future would be a one-seater that is as small and light as a electric velomobile (~70kg). Build a few millions of them and replace all cars in a city with those. Ideally self driving and as a robo-taxi, but even without the self driving this would be good. Of course cars isn’t really that high on the list for climate change.

But as a civilization we are simply not an intelligent species.

Does this poll support for left/right policies or just labels?

I suspect if you properly formulate and frame questions on political issues you’d end up with the US being far left.

What are the chances this is politically motivated? What kind of radio station was it? Right wing talk radio?

I’m not sure but these kinds of wasteful spendings are just “imaginary money” that sits around in virtual bank accounts being hoarded and doing nothing but when it’s wasted like this actually gets spend for salaries etc. Basically all this money is generated in computers and an “inefficiency” until it’s being used.

It’s much worse when they buy up tons of real estate or apartments or buy up existing corporations to make them more “profitable”.

Yeah it’s pretty bad and nobody talks about it. Nobody researches the effects of patents on our global civilization. I suspect the practical role of patents is to actually retard innovation - something gets improved or invented or most of the time just engineered to work better and monopolization or just paperwork makes it too expensive for wide spread adoption. This in turn helps prevents disruptive technology from making large scale investments obsolete - instead of having to adopt and improve your factories you can continue as before because any innovation will be slow and also priced to be around as expensive as existing solutions. Or the patent can just be bought. And even if an inventor has noble intentions, starting manufacturing yourself is a totally different skill set so like most startups often fails and then the patent gets sold off. Innovation becomes a commodity.

This is my logical conclusion but it’s speculative. I suspect researching negative effects of patents is a somewhat “taboo” topic for scientists to research.

In regards to climate change this becomes… genocidal. We have hundreds of thousands of industrial processes that rely on fossil fuels or certain levels of energy. With all the before mentioned effects this basically made a timely response to climate change impossible. Every little improvement to existing processes is patented and maximized for profit. Basically we never had a chance.