skyfaller

It gives me hope for the future to see commenters on HN, a forum made by a VC company to talk about VC funding, dunk on companies for taking VC funding. Any tech enthusiast who has been around long enough has seen VCs and acquisitions eventually destroy everything they've ever loved. Our incredible journey, indeed: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

The question is, can we organize around alternatives to the VC model, and build communities with control over their own destiny, instead of having the rug pulled out from under them repeatedly due to the whims of capital (and founders securing the bag)?

The concept of "exit to community" appeals to me, but unfortunately I see crypto grifters / DAOs trying to take over any "decentralization" narrative. Unless the crypto crash wipes those scammers out, I fear the community may flee from VC scammers into the arms of crypto scammers, new boss same as the old boss.

I hope that we can build some sort of cooperative movement that can avoid the "world domination or acquisition" pressure from VCs, while also avoiding weird technocratic "fixes" like DAOs. There's no replacement for organizing and community, tech cannot replace that difficult and necessary work of marshalling people to pull together in the same direction, accept no substitutes or "shortcuts."

Yeah, I agree the line spacing is far too much. Butterick's Practical Typography recommends 1.2 to 1.45: https://practicaltypography.com/line-spacing.html

Really the only reason to use a line spacing of 2 is if you are printing it and then editing the text with a pen. So... maybe in a print stylesheet in a very specific situation? But never on the web, IMHO.

Are you sure these are natural? In their FAQ, they say:

> Is My Buffalo Vegan Friendly?

> "Yes - The shell lining we use is 100% Polyamide and our internal lining is synthetic - 100% Polyester. No animal products were used in the production of your Buffalo Systems garment.

I think that means it is synthetic, not natural. It may be possible to make fiber pile from natural fibers, but I think this company is using plastic.

Low-Tech Mag also discusses insulating the body without electricity: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-th...

As they mention in that article, the main advantage of synthetics over wool is that synthetics weigh much less while providing the same insulation. However, I figure this is less important if you're sitting around your house than if you're e.g. hiking and have to carry the weight with you, and wool should be great indoors.

Personally I will avoid buying synthetics from now on in an effort to eliminate plastics / fossil fuel products from my life, and reduce microplastic pollution. I will probably be buying more wool, to avoid "death cloth" / clothes that stop insulating if you sweat / get wet.

Are there any other notable natural fibers besides wool that continue to insulate when wet?

Low-Tech Mag also recently advocated for hot water bottles: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/01/the-revenge-of-the...

I acquired and used hot water bottles for the first time in my life last winter and I highly recommend giving them a shot, especially when seated outdoors.

In terms of heat storage for a given volume, water seems very hard to beat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_specific_heat_capacit...

It seems likely that for containers of equal size, water will stay warmer longer than dry rice or any other common/inexpensive material.

EDIT: I occasionally hear of engineers working on materials that work better than water, but they don't seem to be catching on so far, perhaps because water works really well and is comparatively cheap: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130523-zeolite-thermal-s...

Cute, but I just ran both your suggestions through the HTML validator at https://validator.w3.org/nu/ and neither of them validated.

The first error read "Bad value data: for attribute href on element link: Premature end of URI."

The 2nd error read "Missing space before doctype name."

Depending on the context these hacks may still be useful, but I personally think that both production sites and code golfing should require valid HTML.

Why not eliminate quotes in production, if you know the value doesn't need quotes? That's still valid, it's optional HTML: https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/

Sorting content alphabetically and that sort of thing to improve compression may be silly code golfing and impractical for page content, but on the other hand I don't see that it costs you anything (aside from time experimenting with it) when applied to the <head> / metadata. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/html-meta-order-compression.html

I think that both of these methods could be used in production, and I intend to do so when possible.

Avoiding Ansible is precisely why I use chezmoi.

Unfortunately I still have to use Ansible for stuff that isn't my dotfiles, but the less Ansible, the better. It feels like whatever use cases I have for Ansible are weird and not what other people are doing, because everything I try to do is difficult and poorly documented. For example, when I try to spin up a machine running Alpine Linux using Ansible, I've encountered all sorts of strange bugs, some of which I've reported and are (being) fixed, but it boggles my mind that what I thought would be really basic stuff, like setting the hostname or the timezone, is buggy as heck.

I was referring to some material from the no-longer canon Star Wars Extended Universe, where it was referred to during development as the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor", and some characters working on its design genuinely believed (due to brainwashing) that the Death Star "was developed to break up dead, lifeless planets to extract the valuable ores and elements within". https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux

Of course, if programmers are raised from a young age and brainwashed into believing that workplace surveillance is innocent / good, that's a different problem than adults who should know better when it comes to the real world results of using the tech they are building.

It's really just the font I hate. In the past I've used Reader Mode in Firefox to make it readable, but just now I went into Ublock Origin to change the font to something I like, using the suggestions from this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/r4gzzl/how_do...

  pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: Fira Sans !important)

If you like your default browser font, you could instead just unset it:

  pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: unset !important)

On workplace surveillance / "bossware":

> Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you.

> This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry.

I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: just as the Death Star clearly was never going to be used for mining planetoids, it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers, if nothing else because of how it is currently being used. Continuing to work on such tech just because it could theoretically be used for non-evil purposes is morally bankrupt, and something the industry needs to establish ethical standards to prevent.

I'm not convinced proof-of-stake works at all: https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...

It's almost certainly better for the environment / our continued existence than proof-of-work, if we must suffer cryptocurrency, but I don't trust people who were willing to continue to engage with proof-of-work for years to create an ethical (or even functional) alternative.

"Good news"! Due to the climate crisis, large sections of the globe are likely to become uninhabitable, so even if world population declines, there will be an influx of refugees into habitable locations. In other words, local population density could easily increase worldwide even if there are fewer people overall.

Back in college I used PHPosxom, which was "inspired" by Blosxom but I guess dynamically created pages instead of statically generating them (and of course used PHP instead of Perl, useful if PHP was more accessible/functional on your shared hosting). https://sourceforge.net/projects/phposxom/ Of course the project is super dead now.

Here's my old homepage using PHPosxom, which would be valid XHTML 1.0 if the Swarthmore College Computing Society hadn't started injecting analytics into my web site: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/nelson/

No, this doesn't make sense. If your goal is to reduce fossil fuel usage, and Bitcoin also incentivizes fossil fuels, then there's no reason to expect that Bitcoin will help reduce the share of energy produced by fossil fuels. Worse yet, if it increases total energy consumption, and doesn't affect the percentage produced by fossil fuels, then that will increase the absolute amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

Your arguments work just as well for reducing risk for investing in "marginal" fossil fuel sources.

I'll try a simple analogy: imagine that your goal is to consume as much corn as possible. (A silly goal for many reasons, but that's a different discussion.) You have all of the corn that you've grown to eat, and then there's the seed corn you would need to plant in order to eat more corn in the future. If you decide to eat the seed corn as well, you will eat more corn in the immediate future, and then much less corn after that. Clearly limits to consumption are sometimes necessary in order to maximize consumption over the long term, even if you grant the premise that maximizing consumption is desirable.

One aspect I must mention is Bitcoin miners flock to where energy is cheapest for them, not taking into account negative externalities. This is why you see miners attacking CI services to try to use them for mining crypto: free energy is the best deal, even if it is costly to someone else: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...

Of course, the climate crisis is caused in large part by capitalism failing to deal with negative externalities, so one could argue that Bitcoin is just another facet of our corrupt system privatizing benefits and making the public bear the costs. But nevertheless this is a fundamental flaw in arguments that Bitcoin miners only farm where energy is "cheapest".

As for why it's a scam, it's hard to summarize, but I'll try: cryptocurrency is not currency, not decentralized, and not private. https://jacobin.com/2022/01/cryptocurrency-scam-blockchain-b...

Bitcoin doesn't discriminate between green energy sources and fossil fuel energy sources. It encourages production/consumption of fossil fuels just as much as it encourages production/consumption of green energy sources. There's no particular reason to believe that Bitcoin will accelerate electrification.

What part of "Energy use is necessary to support human life" did you not understand when I said it?

Do you understand that heat waves, flooding, forest fires, and other extreme weather events will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that water shortages will interfere with the delivery of energy (e.g. nuclear power plants need water for cooling)? Do you understand that resource wars will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that climate change preventing food from growing will interfere with the survival of the people who deliver the energy?

Of course energy is vital to human existence, I recommend e.g. Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil to anyone who wants to understand this in great detail: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization But the climate crisis will interfere with energy production and delivery, just as it interferes with everything else that humans want or need to do. Refusing to reduce energy usage voluntarily will result in involuntary reduction in energy usage as systems fail.

Humans benefit from using energy, but our current energy systems release terrifying amounts of greenhouse gases. Continued global heating will involve mass death, and a great deal of human suffering along the way. Energy use is necessary to support human life, but limiting energy use is vital to avoid climate catastrophe. It's not a fun problem to have, but you can't wish it away by saying "but people need and enjoy energy!" Of course they do, that's why we need to limit energy use, so that they can enjoy energy in the future, rather than suffering the complete collapse of the systems that allow them to enjoy energy.

To be explicit, one problem with Bitcoin's energy use is that it has the potential to consume any excess energy-producing capacity that we free up by making technology more energy efficient. It could use any fossil fuel-powered energy production that otherwise might be obsoleted by green energy sources. Bitcoin and other PoW blockchains add a strong financial incentive to use all available energy production capacity to its limit. Certainly it is difficult to imagine the market encouraging e.g. carbon capture when the same unit of energy could be used to mine Bitcoin instead for more "profit". (Not that I think carbon capture is likely to make much of a difference, given that simply not releasing greenhouse gases in the first place is always more efficient.)

If energy efficiency and green energy sources will not suffice to reduce our burning of fossil fuels, due in part to Bitcoin and its ilk, then the only way to avoid climate catastrophe would be simply doing less, a.k.a. degrowth. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the typical cryptocurrency advocate thinks of degrowth. (But that would interfere with the numbers going up!)

In short, Bitcoin is a major roadblock to any response to the climate crisis, using any strategy.

Unfortunately this isn't quite accurate, cryptocurrency support is baked in:

> Payments Built In

> As your app grows beyond the hobby phase, Holepunch lets you evolve into a business without compromises.

> With Bitcoin Lightning and USDt micropayments built-in, it's easy to implement and use powerful paid features in apps.

When asked about this, the founder seems supportive of cryptocurrency: https://twitter.com/ttiurani/status/1551524775402635265

Supporting Bitcoin in any way is a sign that they are incapable of detecting scams that will destroy life on earth, which is a bad sign for them dealing with other scams or ethical dilemmas.

> There's only so many lights that you'd put in a given area to achieve the same result, even if you add more for aesthetic reasons: there's only so many lumens that are useful in an area.

You'd think that, but we now see people experimenting with light bulbs that are bright as the sun, purportedly to improve their mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 "I bought an extremely bright “corn cob” style bulb. It emits as much light as about 40 incandescents, and produces enough waste heat that it needs an internal cooling fan to dissipate it." It's not difficult to imagine a future where this is the norm, and people having anything dimmer than full sunlight indoors is considered medieval and backwards. We can always find new limits to what is "useful".

UPDATE: In that article, the author also says this of the lightbulb: "It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks!" This is a perfect example of why we need to talk about climate justice, because the average American refrigerator consumes more energy than an average person in many countries: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23106061/energy-inequity-...

The rest of the world cannot live the way we currently do in the USA, if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating.

Efficiency alone almost certainly will not allow us to avoid climate catastrophe, due to the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox When an activity uses less energy and therefore becomes less expensive, people tend to simply engage more in that activity, until they use more energy than they did before. One reason why is obvious from your attitude here: our culture considers life to be more luxurious and enjoyable when you can do and consume more stuff, and advancing the idea of doing/consuming less is considered backwards and not "useful".

Insulation at the scale needed to avoid climate catastrophe would require a massive international mobilization, along the lines of the Green New Deal and a Green Marshall Plan, to renovate all buildings everywhere before 2050. Sadly the political will to do this seems absent from almost every country, with a couple possible exceptions such as Chile attempting to rewrite their constitution to prioritize climate justice. Basically no countries are approaching even the inadequate Paris agreement targets.

And if you achieved such insulation, without other more drastic changes to our society, people would just run their AC/heat more to reach more luxurious temperatures, and we would not avoid any greenhouse gas emissions.

"Whist is a fork of Brave", and advertises their "Crypto Wallet". I'll pass.

A point that I made in a much longer comment is that Elon Musk seems to be applying pressure to maintain our society's car dependence. So it's not just him making the best of a bad infrastructure situation, he is contributing to keeping the infrastructure terrible.

He's the richest man in the world, are you really worried that he's being treated unfairly? If he wants people to say nice things about him, he could hire entire countries to act as sockpuppets. Or, like, he could work on becoming a better person.

I also think that, while it's possible he genuinely set out to combat climate change, with what we know about him and his projects today, I think his efforts in that department have been ineffective, or even counterproductive.

First of all, SpaceX is making climate change worse. Their rockets spend a great deal of energy, much of it in the form of fossil fuels, polluting parts of the atmosphere that airplanes can't reach. Airplanes are very bad for the environment and we need to drastically reduce their use to avoid climate disaster. Rockets are worse. Their only advantage over airplanes is that there are far fewer of them launching less often, but SpaceX is working to change that. Counterproductive. (For an alternative that could theoretically use renewable energy, I'm optimistic about Spinlaunch.)

In retrospect, it's clear that the Hyperloop is an impractical boondoggle intended to sabotage real world high speed rail projects that might reduce the need for Teslas. Increasing the use of public transit and reducing airplanes and cars is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Counterproductive.

The Boring Company could be developing cool tech, but it's being used to move Teslas through tunnels instead of trains, which is ludicrously inefficient. Counterproductive.

Tesla itself sounded like a good idea at first, and certainly cars need to be electrified to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, simply replacing every fossil fuel car on the road with an electric car would be woefully insufficient to address the climate crisis. They just use too much energy, require too many batteries, and encourage sprawl at a time when we need density to create walkable neighborhoods friendly to transit. (An alternative I love is velomobiles, but most Americans have never even seen one. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobil... ) Like many incremental solutions at this late date where we need radical change, this could end up being counterproductive, especially if the world's richest man applies pressure to maintain our society's car dependency, which as I've suggested above, I believe he has.

I could go on about Elon's swing towards the right wing (which in the USA means supporting climate change deniers), etc., but this comment is already too long.

TL;DR: I think history may view Elon as sabotaging climate action more than he's helped it.

I'm not sure this is an unambiguous miss. There are massive numbers of deaths from pollution, many from cancer: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/david-wallace-wells/...

But a world that struggles to acknowledge the death toll from covid or climate change unsurprisingly may also simply ignore the death toll from pollution as well, until the system collapses due to failing to address any issues at all.

That's a pretty big assumption, to assume that current pledges will be fulfilled. Last I heard, it was just, like, Gambia that was on track to meet Paris Agreement pledges. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/15/world/climate-pledges-insuffi... None of the G20 countries are on track.

The point of the Paris Agreement pledges is to prevent catastrophic global heating, so it would be great, although in my opinion inadequate, if the world community met them. Sadly, we're not heading in that direction right now.

Yeah, that's fair. I frequently agree with what he's saying, but he tends to say it in an abrasive way that won't make him friends or convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him. And maybe that's part of why there are all of these comments where people are like "I don't understand why people would hate Drew!" I think people tend to forget how obnoxious such comments are if they agree with the content, and that's part of how Drew became a divisive figure with so many fans and haters.