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tejohnso

5,067 karma · joined February 21, 2015

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tejohnso··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
1.5 hasn't been viable for over a decade and was already baked in when it became popular. Now people are moving the goalposts to 2.0 and guess what the situation is.

These feel-good "we can still fix it" articles are very common and are never correct. Our trajectory is set. Read Hansen. He's been shouting about this since the 80s when he testified in front of Congress.

tejohnso··on Brax Wink. The most private mobile phone. Modular. Open source
> loving the physical keyboard

Such a shame that RIM shat themselves so badly.

tejohnso··on Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
Well, gpg2 is an implementation of openpgp and is GnuPG the tool correct? So are you saying that when I `gpg2 --symmetric myfile` I'm doing something harmful rather than useful?

The expectation is that anybody who ends up with the encrypted copy would have an impossible time trying to decrypt it without, I don't know, millions of dollars worth of compute per year for decades to throw at it or something like that.

tejohnso··on E Ink Kaleido 4
I wouldn't say it's terrible at all. With proper lighting it's excellent. I love reading color PDFs on it. In low light, the front light built into the device with variable brightness and warmth works perfectly. I guess it would be annoying if you had a Kaleido 3 color with no front light. You'd probably want to get some kind of clip-on external front light in that case.
tejohnso··on E Ink Kaleido 4
You're using Kaleido 3 then.

Compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido 4 doubles its color gamut volume to more than 40K, increases white reflectance by 15%, and improves contrast by 50%. Additionally, with the introduction of new algorithms, E Ink Kaleido 4 is capable of video playback at up to 18 frames per second (FPS).

tejohnso··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
You're talking about FIRE and at the same time griping. Everyone has their own disappointment to deal with in life, but you might consider yourself privileged if you're able to retire at all, let alone retire early in your 40s.
tejohnso··on Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'
> this is the greatest invention of all time

I think it's a little early to make that statement. Could be. But at this point I think things like printing press, agriculture, writing ... they're all many times more significant.

tejohnso··on Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age
Were you in a tent? I'd be too worried about sand critters to do that otherwise.
tejohnso··on House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
I didn't see a single ad. Why not use an ad blocker, or just use Brave?
tejohnso··on [dead]
Every once in a while some people come up with something new to make people feel like we're doing okay by the environment. People lap it up, because really, we want to keep our conveniences and way of life mostly unchanged. No plastic bags at the grocery store anymore, yay for us!

Just don't read anything from the IPCC, don't keep track of glacier ice melt rates, or biodiversity collapse, and definitely don't read anything from that suppressed UK environmental assessment. Otherwise you might realise that the problem is so much larger than plastic bags or straws or even recycling, and you might risk losing some of those virtuous environmentalist feelings you enjoy.

tejohnso··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
You're talking about an end user not being able to afford a luxury item.

The concern is about elite level researchers no longer being able to move the industry forward in a public way, and leaving potentially all major discoveries in private hands going forward.

Possible worst case scenario in your case, you personally miss out on a luxury item.

Possible worst case scenario in the topic case, an AI company controls the only intelligence that discovers and understands the most powerful tools / physics we know of.

tejohnso··on So you think you could be an electrician?
> So: The actual price paid for college isn’t very high and is declining. Obtaining a college degree unlocks higher wages. Plus, white-collar jobs are safe and easy.

Sounds great. Except we keep hearing about people getting zero callbacks after submitting hundreds of resumes for white collar jobs. While at the same time we're hearing about how the trades are desperate for recruits and can never find enough people to hire.

I think young people should try to follow a path that might hold their interest as much as possible, and collect data about their interest. Talk to people that are doing the actual work. Don't assume trades are for people who have no choice because they're not smart enough for anything else. And don't assume that white collar jobs are best because you're guaranteed to have an easier, more prosperous career.

tejohnso··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
> if you don't put sidewalks and pathways in the right places, people invent their own.

To expand on that a bit, you can deliberately avoid putting in paths so that the natural behaviour becomes clear. You'll see paths develop between areas that you might not have thought of. Pedestrians are flattening grass and showing connections that are actually useful rather than following lines that have been set out for them with competing priorities in mind like aesthetics or budgets. Then you take that data and create paths that "users" actually want, based on their behaviour / use of the previous system.

tejohnso··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
> FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture

What is online culture? Is someone who is heavily into instagram for fashion, facebook for family contact and news, maybe Google for mail and search, part of online culture? Because I know people who are like that and there's no way they know what "spawn" or "camping" mean in gamer context and certainly wouldn't be able to piece together what "spawn camping" is.

tejohnso··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Last time I was really paying close attention, there was heavy fighting in Pokrovsk, and Russia ended up taking it. Huliaipole was also a major fight. Ended up being taken. Myrnohrad, taken. Siversk, taken. These are all areas where I recall a lot of resistance and weeks or months long fighting. But in the end the Russian side prevails. However, I haven't been paying much attention in recent months. I've concluded that Russia is going to continue executing and will eventually end up with a settlement that they're happy with.

As far as NATO showing up, they have. To the tune of over 300 billion Euros. I'm not sure how you can claim Russia is not fighting NATO. Zelenskyy is constantly requesting more and more funds and weaponry from the west, because without it, the Ukrainian side would not be able to put up the resistance that they have been.

tejohnso··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
>You can barely tell the difference between a territorial control map from 2023 and 2026

Last time I was paying close attention (maybe 8 months ago) the fighting was heavy in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and not yet in Konstantynivka. Now all three of those are well within Russian control. And that seems to be the story all over the front. There may be some temporary regressions, and occasional slow downs, but overall the Russian side is continually pushing.

> It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population

They're not moving quickly. That's the way they're choosing to fight the war, and also due to the strength and resilience of the Ukrainian side, along with roughly 300 billion Euros pumped into the war by NATO so far. I don't think the slow methodical approach is evidence of weakness. Taking the average territory capture rate since 2022, the entire Donbas would be under Russian control mid next year. Using only the relatively slow 2026 rates, the entire Donbas would still be under Russian control in less than 5 more years.

tejohnso··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
> It's not that niche, if you've been online a little bit you'd know this expression.

No way. You'd need to be pretty well versed in gamer lingo. Even more specifically, combative, likely FPS gamer lingo.

tejohnso··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
> it has proved that Russia is weak.

How? Russia is successfully fighting the entirety of NATO on a front that it is continually pushing further west, with about 20% of Ukraine now lost. If anything NATO and the promise of US security is what has been shown to be weak. And I don't think the idea of US/Western superiority is ever going to come back to what it was given what has happened in the Ukraine and Iran theaters in recent past.

tejohnso··on Fuck it, make it anyway
I don't think his assertion is true at all. AI art can be quite good. I asked ChatGPT to make a painting that looks like it should be in a museum and the output was damn good. I couldn't find anything that would tip me off like I can with some AI writing. No idea how something like that would be embarrassing to look at.

And music. There are youtube channels for AI house music playlists that sound pretty damn good.

I guess if you're a high level art critic you might be able to easily see that some of this stuff is not good.

tejohnso··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
Initially he said it would be over after four to five weeks. Back in March.

He also said he "will end the endless wars" and stressed there were "no new wars" under his first presidency in the 2024 campaing.

And on election night he said "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars."

A lying politician is nothing new but he's doing it more bigly than most.

tejohnso··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
> anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore

Isn't this likely to be a temporary situation though? Are we at peak LLM writing quality?

tejohnso··on The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.

I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.

tejohnso··on The turbulent AI era is here
Election denialism is about rejecting official election results.

But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.

If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.

tejohnso··on We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
This is why we read the comments first :)

Thank you.

tejohnso··on My Ten Years in No Man's Sky
Yeah the scope and detail of the universe is great, but it still feels like a well polished demo to me. The interactions with intelligent beings are very repetitive and boring. I can wander around and build things, but I never really feel strongly engaged like I do in a game like Valheim or GTA.
tejohnso··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
I never see YouTube ads since switching to Brave.
tejohnso··on Grok 4.6
Seems clear to me it means don't go trying to change things over the internet.

Isn't it pretty standard to consider "local" to mean not remote or external? Local storage means storage on the machine, not attached via network or plugged into an external port. Localhost is the ip for the computer in question, not a remote one.

tejohnso··on Grok 4.6
My take: explicitly means clearly and without any vagueness or ambiguity.

It doesn't mean "to say something ..."

So..."if it becomes clear without vagueness or ambiguity that the user is ..."

I don't think it's about preventing such requests only if the request is clear. It's about being certain about what is being requested before censoring. Also, "explicitly clear" is redundant. Wording might be improved with "unambiguously" rather than "explicitly".

tejohnso··on To Improve Student Mental Health, University of Michigan Eases Grading
https://archive.is/gEQRO
tejohnso··on Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years
Fortunately some jurisdictions are death wise enough to provide humane means that we can request from a health practitioner.
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