Ben Matthews

As a kid, I learned to write i = i +1, before school maths taught me it can’t. The point is, computers do iteration well, especially to model dynamics of real non-linear systems, while classical maths is good at finding algebraic solutions to equilibria - typically more theoretical than real. Calculus is great for understanding repeatable dynamics - such as waves in physics, also integrating over some distributions. But even without knowing that well you could still approximate stuff numerically with simple loops, test it, and if an inner-loop turns out to be time-critical or accuracy-critical (most are not), ask a mathematical colleague to rethink it - believe in iteration rather than perfect solutions.

Back in 2011, I with my young family took a local bus north from Mariana, which diverted through several villages including that one Bento Rodrigues just below the dam, soon to be washed away. Through gaps in the trees we could glimpse those huge orange lakes just behind earth dams - it was obvious even to a casual tourist that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the bus was run by the mining company, like all services around there, I suppose that’s why people didn’t complain more.
By the way I was told Brazil didn’t even make much from iron mines, as most of raw ore was exported to China, which got the real value.

Emissions grew in 2023, that’s not the same as ‘are now growing’. There is a good chance global CO2 emissions fall in 2024, mainly due to trends in China. Of course it takes time to gather data, but NS should be more careful with the headline.
The spinscore link has useful refs - but keeps mixing up CO2 emissions with “CO2 equivalents” including methane, landuse and minor gases. Methane rising is a big issue, but might potentially be turned around faster. Regarding landuse, deforestation was exacerbated last year by El Niño feedbacks - it’s hard to separate the anthropogenic part of these fluxes.
Rather than simple headlines which encourage fatalistic doom, it’s more useful to explain how some factors progress better than others. They are right to highlight growth in road transport and aviation (even if some growth still covid-rebound), although more effort still needed in all sectors.

Hmm. I’m still using a 2014 iMac, as its 27" 5k screen still very good for coding (with added memory). Sometimes develops a bunch of thin vertical lines, which come and go maybe dependent on temperature, but hasn’t changed for for ten years and i can live with those. Just wish they’d continue providing security updates for it.

Odd that Estacio de França is now the terminus only of lines from the opposite direction - but it makes sense to run all across the centre.

I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I’d believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.

Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)

Indeed that’s strange, and the flat slope in 2060 seems inconsistent with declared net-zero policies of China and even India. Russia has no such policy, but still strange to assume continuation of current government concepts there until 2060. (you can see the regional breakdown in supplem Fig 1. )

Regarding the map - an annual average cost is not so meaningful - in higher latitudes solar is not enough in winter - especially where it’s mostly cloudy during the first half of winter. Wind helps the balance but not everywhere, always. Of course, the sophisticated models behind the article know all that, the issue is simplistic presentation. I note “we assume hydrogen is used for seasonal storage” - this may be rather optimistic - how many dark months can that cover?

Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven’t yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion

Seems like Germany has a good idea to vary it, to reduce pressure on travel. However we should think bolder still, reimagine the whole timing of the academic year which derived from nineteenth century traditions when children helped plant and gather crops. Now instead we should consider climate change, and July became too hot for comfortable travel in most of continental europe. So it would be better to have long holidays in May-June and maybe September, while also investing in cooling for school buildings (maybe more practical than for small homes).

Aucune réservation obligatoire (hors international) en Belgique, Suisse, Allemagne, Grand-Bretagne … Cette proposition est ridicule, on pousse les gens au voiture. Et la France avait si bon système de chemin de fer, avant qu’ils ont essayé copier l’aviation.

Vietnam is such a long-thin country, high quality rail infrastructure really makes sense given such a geography. I hope they connect their network west too, to other south-east asian countries, such network could also help to balance the development negotiations.

Interesting discussion. ‘Quit while ahead’ sounds obvious with hindsight, but who can say when a peak has been reached during events, and who, in such movements, would have the authority to impose that on others ? What could China learn from other countries ? For example, rapid student-led change in Bangladesh recently.

What better times? They’ll be competing with more solar and wind every year (also fewer people).

I think it makes sense. China also has a housing surplus, loads of infrastructure, plenty of educated graduates, and great diversity of climate (therefore resilience to that problem), but will lack young people to help with services. The first generation will feel discrimination (even europeans who’ve worked there know the laowai feeling) but attitudes could gradually change for their children.

That’s interesting. I wonder whether those 6519 surveyed are representative of whole population, or of people who anyway online a lot. It’s seems there was an inflection around 2012 - what happened then ? The curve ends during covid lockdowns, wonder whether deflected since ?