skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Hungarian president Tamás Sulyok signs constitutional amendment ending his own mandate in ~society
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/u1qjN From the article: [...]From the article:
In response to struggling renters and frustrated first-time buyers, rich-world politicians are championing an ostensibly obvious solution: build more cheap homes. Yet if self-styled socialists such as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Britain’s incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, are serious about housing affordability, they ought to drop the platitudes for the evidence and embrace the construction of more expensive ones instead.
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Above all, high-end developments unlock long housing chains. As higher-income households move into newly built units, they free up older properties, raising supply and slashing prices for middle- and lower-end housing through a process known as filtering. Numerous international studies underscore this positive ripple effect.
One published last year tracked households that moved into a newly built 512-unit condominium tower in Honolulu, Hawaii. It found that the building created at least 557 vacancies in older and cheaper apartments across the city in just three years, with market-rate units more likely to release the largest chains.
Filtering can also be widespread. A 2021 study in Helsinki using geo-coded population data found that every 100 new market-rate units in the city centre led to around 60 units becoming available in the city’s bottom half of neighbourhoods by income. An analysis across all homes in Sweden over several decades concluded that “new homes, even those initially primarily inhabited by rich people, lead to substantial trickle-down effects that also benefit the poor”.
Other US studies highlight how market-rate developments benefit less well-to-do local residents by lowering housing costs. In San Francisco, a 2021 paper found new developments lowered the risk of eviction notices for residents in rent-stabilised housing. Even “luxury” developments in New York City — which Mamdani has criticised — have been shown to contribute to lower local rents and sales prices.
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Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments
1 vote -
Comment on Federal agents were told FBI will no longer investigate ICE confrontations in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the F.B.I. would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.
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F.B.I. managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change on Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their F.B.I. counterparts.
The guidance shared with them said that the bureau would stop investigating claims of assaults against Department of Homeland Security agents, the people said. Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.
A joint statement by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, however, denied that any such change was underway.
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Under the change, responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself, according to guidance circulated among F.B.I. and ICE agents.
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Federal agents were told FBI will no longer investigate ICE confrontations
12 votes -
Comment on Gigafactory in Sacramento will produce sodium-ion batteries for grid storage in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Startup Peak Energy launched in 2023 with a promise to bring the up-and-coming sodium-ion battery chemistry to American shores. Now, it’s building a gigafactory in Sacramento, California, that will be the country’s first to produce sodium-ion battery storage plants for the grid.
If Peak Energy succeeds in its broader mission, it will introduce a new generation of batteries better suited for grid storage than the dominant lithium-ion chemistries, which are effectively hand-me-downs from electric vehicles. These sodium-ion batteries can run safely at a broad range of temperatures, company leaders say, meaning they can operate more cheaply and durably than the lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) cells that have become the go-to for stationary storage.
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[..] The Sacramento factory will produce 40 times more [than a previous factory in Burlingame], 4 gigawatt-hours per year, when it starts its highly automated production, planned for the first quarter of 2027. Once assembled, the 100,000-pound containers can slip right onto the highway for shipment to customers.
It’s a quick turnaround as far as factory buildouts go, made possible because Peak found a newly built shell to lease in an industrial park near the Sacramento airport, said Mossburg. The site already had power supply from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, so Peak can drop in its manufacturing equipment with only minor upgrades to the structure and electrical service, he added. It also helps that the factory won’t be doing the highly technical cell fabrication, which takes longer to install.
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Unlike the chemistries that ruled the grid storage market thus far, sodium-ion was “the first battery really purposely designed” for stationary storage, Brown said.
“You sacrifice some energy density for massive improvements in safety but also very significant economic benefits,” he noted.
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Gigafactory in Sacramento will produce sodium-ion batteries for grid storage
20 votes -
Comment on The voice of Google in ~tech
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/EeeAI From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-made billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie’s they were idols. They would often ascend the stage together, practically matching in sweat-wicking athletic clothes and Crocs. Larry had a dopey perma-smile, and seemed delighted by everything, especially Sergey. Sergey was the straight man, with a faint lilt, a product of his childhood in Russia, and an acrobatic build that made him look like he might launch into a handspring at any moment. Their charisma was unconventional, contextual; you had to be there. The audience of employees lapped up every word, giggled at every dad joke. During a Q. & A. portion of the proceedings, even adversarial questions were absorbed into the Google spirit—it all melted into laughs, love. Merriam-Webster had added “google” to the dictionary the year before. Fortune had crowned it the “Best Company to Work For” in America. Profits were, as the execs loved to boast, “up and to the right,” fuelled by an online-advertising machine that minted cash beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. But the company’s financial success felt almost incidental. What mattered, we told ourselves, was the mission—a conviction that technology could improve the world and that we were helping to build the future. The air in Charlie’s buzzed with collective belief.
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No one else seemed eager to send out a weekly “Here’s how to tune in to TGIF” e-mail, so I volunteered to do it. I kept the notes straight at first, but soon began injecting more voice, writing things like “As the week folds gently in on itself and we collectively blink at the passage of time, we arrive—inevitably, beautifully—at TGIF. Also: beer.” The messages were casual, sly, a little irreverent—proof that Google wasn’t like any other company—while always amplifying the corporate mythology. I wrote about whatever products and feature updates we’d be spotlighting onstage that week as “epistemological experiments” and “peak experiences” in the pursuit of “Meaning and Truth,” and cast the executives appearing alongside Larry and Sergey as visionaries, prophets, and sages. T.G.I.F. was the weekly pageant in which the company talked to itself, but my e-mails became an important companion piece: folklore and fan fiction, the refrains of the gospel. Employees began to look forward to them. Every week, the moment the T.G.I.F. e-mail went out, an internal forum called Memegen exploded with reactions to what I’d written. One meme was captioned, “I want whatever Claire Stapleton’s on when she’s writing the TGIF emails.” Another christened me the Bard of Google. At Charlie’s, a group of engineers presented me with a wooden plaque naming me the company’s poet laureate. When I was promoted to manager, my performance review credited my “cult following.”
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Eric had pontificated plenty, but Larry was the epitome of techno-optimism: Google wasn’t just going to organize the world’s information, he maintained; it was going to solve humanity’s biggest problems. In 2013, he launched Calico, a health-care company focussed on extending the human life span, and Time magazine ran a cover story with the headline “Can Google Solve Death?” “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.) His aphorisms stacked up like motivational posters in a middle-school science classroom—“Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things”—but Larry seemed to experience them all as fresh revelations, and he expected them to invigorate the workforce in turn. He loved to tell a story about how he’d read an autobiography of Nikola Tesla when he was around twelve, and cried—he really emphasized the crying bit—because Tesla died poor. (This, I guess, taught him the all-important life lesson “Commercialize those inventions.”) “Computers should do the hard work,” Larry would repeat, so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, and loving.
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But the platform’s dark underbelly was becoming hard to ignore. One of the first “trends” Kevin briefed me on was dubbed Elsagate: a sprawling ecosystem of videos featuring beloved children’s characters in bizarre and profane scenarios—knockoff Paw Patrol dogs committing suicide, Peppa Pig having her teeth pulled out one by one by a sadistic dentist, Elsa giving birth. Disturbing enough on their own, many had also been labelled by YouTube’s recommendation systems as appropriate for young children. The company tried cracking down on the videos, but the problems felt too vast, too deeply woven into the platform itself, to imagine that they could really be fixed. Our editorial team was told to avoid spotlighting “Frozen” trends for a while, and otherwise to carry on. One day, my counterpart in London Gchatted me a link to an essay by the anthropologist David Graeber, called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” about the rise of pointless office work in late capitalism. I read it twice at my desk, open-mouthed. “Huge swathes of people . . . spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,” Graeber wrote. My co-worker said, “Bit nail-on-the-head, innit?”
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I was promoted right afterward, and I started to ghostwrite the tweets of the latest C.E.O., a longtime Googler named Susan Wojcicki. Her voice was earnest and corporate, a mom enthusiastic about YouTube creators and new product features. But the controversies in which YouTube was implicated were multiplying. It was the year leading up to Trump’s 2016 election, and tech companies were being scrutinized for their part in polarizing public discourse. YouTube had played a role in Gamergate, an online harassment campaign against prominent women in the gaming world that became a culture-wars flashpoint. (Steve Bannon later described Gamergate as a useful way to recruit disaffected young men into Trump’s campaign.) Hard-right channels had always existed on the platform, but now they were growing bigger, becoming mainstream, pushing the boundaries of what kinds of talk were acceptable. How much was YouTube supposed to police its content? Management didn’t seem to be able to decide.
In the summer of 2016, I was put in charge of coming up with a big-budget get-out-the-vote campaign for the Presidential election. No one said outright that we hoped to tip the scales against Trump, but it was understood that YouTube could help the Democrats by boosting youth turnout. We called the campaign #VoteIRL, and we tapped tons of the platform’s biggest stars to encourage their audiences to register to vote. Even President Obama made a #VoteIRL video, lending the campaign an aura of official civic endorsement. Hillary Clinton lost, of course, but internally our campaign was deemed a success. The higher-ups gave me a big bonus and an internal award. Breitbart got hold of leaked footage from a T.G.I.F. meeting during which Larry and Sergey openly expressed their dismay over Trump’s victory: “Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,” Sergey said. Googlers peppered the executives with anxious questions about whether products like YouTube were reinforcing warped beliefs and making the country more divided.
YouTube had become a mirror, reflecting and amplifying the turmoil of the time. Its biggest star, a Swedish gamer named PewDiePie, was an anti-P.C. provocateur who made rape jokes (even putting out a music video literally called “It’s Raping Time”) and tossed around “gay,” “retard,” and “autistic” as playful insults during gaming playthroughs. His “edgy” humor only fuelled his popularity: for nearly six years, his was the most-subscribed-to channel on the platform. But, in 2017, he pushed things further, releasing a video in which he paid two South Asian men on a gig marketplace to hold up a sign that read “Death to all Jews.” In another video posted to PewDiePie’s channel, a guy dressed as Jesus declared, “Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong!” Soon YouTube was facing an “adpocalypse,” as brands including PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, and A.T. & T. realized that their commercials were appearing on the platform alongside extremism and hate speech. The company scrambled to placate the brands with new demonetization policies, stripping ads from huge batches of videos. This, in turn, slashed creator revenues and sent independent creators—the emotional lifeblood of the platform—into uproar.
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That night, a member of the group posted on Memegen, the internal forum where commentary on my T.G.I.F. e-mails had once appeared: How about a walkout to stand against toxic workplace culture? Maybe a hundred people reacted with a “+1,” and women in the mom group were talking about it. I quickly created a new Google group to discuss the idea. We made our first decision almost immediately: the walkout would be Thursday, November 1st—just five days away. A project manager named Tanuja reached out and offered to help. We met in a conference room in my building; she was hyper-organized, fired up, ready to project-manage the hell out of this. In forty-five minutes, we outlined a rough plan and built an internal site: a “hub and spoke” model, with local leads in every participating office, customizing the day with their own stories and flair.
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The voice of Google
10 votes -
Comment on Union Pacific has started painting the sides of rails white to reduce heat in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
As warmer temperatures return, Union Pacific is applying an innovative concept to manage heat-related track conditions – part of a broader strategy that helped the railroad deliver its best-ever full-year derailment incident rate in 2025, improving 19% year over year.
“Steel rails expand in extreme heat,” said Rod Doerr, chief safety officer. “When that steel has nowhere to go, it can push sideways and create what we call a thermal misalignment.”
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“We took a page from road striping,” Doerr said. “Using a high-rail truck and paint sprayer, we apply white paint to both sides of the rail.”
The idea is simple: by reflecting sunlight, the white paint lowers the rail’s surface temperature.
“We’ve seen about a 20-degree drop in the rail temperature,” Doerr said. “That’s huge. If you’re not fighting the sun’s heat, you dramatically reduce the risk of the rail shifting.”
Union Pacific began targeted deployment in high-heat areas last year, adding another layer of protection alongside existing maintenance and inspection practices.
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“When people first saw it, they said, ‘Why haven’t we been doing this for a hundred years?’” Doerr said. “That’s the kind of question I love to hear, because it means the culture of safety innovation is alive and well.”
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Union Pacific has started painting the sides of rails white to reduce heat
25 votes -
Comment on US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1b worth of Reapers in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
In a call for industry pitches, the Defense Innovation Unit’s notice described the US military’s current reliance on drones and crewed aircraft, each costing more than $30 million, as being “unsustainable against adversaries utilizing layered defenses enabled by increasingly low-cost antiaircraft capabilities.” It envisions deploying more “cost-effective” drones to “overwhelm enemy air defenses even while experiencing numerous [drone] losses.”
That is, in practice, what Ukraine’s military has been demonstrating with its long- and mid-range strike campaign against Russian supply lines, oil refineries, and various energy or industrial targets within Russia or occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian campaign has been overwhelming Russia’s overstretched air defense capabilities by launching hundreds of relatively inexpensive drones and missiles on a daily basis to attack targets far behind the frontlines, while continuing to damage or destroy Russia’s most sophisticated air defense systems.
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A heavy reliance on Reapers avoids putting more US pilots at risk, but it has also led to Iranian air defenses shooting down dozens of the hunter-killer drones. The US military had lost nearly 30 Reaper drones as of May 2026, including some destroyed on the ground by Iranian counterstrikes, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The Air Force acknowledged such combat losses as reducing its Reaper fleet to about 135 drones.
The total US taxpayer bill for the destroyed Reapers comes to about $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. A typical Reaper may cost $30 million per aircraft, but the Air Force has said a Reaper equipped with a full sensor package can cost up to $50 million.
That number of Reapers lost in combat has almost certainly increased since May, as the United States and Iran have continued to trade airstrikes and drones despite so-called ceasefire periods and attempted negotiations. On July 8, as hostilities ramped up again recently with new Iranian strikes on commercial shipping triggering more US military airstrikes, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have shot down yet another Reaper drone.
The defense company General Atomics stopped manufacturing Reaper drones for the US military in 2025. But a General Atomics executive told Breaking Defense that the company is interested in pursuing the newest drone contract offering from the US military, and seemed to suggest it would provide a cheaper successor to the Reaper.
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US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1b worth of Reapers
9 votes -
Comment on Where profits come from (the profits identity) in ~finance
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Comment on Where profits come from (the profits identity) in ~finance
skybrian (edited )LinkOops, could someone remove the query string on the URL?Oops, could someone remove the query string on the URL?
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Comment on Apple sues OpenAI for stealing trade secrets to build AI hardware in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don’t know what’s going on internally, but I’ve been using my $20/month ChatGPT subscription quite a bit and I’m quite happy using GPT-5.6 for coding. Usually Terra. Since I don’t use Claude...I don’t know what’s going on internally, but I’ve been using my $20/month ChatGPT subscription quite a bit and I’m quite happy using GPT-5.6 for coding. Usually Terra. Since I don’t use Claude Code, I can only use Claude at API rates and it’s too expensive.
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Comment on AI mania is eviscerating global decisionmaking in ~tech
skybrian LinkIt’s good writing and this consulting thing seems to be working out for him, but when I read one of his articles, I wonder how it is that Suresh is invariably reporting what’s going on inside the...It’s good writing and this consulting thing seems to be working out for him, but when I read one of his articles, I wonder how it is that Suresh is invariably reporting what’s going on inside the worst companies.
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Comment on Linus Torvalds says Linux is not "anti-AI", tells haters to 'fork it' and 'just walk away' in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWhen there's a polarized debate there are always going to be people posting unreasonable nonsense. If people on the other side see that as an excuse to jump in and post more unreasonable nonsense,...When there's a polarized debate there are always going to be people posting unreasonable nonsense. If people on the other side see that as an excuse to jump in and post more unreasonable nonsense, it's just going to snowball.
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Comment on Ukraine ‘cuts off’ Crimea from Russia, plunging it into an energy crisis in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Ukraine’s operation, named “Molochka”, began on July 6. Ukraine’s commander of unmanned forces, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, said it “paralyzes the feeder fleet of Russian courier tankers”, in comments on his Telegram messaging channel.
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These flat-bottomed tankers and barges ferry oil from the shallow waters of the Volga-Don Canal and Sea of Azov to larger tankers waiting in the Black Sea on the other side of the Kerch Strait, he said.
“It essentially prevents the export of ‘black gold’,” said Brovdi, and “restricts the delivery of scarce gasoline to Crimea via the narrow channel of the shallow Sea of Azov, leaving the main and very dangerous method of delivery as rail and road tank cars.”
During the first 10 days of the operation until July 16, Brovdi said, Ukraine had struck 147 tankers of the Russian shadow fleet. The majority, 117, were feeder tankers in the Sea of Azov. The rest were in the Black Sea.
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On the night of July 13, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) also struck several ferries used to transport military materiel across the Kerch Strait, as well as oil storage and trans-shipment points.
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Ukraine also targeted the Crimean electricity supply, striking the Saky thermal power plant on July 9, five electricity substations on July 10 and nine more substations and the Kuban-Crimea electricity transfer point in Russia on July 13.
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Crimea seems set for more suffering, however, as Ukraine’s campaign appears to be mounting.
The strikes against it and the Sea of Azov are part of a campaign of mid-range strikes begun this year to starve Russia’s front line of fuel and weapons, and the Kremlin of export revenue from fossil fuels.
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On July 7, Russia said Ukraine tried to blow up the main compressor station on its TurkStream gas pipeline, which supplies 16.5 billion cubic metres of gas to Turkiye a year, and has a similar capacity designed to serve Southeast Europe.
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Russian petrol production now reaches only two-thirds of seasonal needs, said the Reuters news agency, citing two industry sources and its own calculations.
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Ukraine ‘cuts off’ Crimea from Russia, plunging it into an energy crisis
36 votes
More recently that average is a lot higher. From this article:
To get the average term down to 9 years, there would need to be one new judge appointed per year and that seems like too much turnover. Imagine if Trump were able to appoint 8 judges! Two new judges per 4-year term, resulting in 18-year terms, seems more reasonable, though appointing 4 judges still a lot of power for a two-term president.
It seems like making it a fixed number of appointments per term instead of waiting for people to resign or die would be an improvement.