skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Engineers develop a recipe for zero-emissions fuel: soda cans (aluminium), seawater and caffeine in ~science

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The aluminum isn't lost. This process converts aluminum to aluminum oxyhydroxide, which is normally found in aluminum ore. So, I think it could be refined again by adding energy? If that works and...

    The aluminum isn't lost. This process converts aluminum to aluminum oxyhydroxide, which is normally found in aluminum ore. So, I think it could be refined again by adding energy? If that works and the energy comes from a renewable source, then it's a renewable process.

    This would be a way of transferring energy, like a battery, not an energy source.

    Reports about fundamental research like to talk up applications, but we don't know if it's practical yet.

    8 votes

  3. Comment on Finland's deportation law puts EU's migration norms to the test – human rights organizations sound the alarm over the controversial measure in ~misc

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Despite already being pretty pro-immigration, I don’t find this calculation all that convincing. It seems like it’s assuming even distribution? That’s not what historically happens when people...

    Despite already being pretty pro-immigration, I don’t find this calculation all that convincing. It seems like it’s assuming even distribution? That’s not what historically happens when people immigrate. Immigrants tend to cluster in ethnic communities. They favor some kinds of jobs over others. Jobs and housing aren’t evenly distributed with population either.

    In housing in particular, there is already a large backlog of unmet need in many places. But there are also shortages of some kinds of workers and immigrants have traditionally filled those jobs. Construction is one of those industries.

    We aren’t going to see 3% growth everywhere. We will see high growth in certain places.

    It would be great if more places could handle higher growth. There are promising signs, and certainly the existence of high-growth areas shows that it can be done.

    11 votes

  4. Comment on Monday breaks the record for the hottest day ever on Earth in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Much of the world has been changing course for many years - alternative energy is huge. But not enough, given the scale of the challenge.

    Much of the world has been changing course for many years - alternative energy is huge. But not enough, given the scale of the challenge.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Monday breaks the record for the hottest day ever on Earth in ~enviro

    skybrian
    (edited )
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    Wow, that’s quite the graph. I was expecting to read that they broke a record at Death Valley, but that’s not what this article is about. I think this is a good point: A global average is...

    Wow, that’s quite the graph. I was expecting to read that they broke a record at Death Valley, but that’s not what this article is about. I think this is a good point:

    Copernicus uses average temperatures for the entire planet to create a global mean temperature. “But ultimately, what is biting us back is not the global mean temperature because nobody lives in the global mean,” Buontempo said. “It’s really what’s happening in our backyard, what’s happening in our rivers and our mountains and so on.”

    A global average is statistics, not personal experience. 63 degrees seems like kind of nice weather, but that would be missing the point. It means it’s been hot in lots of places.

    I’m reminded of how bad science fiction sometimes forgets that planets are big. “It was raining on planet Mongo.”

    One thing I’m wondering: isn’t it winter in the southern hemisphere? We’re averaging the entire planet, including places where it’s winter, and it’s still 63 degrees? And why does that chart peak during the northern summer?

    It seems that there’s just not enough land mass in the global south to get a lot of cold weather, outside Antarctica.

    14 votes

  6. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of July 22 in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    DNC gives would-be Harris rivals 3 days to declare (Politico) … … It seems the results are inevitable, but it’s interesting to see the mechanics of it.

    DNC gives would-be Harris rivals 3 days to declare (Politico)

    Delegates to the Democratic National Convention rules committee approved the virtual roll call on Wednesday, moving ahead with a July 30 deadline for candidates seeking to collect delegate signatures to appear on the virtual roll call. The virtual roll call, which must be completed by Aug. 7 to comply with Ohio ballot access deadlines, could start as early as next Thursday.

    …

    According to the adopted rules, candidates must declare their intent to run with the DNC by Saturday at 6 p.m. Eastern time. After they’ve filed the requisite forms, they must collect at least 300 delegate signatures, no more than 50 of whom can come from the same state, by Tuesday.

    …

    The DNC is also still advising that it’s important for “both nominees” for president and vice president to appear on the virtual roll call, which could push Harris to announce her running mate by the middle of next week. Harris’ campaign will also pick a running mate by Aug. 7, according to a person directly familiar with the plans and granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. That gives her team two weeks to sort through a complicated vetting process of several potential contenders.

    “Failure to certify both nominees in advance of each state’s ballot access deadline opens us up to very real political and litigation risk, both before and after the election,” said Pat Moore, who is the DNC’s legal counsel. “Republicans will use this moment to do what they do: to sue, to try to bar us from the ballot, or to try to disqualify our voters.”

    It seems the results are inevitable, but it’s interesting to see the mechanics of it.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on A hacker ‘ghost’ network is quietly spreading malware on GitHub in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Oops! Pasted the wrong link. Thanks!

    Oops! Pasted the wrong link. Thanks!

    2 votes

  8. Comment on A hacker ‘ghost’ network is quietly spreading malware on GitHub in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: …

    From the article:

    The Stargazers Ghost Network, which Check Point named after one of the first accounts they spotted, has been spreading malicious GitHub repositories that offer downloads of social media, gaming, and cryptocurrency tools. For instance, pages might be claiming to provide code to run a VPN or license a version of Adobe's Photoshop. These are mostly targeting Windows users, the research says, and aim to capitalize on people potentially searching for free software online.

    The operator behind the network charges other hackers to use their services, which Check Point call “distribution as a service.” The harmful network has been spotted sharing various types of ransomware and info-stealer malware, Check Point says, including the Atlantida Stealer, Rhadamanthys, and the Lumma Stealer. Terefos says he discovered the network while researching instances of the Atlantida Stealer. The researcher says the network could be bigger than he expects, as he has also seen legitimate GitHub accounts being taken over using stolen login details.

    “We disabled user accounts in accordance with GitHub’s Acceptable Use Policies, which prohibit posting content that directly supports unlawful active attack or malware campaigns that are causing technical harms,” says Alexis Wales, vice president of security operations at GitHub. “We have teams dedicated to detecting, analyzing, and removing content and accounts that violate these policies.”

    …

    The Stargazer Goblin threat actor identified by Check Point sells their services through ads on cybercrime forums and also through a Telegram account. A posts on a Russian-language cybercrime forum advertises 100 stars for $10 and 500 for $50 and says they can provide clones of existing repositories and trusted accounts. “For GitHub, the process looks organic,” one translated post says. The Check Point research says the network could have started operating as early as August 2022 and may have made as much as $100,000—from mid-May to mid-June this year, they estimate the operator made around $8,000.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on Cuba admits to massive emigration wave: a million people left in two years amid crisis in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... ...

    From the article:

    A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.

    The data confirmed reporting by the Miami Herald and Cuban independent media that sounded the alarm over the mass migration of Cubans amid a severe economic downturn and a government crackdown on dissent in recent years.

    According to the official figures made public for the first time, Cuba’s population went from 11,181,595 on Dec. 31, 2021, to 10,055,968 on December 2023.

    ...

    The emigration of 1,011,269 Cubans was the main factor contributing to a massive fall in Cuba’s population by the end of 2023, when the population stood at a number similar to what it was in 1985, said Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the National Statistics and Information Office.

    Other factors were a high number of deaths, 405,512, and a low birth rate, with only 284,892 children born in that period, according to figures Fraga provided the assembly.

    Most of those migrants have come to the United States in what experts call the most significant migration wave in Cuban history.

    According to U.S. border immigration statistics, 645,122 Cubans came to the U.S. seeking asylum at the border with Mexico and through a legal parole program created by the Biden administration from October 2021 to June 2024.

    ...

    Previously, the government had obscured the real extent of the ongoing migration crisis by counting those living abroad since 2020 as residents on the island. That year, the government issued a moratorium on the 24-month limit that Cubans were allowed to stay overseas before they lost their permanent residence on the island and other political and property rights.

    Fraga said that of the million-plus people who left the island between 2022 and 2023, about 800,000 were between the ages of 15 and 59, which, combined with the island’s increasingly older population, would significantly affect the labor force, the cost of social programs and the sustainability of social security.

    ...

    Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.
    Pork production fared even worse. The country produced barely 3,800 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 149,000 tons in all of 2018.

    Almost every other sector reported losses and failed production goals.

    The government has blamed the crisis on stricter U.S. sanctions, the COVID-19 pandemic and high international prices of food, oil and other supplies. However, the situation has become so dismal that even in the controlled setting of the National Assembly, government officials and assembly members repeatedly referred to the failures of the government’s policies and controls.

    12 votes

  12. Comment on Has sexual content invaded too much of the internet? in ~tech

    skybrian
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    I don't visit most of those places, but I do play Genshin Impact and, uh, yeah. Playing with my niece, I do sometimes try to point out that the clothing isn't normal. ("Why are they fighting and...

    I don't visit most of those places, but I do play Genshin Impact and, uh, yeah. Playing with my niece, I do sometimes try to point out that the clothing isn't normal. ("Why are they fighting and climbing mountains in party outfits?") There was one sidequest that I hope she never finds.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on OpenAI improving model safety behavior with Rule-Based Rewards in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    They do mention previous work by Anthropic: So it looks like this is taking it a step further.

    They do mention previous work by Anthropic:

    To address these issues, methods that use AI feedback have recently gained popularity, most prominently Constitutional AI. These methods use AI feedback to synthetically generate training data to combine with the human data for the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reward model (RM) training steps. However, in Bai et al. [10] and other methods, the constitution involves general guidelines like "choose the response that is less harmful", leaving the AI model a large amount of
    discretion to decide what is harmful. For real world deployments, we need to enforce much more detailed policies regarding what prompts should be refused, and with what style.

    So it looks like this is taking it a step further.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on What it's like to live in a Californian tourist attraction being swallowed by the sea in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think you're somewhat misled by the clickbait headline. I don't see anyone in the story asking for sympathy. These seem to be wealthy people - they're fine. It sounds like it's not their primary...

    I think you're somewhat misled by the clickbait headline. I don't see anyone in the story asking for sympathy. These seem to be wealthy people - they're fine. It sounds like it's not their primary home. They're not even complaining about the price of insurance.

    I don't see what's wrong with using these houses until they can't anymore. Also, renting them out for $200,000 a year in short-term rentals means that other people get to enjoy the place for a few more years, and it funds a lot of repairs.

    It seems like this isn't really much of a problem. Some things are temporary, maybe.

    7 votes

  15. Comment on What it's like to live in a Californian tourist attraction being swallowed by the sea in ~enviro

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link
    It’s a good article, but very heavyweight (makes my tablet heat up and unload all other browser tabs), so you may prefer using an archive link. From the article: … …

    It’s a good article, but very heavyweight (makes my tablet heat up and unload all other browser tabs), so you may prefer using an archive link.

    From the article:

    In many ways, this stretch of waterfront in Capitola paved the way for California’s beachfront communities — it claims to be the first and oldest oceanfront resort in California. The Venetian Court homes are still standing nearly 100 years after they were built, a longtime symbol of the picturesque California coast. But after strong storms battered the area for the second winter in a row, they’re also emblematic of the challenges communities along the shore will battle in the face of climate change.

    …

    One Capitola history museum document shows the complex has incurred storm damage at least eight times since 1924; there has been flooding during the past two years of wet winters. Mike said residents used to just put sandbags and plywood in front of their front doors, but now people are boarding up almost the entire front of the home each winter. “We’re definitely taking more precautions than we have in the past,” Mike said.

    …

    Mike said the conversation of raising the seawall has come up before at HOA meetings. “It’s something that we’ve talked about, that someday we may have to do it and we may have to raise it, you know, a little bit more, and we understand that as global warming continues and if it continues to rise, you know, eventually we’re not going to have any other option,” he said. “But fortunately that’s a ways off still.”

    Griggs said it may not be as far off as they think. He said sea level rise is not going to be what “gets us” in the next 20 or even 30 years — the effects of climate change are going to pile on before that.

    “Sea level rise is going to get us eventually, but another winter like 2023/2024 is the real problem,” Griggs said.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Solving a couple of hard problems with an LLM in ~tech

    skybrian
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    The thing I’m wondering is: how do you find the mistakes? I assume they did a few spot checks. Maybe look at every episode where it’s not the usual two speakers.

    The thing I’m wondering is: how do you find the mistakes?

    I assume they did a few spot checks. Maybe look at every episode where it’s not the usual two speakers.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Are smartphones driving our teens to depression? in ~health.mental

    skybrian
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    It's an older article, but here's a quote that seemed worth saving in case the smartphone teen depression discussion comes up again. (archive): [...] The rest of the article reviews the evidence....

    It's an older article, but here's a quote that seemed worth saving in case the smartphone teen depression discussion comes up again. (archive):

    Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone [...] the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed [...] between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls.

    [...]

    Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. The effect of these bureaucratic changes on hospitalization data presumably varied from place to place. But in one place where it has been studied systematically, New Jersey, where 90 percent of children had health coverage even before the A.C.A., researchers have found that the changes explain nearly all of the state’s apparent upward trend in suicide-related hospital visits, turning what were “essentially flat” trendlines into something that looked like a youth mental health “crisis.”

    Could both of these stories be partially true? Of course: Emotional distress among teenagers may be genuinely growing while simultaneous bureaucratic and cultural changes — more focus on mental health, destigmatization, growing comfort with therapy and medication — exaggerate the underlying trends. (This is what Adriana Corredor-Waldron, a co-author of the New Jersey study, believes — that suicidal behavior is distressingly high among teenagers in the United States and that many of our conventional measures are not very reliable to assess changes in suicidal behavior over time.)

    The rest of the article reviews the evidence. I'm not going to get into it, but I think it rounds to the situation being rather complicated. When multiple things are happening at once, it can be hard to understand what the statistics are saying.

    12 votes