I do not own a car, I do not fly, I buy clothes used or new just once a year. My newest smartphone I bought five years ago (and I just bought a new battery for $10, so I can use it for five more years). My utility company stats says my energy consumption is overall very low. I eat meat once a month. I try to own as few things as possible. I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...) [1]. I self host some services on my arm board that consumes 0.79W when idle.
I do not feel, that it makes a large dent, but I feel that I'm way ahead what the average person does in order to reduce their environmental footprint.
Also, I do not feel I'm cutting myself short and I still depend on many of the niceties of modern civilization - but, I'd also be happier, if my footprint would be even lower.
I am not saying anything negative about your lifestyle and I make similar choices. But, the perception is you need to be that extreme when the reality is different. People really don’t need to suffer to make a difference, which is critical as most people aren’t willing to suffer if they can avoid it.
For example rather than turning the heat down, buying a solar hot water heater let’s you save money, take long hot showers, and be toasty in the winter while also being more environmentally friendly. Carbon credits are poor policy vs carbon taxes for a host of reasons. However, if you really want to feel better about your personal choices effective leverage is available. At the same time a huge number of what amounts to scams are also out there.
PS: Of course lowering consumption has other environmental benefits
> "People really don’t need to suffer to make a difference"…
You are 110% correct about that, and yet the most common arguments I hear from folks who argue against every proposed solution to climate change that they hear all make it sound like they actually think they're gonna have to live like cavemen if we try to do anything to fix the problem. :(
Making positive ROI investments in solar, wind, etc manufactures or projects. The transition is economically viable but capital constrained.
PS: I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...) [1].. That comes off as extreme to me, it’s going to take a lot before that’s saving more energy than a single lightbulb uses.
Yes and no. I feel that not doing certain things is a very simple thing to "do" things - and I appreciate simplicity.
For example, I would probably prefer getting rid of half of the cars and trying to find ways so that people do not need to move that much, if they do not want to (for example making all possibly remote remote work actually remote) - as opposed to making all cars electric.
You can have frugal lifestyle in regards to the climate, but still be fullfilling. In some way it becomes part of you life to create less waste and find better ways to handle the climate. It's fun!
But you can only succeed if you also treat it like a religion were everyone else are heathens. Because if you do not convert all of society to your believes that is always going to be your biggest climte debt. My own carbon foot print is minimal compared to what I use as a part of my society. That is no fun. That's not what I want to spend my time doing..
> Was it always this bad and we just didn't see it before?
After about two hours of using FB in 2007 I had this crazy feeling that someone having access to all those people's photos and activities won't necessary end well; left and never looked back.
Question: How hard would it be to write create open source components to run a DSP collaboratively, e.g. with the power asymmetry created by aggregation
The same argument was made for an open source Uber, and I think it's a noble idea, but it appears the problems of routing and competition are complex enough that it just doesn't work.
I support sourcehut, because I would like to see it evolve, and hopefully keep the no-nonsense UI approach. Having a nontrivial site with a usable interface running without JS in 2019 is beautiful on its own.
I managed complex datasets of a few TB with standard Unix tools just fine. If you are lucky, you have a sustained read and processing speed of 200M/s (or more with, if you are put in some work), which allows you to sift through a TB in a good hour.
Sometimes I am wondering, how people will rationalize the layer bloat in 5-10 years, when hardware went through a few more upgrades.
I once taught[1] the building blocks of git (basically bullet time view of a commit) and people found it a bit too theoretical - even though it contained all the elements, that helped me to understand and appreciate the simplicity.
There is a point, where you go from memorization (add, push, commit) to deduction (graph, objects and refs) but when this point is reached, depends on many individual factors.
> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible.
I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either.
The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver.
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.
The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it’s impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?).
RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.
Maybe this disagreement about what Solid is demonstrates the GP's point that the intro site is a piece of PR puff so that nobody knows what it's supposed to do.
Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."
Norvig is a smart guy, and maybe he meant something different by that quote than the obvious reading, but at first blush that sounds silly. If he's saying "The semantic web "always will be" the future because it will never happen, then he's objectively wrong. The semantic web is here and has been for a long time.
The key thing to remember though, is that the semantic web is about machine readable data... semantic web technologies are not, by and large, something end users interact with, or even need to know about, themselves. They empower things for developers, but are mostly invisible to the average user.
Google, Yahoo and other major search engines have been extracting semantic data - in the form of RDFa, Microformats, etc., - and using that data for at least 10 years now.
OTOH, if Norvig mean that it will always be the future because it's always evolving, adapting, and growing, then, well, yeah... of course. And that's exactly where we are. Semantic Web tech just keeps getting better and more useful.
> The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me.
Ted Nelson invented the idea of hypertext in the early '60s. It wasn't until the creation of HyperCard in 1987 and the WWW in 1990 that there were practical applications of hypertext that you could put your hands on and use.
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users. It's technologists in a vacuum building approaches that don't actually solve problems that millions of people have. So long as they keep doing that, it will perpetually fail.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person. There was no reason for it to exist in regards to doing something for millions of people.
Wikipedia, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc. are what people want to consume. Until the semantic Web leads to a dramatic improvement on those types of end user products, it's not going to matter.
> The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists
The failures of the semantic Web are pretty much the same as the failures of the Web of evil, i.e. the internet:
1. You cannot make people tell the truth.
2. You cannot always determine when someone is not telling the truth.
3. You cannot always make people do things the right way.
4. You cannot always determine when someone is not doing things the right way.
So, you are correct. The true creed of each hard-core technologist is: "Everything would work great if only everyone always did everything my way."
The failure of the semantic Web is that it's repetitively being built by and for technologists rather than to meet a real need of real end users.
The Semantic Web hasn't "failed" and it's not something that end users need to see, know about, or care about directly. It's those technologists that use Semantic Web tech and data to build applications for the end users.
Freebase as a prominent example, was pointless for an average person.
Likewise Github is pointless to an average person. Because the average person isn't who it's meant for.
