Sometimes ChatGPT/copilot’s code predictions are scary good. Sometimes they’re batshit crazy. If you have the experience to be able to tell the difference, it’s a great help.

LOL, I work in climate science.

Specifically in consequential carbon accounting analysis. Which is the branch that specializes in quantifying how much impact decisions and policies will have on greenhouse gas levels.

We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

I comment regularly on social media about what actually needs to happen if we’re to limit the damage from WW3 to just seriously fucked. You can imagine how that goes.

People advocate for things on Reddit or Lemmy about what we should be doing to avoid the disaster. Most of the time these things will have little benefit, and often will make things worse. I try to educate people but everybody has their pet issues usually based on whatever article they read last and they don’t actually want to seek the truth, just defend their opinion.

It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another. People aren’t wrong about the small part they’re looking at, just its impact on the bigger picture.

Everyone is pulling in different directions on this issue because the waters have been so incredibly muddied by the people who stand to lose from real climate action.

Not all VPN traffic. Only traffic that would be routable without a VPN.

This works by tricking the computer into routing traffic to the attacker’s gateway instead of the VPN’s gateway. It doesn’t give the attacker access to the VPN gateway.

So traffic intended for a private network that is only accessible via VPN (like if you were connecting to a corporate network for example) wouldn’t be compromised. You simply wouldn’t be able to connect through the attacker’s gateway to the private network, and there wouldn’t be traffic to intercept.

This attack doesn’t break TLS encryption either. Anything you access over https (which is the vast majority of the internet these days) would still be just as encrypted as if you weren’t using a VPN.

For most people, in most scenarios, this amount to a small invasion of privacy. Our hypothetical malicious coffee shop could tell the ip addresses of websites you’re visiting, but probably not what you’re doing on those websites, unless it was an insecure website to begin with. Which is the case with or with VPN.

For some people or some situations that is a MASSIVE concern. People who use VPNs to hide what they’re doing from state level actors come to mind.

But for the average person who’s just using a VPN because they’re privacy conscious, or because they’re location spoofing. This is not going to represent a significant risk.

The pro-lifers that think there should just be an exceptions when mother’s life is at risk need to also hear that the Texas law already has an exemption for when a doctor uses their "reasonable medical judgment" that the life of the mother is at risk or the pregnancy poses "a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function."

All pregnancies are a risk to the mother’s life, anytime a doctor performs an abortion in Texas they risk losing their license, and possibly even prison time. Which is why we have these case of mothers with unviable pregnancies that aren’t terminated until they’re almost dead.

If you care about life, why on earth would you support a law that takes informed medical decisions away from doctors and their patients to put it in the hands of lawyers and lawmakers?

And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.

The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.

Only the very rich lose.

The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.

Which one are you?

The economics of Bitcoin mining are a bit weird in that it impossible to make it more energy efficient.

The system auto adjusts the computational complexity of mining bitcoin so that it always costs a little less than one bitcoin to mine a bitcoin, and at scale the only variable expense is electricity so as the price of bitcoin goes up, so does the amount of money that must be spent on electricity.

Current 6.25 Bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes. So globally about $2 million must be spent on electricity every hour.

In a little over 2 months the block reward cuts in half to only 3.125 bitcoin every 10 minutes. That will have the side effect of reducing the money spent on electricity for mining bitcoin so long as the price of bitcoin remains the same.

You’re trying to take a prescriptivist position on the meaning of the word “homophobia”, defining it as meaning “fear of homosexuality or homosexuals”.

But English doesn’t work that way. English words are defined descriptively not prescriptively. The definition of a word is changed to match how people use the word. When a word is commonly used with a new meaning the people who make dictionaries will change the definition to match how the word is used.

Homophobia can describe a fear or homosexuality, but it’s more commonly used to describe hostility or discrimination against homosexuals.

And as a result the Oxford English Dictionary now defines homophobia as “Hostility towards, prejudice against, or (less commonly) fear of homosexual people or homosexuality.”

Most words that end in -phobia do generally just describe a fear. But when we’re talking about a class of people, words ending in -phobia (e.g transphobia, Islamophobia, etc) we tend to use the hate, prejudice, and hostility meaning instead.

It doesn’t matter that “phobias” were at one time exclusively just irrational fears. If the majority of English speakers use the word to describe hate, that’s its meaning.

If anything, we now need a new word to describe “fear of homosexuality without prejudice towards homosexuals”. Because homophobia already means, to use your words, “a hatred of gay people”.

This is great to see.

80% of carbon offsets are creative accounting at best and bold-faced lies at worst.

If you don’t agree I’ve got a ~a bridge~ I mean some Carbon Offsets for sale.

‘cause if there’s one demographic that couldn’t possibly have the aptitude, resourcefulness or motivation needed to defeat a scheme like this it’s horny teenagers.

Where’s the option for: “I don’t want to use edge because it shoves polls in my face”

Climate change isn’t caused by just using fossil fuels to make a product, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gasses, (primarily carbon dioxide and methane), into the environment.

Asphalt is a problematic material, but not so much because it’s made from oil. It’s problematic because we burn fossil fuels to harvest the raw crude and to generate the energy needed to refine crude into asphalt. The carbon in the asphalt itself remains sequestered there and doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect as long as it isn’t burned later.

If we figured out how to extract crude and generate the vast amount of energy needed to manufacture asphalt without actually burning fossil fuels we’d eliminate the vast majority of asphalt’s impact on climate change.

In fact it’s been shown in a lab that it’s possible to make asphalt from CO2. It’s currently cost prohibitive to do so, but in theory asphalt could be part of the solution to climate change.

Now Asphalt does have other environmental issues, like leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water table and the fact that it’s usually black which absorbs more the sun’s radiation than almost anything else which would reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. But those problems aren’t necessarily solved by using non-petroleum based bioasphault, nor are they unsolvable with bitumen based asphalt.

About 20% of a barrel of oil gets made into products like plastics or foam, that’s not what’s causing climate change. What causing climate change is the 80% that gets refined and burned for cheep energy. So it’s less “Just stop oil” and more “Just stop burning oil”

I find it humorous that y’all think it’s only the company you worked at that had a fragile tech solution held together (sometimes literally) with duct tape and coat hangers, as part of a mission critical business process.

Pretty much every company big or tiny has at least one permanent “temporary” solution in place.