Wow, I can't believe The Handmaid’s Tale was on the list. That book is excellent and not offensive at all
It's offensive to the people who are trying to build the Republic of Gilead.
Readit NewsAntiEgo commented on "None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill bookriot.com/penguin-rand... · Posted by u/healsdata
AntiEgo commented on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/Vinnl
I volunteered to do some work in a rural village in the Dominican Republic years ago and got instructions to take several forms of public transportation from the airport to downtown Santo Domingo and then the town of Ocoa and finally either walk up the hill to El Limon or ride on a motorcycle with somebody.
I saw motorcycle taxis and minibuses that run between cities and have the cobrador hanging out the side to rustle up passengers and where you might sit next to somebody holding a chicken. I rode in a "public car" which was painted red and drove in a circle and got out at a place that I thought was a bus station until I realized the tickets on the wall had the names of US college football teams and it was really a sportsbook.
In the developing world it is common to see many forms of less formal transit. Maybe standards aren't that high and maybe I'd feel different if I'd missed the last bus to Ocoa, but it struck me as an economical, fast and efficient system.
This is my experience travelling as well--Latin America has public transit that is an order of magnitude better than anything I've used in Canada or USA.
The success in s.a. highlights how much of a problem cars are causing in n.a. cities. Even if a well financed public or private bus service wanted to run frequent lines at rush hour, those buses would be stuck in slow car traffic. In nordic countries, the bus and trams have dedicated lanes, and mass transit is generally faster than cars.
AntiEgo commented on University of Texas-led team solves a big problem for fusion energy news.utexas.edu/2025/05/0... · Posted by u/signa11
I remain skeptical that fusion will ever be a commercially viable energy source. I'd love to be wrong.
The engineering challenges are so massive that even if they can be solved, which is far from certain, at what cost? With a dense high-energy plasma, you're dealing with a turbulent fluid where any imperfection in your magnetic confinement will likely dmaage the container.
People get caught up on cheap or free fuel and the fact that stars do this. The fuel cost is irrelevant if the capital cost of a plant is billions and billions of dollars. That has to be amortized over the life of the plant. Producing 1GW of power for $100 billion (made up numbers) is not commercially viable.
And stars solve the confinement problem with gravity and by being really, really large.
Neutron loss remains one of the biggest problems. Not only does this damage the container (ie "neutron embrittlement") but it's a significant energy loss for the system and so-called aneutronic fusion tends to rely on rare fuels like Helium-3.
And all of this to heat water to create steam and turn a turbine.
I see solar as the future. No moving parts. The only form of direct power generation. Cheap and getting cheaper and there are solutions to no power generation at night (eg batteries, long-distance power transmission).
The steam reactor I guess you might be describing is tokamak, which i agree will be a dead end technology.
There are interesting small fusion reactors that skip the steam step. They compress plasma magnetically, and when the fusion happens, the expanding plasma in turn expands the magnetic field, and the energy is harvested directly from the field. No steam and turbines.
Here is the video where I learned about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
Maybe any physicists in this thread could share insight on how feasible this is?
Your main point stands of course: this is a moonshot project, and solar works TODAY!
AntiEgo commented on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/magicalist
Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.
Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.
The feds had it labeled, "Canada Carbon Rebate", and to even get that they had to fight the banks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-pricing-rebates-land...
AntiEgo commented on Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (2019) wired.com/story/archive-o... · Posted by u/Tomte
Sure, it works for your anime fan site, but what about when money is involved, like in a search engine? That attracts bad actors, who can use their power to abuse your site.
I noticed the article didn't speculate on why, but I think you nailed it. This system is probably incompatible with a commercial site. It requires too many volunteers.
AntiEgo commented on Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living videotoflip.com/... · Posted by u/momciloo
It almost looks like something I could make myself, but cutting those tiny pages while keeping them perfectly indexed would surely be where my diy would go wrong. Good work OP for working out that special sauce!
It's a clever idea, and it's encouraging to see that there are still clever ideas at the small-business scale still waiting to be invented.
Users, not tools, should be judged.
It is unlikely anyone is going to perform act of terrorism with this, or any kind of deep fakes that buy Easter European elections. The worst outcome is likely teens having a laugh.
"Teens having a laugh" can escalate quickly to, "... at someone else's expense," and this distinction is EXACTLY the sort of subtlety an algorithm can't filter.
This does not need to become a thread about bullying and self harm, but it should be recognized that this example is not benign or victimless.
This genie is out of the bottle, let us hope that laws about users are enough when the tools evolve faster than legislative response.
[edit:spelling]
AntiEgo commented on US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward reuters.com/technology/us... · Posted by u/christhecaribou
Reminder that a mere 15 years ago, Walmart was the unfair monopolist whose market position rendered competition infeasible.
Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)
Amazon's "favoured nation" policy stipulates that vendors can't sell an item anywhere else for a lower price. This policy seems designed by them to put a moat between them and retail.
AntiEgo commented on Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks blog.archive.org/2024/09/... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.
Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.
I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.
What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...
(Edit: formatting)