Lots of reasons to dislike Google. That is not one of them.

Is it fair? Probably, yeah. But I don’t think it’s an effective way of framing or addressing the problem.

The challenge is always getting enough people to do enough of an action that it makes an impact. It is certainly more effective, in terms of reducing emissions, to target policy interventions at leverage points - like forcing energy companies to adopt renewables by law and banning further fossil fuel extraction.

Personal action can be useful to live in alignment with your values and to provide examples to others for ways to get involved in the climate movement, but we can’t consume our way out of this.

Why am I not surprised? In the words of the Wu Tang Clan - “cash rules everything around me”

Of all the words in the world, those are certainly some of them

Wind has come down a lot, just over a longer time. Solar and storage are what have really plummeted recently. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy

One of the big challenges now in the US is streamlining permitting, for renewables and for transmission upgrades and expansions.

I’d be interested to see the video you mention!

This is true, but investing in research and subsidizing its production is how we drive costs down. We’ve done a really incredible job of getting clean energy costs down from where they were, but there’s no need to slow our efforts down now

Yep! It’s a good way to get over the fear of a blank page, but I don’t trust it for more than outlines or summaries

You can critique UI design without using an ableist slur

I think scripting is certainly a level 4 activity, since to even get started solving the problem you would need to navigate an IDE and have basic knowledge of a scripting language. Most people wouldn’t even know where to start.

Aw darn, I usually like Vox. I guess I won’t be getting news from them as much anymore

Yeah, that seems reasonable to me

Heck yeah! Love me some pumped hydro

It is for sure a tricky question. Another comment pointed out that we may be coming at the topic from different directions. I’ll admit that the energy demands of AI make me nervous, when I consider how hard the transition to renewables already is without the added load, but I’m not familiar with work in that space to make AI training less energy intense. What options are being worked on?

(Other than SMR or betting on fusion)

Ah, that makes sense! Yeah, I’m out of my depth when it comes to how to train an AI model. I tend to leap into defense mode when intermittency of renewable energy comes up, because it’s very often an anti-renewables talking point, when we actually do have a lot of solutions for it.

We already have a more elegant solution than training AI when solar arrays produce more electricity than the grid needs - batteries. It strikes me as a better option to save the energy for later use than to burn it off to train AI.

Does word soup come before or after word salad? You’re right though lol, I just copied the title directly from the article

Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not

Neat! I’ll probably try it out. Like it or not, short form video is really popular now, so this feels like a good thing to grow Pixelfed and the fediverse

Neat, I’ll have to look into it. Thanks!

Why did it irritate folks at bluesky?

I find the stackable layers interesting, but I like the decentralization of the fediverse. I’m way outside my realm of expertise here, but would it be possible for a platform to adopt both?