Lemmy - RazBot

These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it?

So, Alec over the Technology Connections channel made an hour long video explaining the difference with kW and kWh (obviously with other stuff around it).

I'm living in northern Europe in an old house, with pretty much only electric appliances for everything. We do have a wood stove and oven, but absolute majority of our energy consumption is electricity. Roughly 24 000 kWh per year.

And, while eveything he brings up makes absolute sense, it seems like a moot point. In here absolutely everyone knows this stuff and it's all just common knowledge. Today we went into sauna and just turned a knob to fire up the 6,5kW heaters inside the stove and doing that also triggered a contactor to disengage some of the floor heating so that the thing doesn't overload the circuit. And the old house we live in pulls 3-4kW from the grid during the winter just to keep inside nice and warm. And that's with heat pumps, we have a mini-split units both on the house and in the garage. And I also have 9kW pure electric construction heater around to provide excess heat in case the cheap minisiplit in garage freezes up and needs more heat to thaw the outside unit.

And kW and kWh are still commony used measurement if you don't use electricity. Diesel or propane heaters have labels on them on how many watts they can output right next to the fuel consumption per hour and so on. So I'm just wondering if this is really any new information for anyone.

I assume here's a lot of people from the US and other countries with gas grid (which we don't really have around here), is it really so that your Joe Average can't tell the difference between 1kWh of heat produced by gas compared to electricity? I get that pricing for different power sources may differ, but it's still watt-hours coming out of the grid. Optimizing their usage may obviously be worth the effort, but it's got nothing to do with power consumption.

So, please help me understand the situation a bit more in depth.

Undercover at Reform UK’s biggest ever rally, I saw white men bond over fury at migrants, trans people and politicians

Twenty years after President Bush laid out his vision for electronic health records, the U.S. has spent $100 billion for systems that keep doctors and nurses glued to their screens

“Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza,” laments the Washington Post. “Hospitals Are Reporting More Insurance Denials. Is AI Driving Them?,” reports Newsweek. “AI Raising the Rent? San Francisco Could Be the First City to Ban the Practice,” announces San Francisco’s KQED.

Within the last few years, and particularly the last few months, we’ve heard this refrain: AI is the reason for an abuse committed by a corporation, military, or other powerful entity. All of a sudden, the argument goes, the adoption of “faulty” or “overly simplified” AI caused a breakdown of normal operations: spikes in health insurance claims denials, the skyrocketing of consumer prices, the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. If not for AI, it follows, these industries and militaries, in all likelihood, would implement fairer policies and better killing protocols.

We’ll admit: the narrative seems compelling at first glance. There are major dangers in incorporating AI into corporate and military procedures. But in these cases, the AI isn’t the culprit; the people making the decisions are. UnitedHealthcare would deny claims regardless of the tools at its disposal. Landlords would raise rents with or without automated software. The IDF would kill civilians no matter what technology was, or wasn’t, available to do so. So why do we keep hearing that AI is the problem? What’s the point of this frame and why is it becoming so common as a responsibility-avoidance framing?

On today’s episode, we’ll dissect the genre of “investigative” reporting on the dangers of AI, examining how it serves as a limited hangout, offering controlled criticism while ultimately shifting responsibility toward faceless technologies and away from powerful people.

Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Steven Renderos, Executive Director of MediaJustice, a national racial justice organization that advances the media and technology rights of people of color. He is the creator and co-host, with the great Brandi Collins-Dexter, Bring Receipts, a politics and pop culture podcast and is executive producer of Revolutionary Spirits, a 4-part audio series on the life and martyrdom of Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco Madero.

A massive thanks to @LuanRT for providing the fix regarding to the extraction of the deciphering functions. Also, big thanks to @PikachuEXE for coming up with a potential alternative solution!

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/releases

Apparently Android apps (even in current Android versions) can check for the presence of other Android apps by listing the apps they want to check for in their manifest file. Nothing stops them from listing dozens or hundreds of other apps, and some do exactly that. Up til Android 11 they didn't even have to list the other apps in the manifest. Then Google "tightened" things to be almost as bad. Dumb move, Android.

It's World Backup Day again. Good opportunity to check if your backup mechanisms work as intended.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27947261