Thanks!

There are a hundred different issues that are more important to me than the usability of my notebook in a court proceeding. And even so, that proceeding might easily be one against you, so why would you want to produce reliable evidence against yourself?

But when thinking about society and the environment, there are different considerations that make the simplistic capitalist thinking wrong in certain situations. Human labor is such a resource that cannot be strictly evaluated by monetary values.

For example (caveat: slight intentional alteration): > would you drive to the library and spend hours or days scanning through reference material... or would you do a [prompt and have AI provide you with a summary]?

Of course on the first glance, as a lazy person myself, the choice is obvious. But is it really? Doing the research yourself has secondary benefits, such as higher familiarity with and learning of the topic. Even as a boss who pays money for people who do that, I'll sometimes gladly pay money so they'll learn and become better employees.

> That is essentially what the "environmental impact" debate comes down to, but nobody is talking about it that way.

Because the environmental impact of human labor behaves differently than the environmental impact of other resources.

If you consume less steel the environmental benefit is clear. Less consumption means less extraction, less processing, less waste and pollution, etc. There is also a direct feedback loop through our capitalist system to induce this. Nobody will mine iron ore that won't be paid for, processed, sold as steel. In that sense, steel is a flexible resource, because there is a direct relation between demand, supply and environmental impact.

If you consume less human labor, things are not so clear and easy. There is a base rate of the "production" of humans, that is relatively independent from the flow of money (actually, it might even be an inverse relation: the less money you have, the more you procreate). The production of human labor is also a slow process, since it takes around 2 decades for a human to grow up. So the resource "human labor" is basically an always-there-resource at some amount that won't be influenced by market forces. The environmental impact of that amount of humans won't be influenced by market forces. So for the environment, it is actually better to give those humans something to do, and use human labor as an always-there-resource, instead of using flexible resources. Same thing for society, humans with nothing to do are generally considered a problem, so you need to give them something to do.

So in a strictly capitalist sense, you are right. But when talking about the environment and society, human labor is a special resource that cannot be treated like other resources.

I'm guessing with a few more tries to get the right positioning and amount of explosives, those terrorists could blow up US ships as well as the Ukrainians do Russian ones.

That ignores the fact that the then-unemployed human will not change it's resource consumption in any way, because a human coding or a human sitting around idly do have roughly the same resource footprint.

Except of course if you are arguing for doing the Skynet thing and terminate all humans replaced by AI...

Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.

Maybe VR glasses will be big soon. Do we trigger on 'blink'? 'look harder'? 'eyeball wiggle'?

Maybe voice interfaces? Trigger on 'say it louder'? 'stuttering'? 'hesitant'?

Maybe guestures, facial expressions, thought patterns? 'think hard about that button to trigger tooltip'? 'furl your eyebrows'?

As I've said, decades have passed with no progress. If progress in other fields is a reason for waiting, it'll be stagnant forever and eventually just dead.

We've had things like https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwidgets-module.html since the late last millenium. Back in the day, there was Delphi, now there is Lazarus, with even nicer Data-Bound widgets. Look at some tutorial for those, that's like magic, and also from before 2000!

Does anyone know why there have been 3 lost decades in native HTML widgets? Any ideas how to fix this?

Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.

You are guessing right. To receive direct debit transactions, your bank typically forces you into an insurance contract to cover disputed transactions, plus they block a minimum balance on your account, plus they require some overview of your company assets, in case the former two measures aren't enough. No chance to get direct debit approved as a private person or small company. And the amounts you can receive, as well as the number of transactions will be limited to your insurance coverage. And if there are more than a very small number of disputes, you are done.

Which is why for small businesses, direct debit is only viable through some intermediary, if at all.

In Dieselgate VW got caught, made the supervisory authorities and politicians look bad, which is why the authorities also weren't inclined to sweep it under the rug completely. They just shielded VW from the financial consequences in Germany (German VW customers got shafted).

Blocking GrapheneOS is the useless "pretending" part of compliance. They don't really want to do security, because that would cost money, so they pick some actions that seem drastic, harsh and don't cost them anything to implement. Later, when there is a security incident, they will point to their huge heap of pretend compliance, whine a bit about state sponsored actors, high criminal intent and other obvious deflecting bullshit. But they will get away with it, because they did the compliance dance, so they are obviously compliant and did nothing wrong. Nobody in authority will look twice als long as they are neither annoyed or made to look bad.

tl;dr: compliance in Germany is performative

But WebPKI, which letsencrypt is concerned with, doesn't need long-lived signatures at all. TLS connections live a few days at the most, that's how long the connection signatures have to hold up. The only thing that really needs some lifetime are CA certificate signatures and the CA keys themselves. And even for those CA certificates currently, CRQCs won't be a problem before they expire. And browser update cycles are quick enough that new CA certificates aren't that much of a problem anymore.

That's not the meaning of a "high trust society".

You are _trusting_ that the banks and the government are not out to get you. That doesn't mean that they _really_ aren't out to get you. You just believe they aren't and haven't yet been disappointed enough to change your belief...

Edit: and the original article shows btw. that there is yet another failure mode, not only "out to get you". It's that the banks and the government obviously don't care a bit if some people are intentionally left behind.

No, it doesn't. The article is explicitly about intraday-prices. So day-ahead clearance made invalid assumptions about generations and consumption that were not met during the day. This kind of miscalculation does require additional (costly) redispatch measures to mitigate the overproduction, and it can affect grid stability.

And even if there were negative end prices happening: There are metal smelting works and other operators of big resistors who will happily heat up even more. So prices will probably never get so negative that a normal consumer can ever profit from them.