internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
Obsidian.md; for fun, although i do tend to write blog posts about the things i read
the going theory is that this is effectively the western division of NetEase getting axed because they’re not important enough and “cost too much” to keep around
resetERA is an unusual source for this, but the OP is just direct screencaps off of LinkedIn of people saying they were laid off, and it’s hard to get more definitive than that in terms of sourcing
The biggest problem with concrete is that the resource investment is front loaded.
the biggest problem with concrete is we use too much of it and it’s severely environmentally destructive; just on its own, for example, its manufacture contributes anywhere between 4 and 8% of all CO2 emissions, and most of that is from the production process and not from secondary aspects like transportation.
it’s very funny because at the absolute most this maybe saves like, what, two steps in the best case? AI is so bad at this stuff that you have to human-edit it into something that looks good most of the time anyways
take a week off, you were told the issue politely and this is not an acceptable way to respond
bluntly: why would an Indian news website use metric to satisfy a bunch of foreigners who don’t read their paper over a cultural numbering system that people on the Indian subcontinent have used for centuries without problems and which is almost universally understood across the subcontinent’s dozens of languages
Kind of annoying to have to click the damned link if the text can just be in the body of the post. What, do you work for PC gamer?
no offense but why are you on a link aggregator (and a clone of Reddit in particular) if you’re averse to clicking links? that’s literally the point of this form of social media: emphasis on sharing interesting links from other places, with the expectation that you’ll follow them.
in any case we strongly discourage the practice of copying the entire article because it’s technically copyright infringement, we generally expect people to actually engage with what’s posted instead of drive-by commenting, and it’s just generally bad form to rob writers of attention and click-throughs for their work.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
RTFA before replying
As many as one million black-footed ferrets lived on the continent in the late 1800s, but by the late 1950s, the species was presumed extinct. Scientists discovered a wild population in 1964, but even that group died out, and a captive breeding effort failed. Since a second rediscovery of a wild population in 1981, conservationists have worked hard to conserve the species using traditional breeding programs as well as more innovative technologies, including freezing semen and cloning.
One of the challenges conservationists face when tasked with bringing back a species from the brink of extinction is limited genetic diversity, which leads to inbreeding and can make offspring more vulnerable to issues, including hereditary abnormalities, poor reproductive efficiency and increased mortality rates.
The current population of black-footed ferrets—thousands of which have been reintroduced across the western U.S. since the 1990s—is all descend from just seven individuals, except for a few clones and Antonia’s new offspring. That’s a recipe for genetic bottlenecks that threaten the longevity of the species.
Cue cloning. In 1988, scientists had the foresight to collect tissue samples from a black-footed ferret named Willa after she died and preserve the material in the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Willa never reproduced, so her genetic material was not included in the modern ferret population. Her preserved genes contain three times more genetic diversity than living black-footed ferrets do.
Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.
i think you’re operating under 1) an extremely 1800s understanding of how fire-resistant a wood skyscraper would be and 2) a misguided understanding of where fire safety problems tend to come from in most contemporary buildings
wood is not uniquely flammable,[1] and the vast majority of the problem in a fire is not going to be with the actual wood itself (as is true of steel, concrete, etc.) but moreso with the fact that we make nearly everything that isn’t the building itself out of extremely combustible materials and we probably should not do that? as i recall that was the entire problem at Grenfell, where the cladding used was a flammable plastic that rendered any airgapping measures between flats useless and allowed the fire to spread uncontrollably. the fire at Grenfell also reportedly began from a refrigerator that was plastic-backed.
it can rather trivially be treated to be fire-resistant–and as the person you’re replying to notes has already been tested extensively and implemented in existing buildings to that end, and in multiple locales, just from a brief search on the subject ↩︎
my understanding is yes that’s the general avenue people are researching; there’s also the actual energy inputs powering steelmaking that hypothetically can be made greener (currently, it’s a process that seems to almost exclusively use fossil fuels because of the very high temperatures needed)
as the article kind of notes steelmaking in specific is very carbon intensive, so we either need to use less of it or decarbonize its production (or more likely a mixture of both). the statistics on this according to Wikipedia are:
As of 2021, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for around 11% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide and around 7% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.[12][13] Making 1 ton of steel emits about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.[14]
one thing i’d be interested in: is it possible to make a fun 4X-style game that challenges the very premises of 4X (which are mostly patterned after the models of expansion we’re familiar with in the West)?
Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.
Since June 10, the campaign has organized multiple disruptive civil disobedience actions every single week. Convened by Climate Defenders, Planet Over Profit, Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change (where I am the senior climate campaigner), and endorsed by over 115 partner groups, the protests have been attended by over 4,000 people, and more than 600 have been arrested. Actions have included sit-ins at the biggest banks and insurance companies backing fossil fuel projects, interruptions of Wall Street executives’ public appearances and visits to those executives’ homes. But most of all, they have consisted of numerous blockades of the entrances to the global headquarters of Citi, preventing employees from entering work multiple times a week.
I am not understanding what you want from me
i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like “I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals” and “This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.”, how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that’s why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.
in terms of notes usually i just do unrefined, copypasted highlights into Obsidian to start and then synthesize my notes into prose later; for most books i also tend to export my highlights into their own markdown document so i always have the initial highlights even after the prose