Muehe

You people think it will be a night and day collapse? Get real.

You know that's the thing, nobody really knows. It's all predictions based on necessarily flawed models. And they range from relatively mild changes until the turn of the century on the one hand, over methane released from thawing permafrost leading to a steep acceleration of warming in the middle, to having crossed an irreversible tipping point decades ago that will lead to an algae bloom in the oceans which will render the atmosphere unbreathable on the other hand. We can only hope it's on the former end of the spectrum, but I wouldn't bet on it personally.

All true, and maybe I have been understating my negative estimation of the whole ordeal a bit, but we are like five levels of escalation deep at this point, and all I'm saying is it's getting harder and harder to gain a nuanced understanding of the situation. Which is important.

Anyway, given the totality of what I have seen so far LTT has either always been or just devolved into an entirely toxic work environment. Their reaction so far doesn't inspire any confidence in the slightest. On the contrary, it reinforces all of the accusations.

This isn’t “something”. This is a “we’re sorry (not really)” video. If you watch it in the context of “I have no favorites in this game” and look it it pretty objectively, it feels like just a bait to try to stop the bleeding.

Yeah that's what I meant with "Southpark-y 'I'm sorry' vibes". For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

P.S.: And that's... "something".

A week? To refine all the processes in that size of a company?

No, a week without videos to get started with reviewing processes. I agree with you in general though, if it stops there it's nothing more than PR. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but the allegations by that former employee are certainly a dampener on an optimistic view of the situation.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY

There are some steps mentioned that they will take, like not making any videos for a week and reviewing internal processes. Getting some Southpark-y "I'm sorry" vibes there, at least it's something though.

But the video (at least its creation if not its release) seems to predate the Twitter/X thread of a former LTT employee alleging sexual harassment and other toxic workplace behaviour: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741

So not very surprisingly most Youtube comments I've seen refer to that bomb dropping.

Assuming you mean this thread, I find it hard to see how this could be a bug. It doesn't happen with curl, unless you make curl pretend to be a browser. And only happens on certain target websites known to be despised by Musk. I mean it's still possible that it's a bug, but not very likely given these circumstances.

The possibility of a tipping point cascade is generally without dispute as far as I know. It is likely based on what we do understand, however predicting how likely exactly, the severity of consequences, and the interaction with positive and negative feedback loops from other climate systems is not well understood.

The consensus seems to be that it's virtually certain with a warming of 4-5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels.

Ignoring an existential risk like that because one lacks understanding doesn't seem wise.

Does this mean we’re all going to die?

No; at least, that’s unlikely.

Well that "unlikely" there merits some debate I would say. Yes there is reason for cautious optimism, but there is also the very real possibility of climate change becoming an extinction level event for humanity, specifically by a cascade of tipping points through several globally relevant climate systems being triggered. The damages that will be caused just by optimistic projections of warming are not well understood either:

Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).

Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. [...]

There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered.

Source

So is the extinction of humanity through climate change certain? No. But is it possible? Yes, and the likelihood is very poorly understood.

Another aspect that is often overlooked in this debate is that the beginning of the holocene mass extinction is very much pre-historic, insofar as the spread of homo sapiens over the globe closely matches to the extinction of mega-fauna wherever we appeared, unsettling ecosystems millions of years old, and reducing biodiversity further and further. Other ecosystems will only be able to compensate for so long before they go extinct, and so on, and the explosion of complexity that usually follows after a mass extinction happens on timescales longer than humanities existence. If or when this cascades to the top of the food chain is anybodies guess.

Klar sind die Ultrareichen deutlich schlimmer mit ihrer Klimabilanz als der Durchschnitt aber wenn man das gesamtgesellschaftlich sieht sind das halt nur extrem wenige Leute so dass es nicht reicht wenn nur die sich ändern.

Das vernachlässigt meiner bescheidenen Meinung nach aber einen ziemlich zentralen Faktor, nämlich die gesamtgesellschaftliche Machtverteilung zwischen diesen beiden Gruppen. Wem die Produktionsmittel gehören um es mit den Sozialisten zu sagen. Otto-Normalverbraucher hat persönlich schlicht kaum eine Handhabe gegen klimaschädliche Produktions- und Transportarten auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene, "die Ultrareichen" hingegen schon.

Nun kann man natürlich anmahnen, dass auch individuelle Verbraucher eine Verantwortung haben "mit ihrem Portmonee zu votieren"; Aber vor dem Hintergrund, dass ein Großteil der Treibhausgase durch die Industrie erzeugt werden, und der steuernde Einfluss auf diese hauptsächlich in den Händen einer anderen Gruppe liegt ist diese Verantwortungsverteilung wie Du sie darstellst quasi umgekehrt proportional zur Realität. Geld ist Macht, und Eigentum verpflichtet.

How is a language based approach that completely abstracts away actual knowledge, and just tries to sound “good enough” any kind of useful in a medical workflow?

A LLM cross-referencing a list of symptoms against papers and books could be helpful for example. There is so much medical literature available these days and in so many languages that no one person can hope to gain a somewhat clear overview, much less keep up with all the new stuff coming out.

Of course this should only be in assistance to a trained medical professional, as all neural networks are prone to hallucinations. You should also double-check results of NNs that interpret medical images, they may straight-up hallucinate or just pick up on correlation instead of causation (say all the cancer images in your training set having a watermark from the same lab or equipment manufacturer).

Climate change is probably the most clearly a “big fucking issue” for mankind. I’m fully aware it’s going to kill a huge portion of the population before the end of this century and that I’m probably going to be one of them. I don’t expect to retire or have any kind of life beyond MAYBE 60 because we’ll be locked in famine wars and constant civil unrest.

Can't say I haven't wandered those paths of thought, but what keeps nagging at the back of my mind is the possibility of a positive feedback loop of ecosystem collapse, cascading through all of it. From my limited understanding it's somewhat likely to happen but nobody can tell the exact likelihood or outcome. Best guess likelihood of it happening climbs exponentially between 1.5°C and 5°C of warming, which is why limiting warming to 1°C was determined as a threshold initially and subsequently raised to 1.5°C because 1°C became a pipe dream. Depending on how pessimistically you want to do your measurements we have now already reached those 1.5°C of warming.

For reference: Wikipedia:Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system#Cascading_tipping_points

The rise of global fascism and it’s persecution of “the other” or “enemies of the state” as seen in the USA, Israel, China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, The Philippines, and many South American and African nations is another major issue that’s being largely ignored and/or actively progressed by an alarming number of people today. Is another thing that is being underplayed in the media and it going to ADD TO the major global instability that climate change is going to cause.

Yeah tell me about it, the far right party in Germany keeps getting new poll records, now breaking 20%. In fucking Germany! Thought I'd never see the day. And therein lies the crux. I think the move towards the right on a global scale is in large part reactionary towards the largest problem on a global scale happening right now, which is climate change. Of which we keep seeing incrementally bigger symptoms, chiefly among them in this context migration as well as economic problems related and unrelated to that. The sensory information of our society already indicates how vast this problem will be. And unless the underlying cause is fixed, this trend won't reverse itself; On the contrary, we will see democracies collapse left, right, and centre, pun intended.

OP is in their mid-40s.

Ok, this is too ad hominem for me, so I'm going to disregard that part of the argument.

I’d hate for our discussion to be about semantics,

Semi-off-topic rant incoming, but hard disagree on this one. This is a really weird statement that is commonly used for the opposite of what it actually means (although not in this case). I don't enjoy syntactical discussion, e.g. whether I used the wrong sentence structure or whatever, as long as the meaning is clear. But discussion on "the meaning of words", i.e. their semantics, is absolutely necessary in many cases, here about whether we use the same definition of this idiom. You can't properly communicate without that, so if you don't discuss semantics where appropriate you are talking at each other instead of with each other, despite using the same language.

but I’m saying that we don’t believe in the problem.

Case in point here, you are operating from your intuitive definition of the head-in-the-sand idiom which doesn't fit the situation at hand, I'm operating from the Merriam-Webster definition which does fit the situation at hand.

Just to be clear, I don't intend any judgement here, just saying it fits that one specific definition of this idiom, which is why I quoted it originally.

As stated in the grandparent of this comment I can agree with many of your examples, so I understand your revulsion of categorising your behaviour as sticking your head into the sand. But to people who recognise and acknowledge the problem, unlike you who recognises but doesn't acknowledge the problem, you are sticking your head into the sand.

FYI you can just copy over the settings directory to port all your config/passwords/bookmarks/profiles/history. On Linux it's in the ~/.mozilla directory, on Windows it's somewhere in the user directory, AppData specifically IIRC.