In my experience there are two types of software engineers. Those who are narcissistic and believe their own bullshit and those who suffer from crippling imposter syndrome. Few can agree on what is the best way to do things but most will agree to do things the wrong way for money.

God where to begin lol

Honestly? Can’t go wrong with most of the Oscar contenders from 2010 to 2015 or so. 80% of those films are very good. I would say browse those and grab the first one that looks interesting to you. Some notable ones are The Act of Killing (very intense/trigger warnings but an unbelievable film), Blackfish for its cultural reach at the time (also very sad/trigger warning for animal cruelty), and Five Broken Cameras (very relevant with what is happening in Gaza).

Personal favorites? Man on Wire, Won’t you be my Neighbor?, a great short by Errol morris that is super relevant in our highly conspiratorial climate is The Umbrella Man. The Thin Blue Line (also morris) is kind of wild and genre-defining if a little dated - it’s a piece of documentary history though. Won’t spoil the ending but it’s a once in a lifetime film someone gets to make if ever. Also relevant with current police discussions. Harlan County USA is a great film about a Kentucky coal miners strikes focused on their wives. Another piece of cinema history for sure.

I could go on and on, but the nice thing is there are so many amazing ones! If you’re looking for something a little more bite-size, I would check out anything made by Louis Theroux. His ability to get people to open up despite how challenging he is in his questions is remarkable. I don’t know how he does it. HBO has a great collection of his work.

Yes but manipulation - while accurate - has a very sinister connotation. So I’d like to push back ever so slightly there lol

It’s actually a very famous work! He went through a divorce and basically didn’t make the movie he said he would when it got funded lol

The quality has very little to do with it honestly! It’s that if somebody’s making a documentary about something, they clearly care about the subject. In addition, you have to to decide who gets interviewed and who doesn’t. Who gets to tell the story and who doesn’t. Then you have to edit: what stays? What gets cut? How can that ever be objective? You have to choose where the camera is pointed, what lens, what camera. It’s nothing but decisions all the time, all of which reflect your own personal biases and values. And there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s about knowing the limitations of our own perspectives.

I definitely agree. The UK has a wonderful tradition of documentary filmmaking.

Any doctor worth their salt is going to be able to answer the question “how do you know that?” way better than “I just do” or “I have a medical degree” and that’s the point; I’ve yet to find a problem space where that isn’t the case. I don’t try to win arguments by waiving my credentials around and I don’t expect people to take my for “my word” just because of my credentials.

There are plenty of people with titles and fancy degrees that are not worth listening to, like the Ohio doctor (that somehow recently got her medical license back) that claimed the COVID vaccine was making people magnetic, Dr. Oz, etc.

Put another way, do you trust the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire makes you safer but can’t explain why, the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire is worthless, or the person that says “fuck who I am, ground wires are important because they allow tying things like a metal mixer’s body to an incomplete circuit, so that if the metal becomes electrified the circuit is instantly completed and the breaker trips. Alternatively, the circuit becomes completed when you touch the metal and you might die before the breaker trips. If you don’t have a ground you can protect humans with a GFCI which detects current loss at the outlet and cuts the power locally. However, a GFCI may not detect some situations that a ground wire would resolve, like an arc that makes use of a grounded portion of the appliance and may generate enough heat to start a fire. AFCIs have been created to help detect this situation. However, both GFCI and AFCI can fail and thus a ground wire is still a useful backup option that also has value for some sensitive electronics.”?

Most professionals aren’t going to volunteer all of that, but many will volunteer more and more if challenged/questioned.

For reference, my background is in Software Engineering but my father is an electrician at a factory, and a good friend of mine is a forensic electrical engineer. I have no formal credentials in electrical engineering … but I do know a fair bit about the what and why … because I have been inquisitive, I’ve questioned the experts that I’ve come across to understand their field and learned from them.

Hey! There was just an example of that on Lemmy. Some judge ruled that tacos are sandwiches.

Edit: here it is

https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/indiana-judge-rules-tacos-burritos-are-sandwiches/

I don’t know, but it’s bad.

At this point even our best case scenarios are still pretty bad; barring some massive breakthrough in carbon sequestration tech.

And the “business as usual” scenarios are down right scary, millions of deaths annually. Never mind the economic consequences.

In my other comment I talked about what needs to happen on the macro level.

But the micro level is another story.

I’m worried because the paths to mitigating the worst of it depend mostly on countries, people, corporations etc… making major changes to drive reductions.

I seen the strategies the big companies have… they’re not coming close to making the difference needed. And the small companies aren’t even trying to measure their emissions let alone reducing them. It’s that lack of data that’s a part the problem. The data needed for decisions at the micro level isn’t available. It’s difficult to even identify what changes to make because you don’t know what impact a change might have outside of your control.

So far it means we haven’t even got emissions to start going down. At best, they’ve just slowed the rate at which they’re going up.

Governments should be pushing harder to mandate emissions reporting, but it’s politically unpopular so we’re still largely guessing about what decisions to make and that’s what leads to us all pulling in different directions making little progress.

I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.

And I’d love to say they’re stupid and wrong!

/s

(Sorry for the length here… this is actually my shortened version)

89% of climate change is because we took carbon that was permanently sequestered underground in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burned it for cheap energy. We need to stop that entirely but you can’t “just stop oil”, you need to remove the demand not try to disrupt the supply.

There are 4 broad strokes to making that happen:

1. We need a metric fuck ton more carbon-free electricity generation asap. Not just enough to replace all existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation, but enough to supply double to triple the current generation capacity. Only about a quarter of the energy we get from fossil fuels is used to generate electricity, so as we switch things over to electricity, demand will increase exponentially.

Renewables are great and we need to build as much as we possibly can, but what people don’t get is the sheer quantity needed. No matter how much money is thrown at new renewables projects we simply can’t build enough of them fast enough due to bottlenecks in supply chains, raw material mining, grid interconnection times, and other limits.

New nuclear is the only other major option to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. People resist it because of safety or waste concerns (neither are backed by data, nuclear is tied with solar for the safest tech, and it generates less radioactive waste than coal). Or they think nuclear has a big carbon footprint when you include the manufacturing and disposal (also not what the data says, nuclear is tied with wind for the lowest full lifecycle carbon emissions and is about half as much as solar). Or they argue renewables are cheaper which is at least mostly true, but it isn’t as clear cut either when you factor in the costs of connecting that many renewable power projects to the grid. Connecting one nuclear power plant to the grid is significantly cheaper than connecting the 100+ wind and solar farms needed for the same quantity of electricity. Not to mention the cost of storage.

We want to be building renewables, but we can’t wait around for renewables to save us that’s just not going to happen fast enough, our best option is building as many renewables as possible and a bunch of new nuclear and anything else carbon free at the same time.

2. We need to electrify everything that runs on fossil fuels. Cars, furnaces, industrial uses, everything needs to switch from burning oil, gas, and coal, to being electrically powered.

But deciding what to electrify, when and in what order is complicated too…. adding to electricity demand before we’ve removed fossil fuel power generation from the grid, results in the scale-up of the fossil fuel generation to meet the increased demand. Until fossil fuels are gone from the electric grid, we should only electrify something if its efficiency is sufficient to still reduce emissions when we assume it’s powered by the most polluting form of electricity generation on the grid.

Battery electric vehicles have reached that point including factoring in the high-carbon footprint of lithium-ion manufacturing. Even if charged exclusively with coal power a BEV has lower lifetime emissions than an ICE car. Even discarding ICE cars before their end of life to replace with a BEV will generally be a net win.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the other hand (pretty much anything hydrogen-powered for that matter) aren’t even close. Using Hydrogen to power vehicles is not a tech we should be investing in right now.

Even if you’ve built a dedicated solar or wind farm to power something you want to electrify that hasn’t reached that efficiency threshold, you need to ask if it’s better to use that solar farm to displace current coal or natural gas-based electricity generation than to power your newly electrified whatever. This is why even so-called “green hydrogen” is a counter-productive tech to be investing in right now.

It’s also why some DAC and CCS techs shouldn’t be built yet. Even if you plan to build a dedicated solar or wind farm to power it. It’s often more impactful to just connect that solar/wind farm to the grid instead to reduce fossil fuel-based generation than to use it to power CCS. DAC and CCS is a rapidly developing space, we’re all hoping for some new breakthrough techs here that changes this story… so don’t criticize research in this area as a dead end… we don’t know that.

Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why so many of these discussions are more nuanced than people on Reddit/Lemmy claim…. a lot of new electrification technologies are just on the borderline here for not causing more emissions, and it often depends on where you live and what will be scaled up to meet the added electric demand.

All of this points back to why we need massive quantities of carbon-free electricity. Without clean electricity, these other techs aren’t a net win. Many things will cause a net increase in emissions if they’re electrified before carbon-free electricity is abundant. We need more new carbon-free electricity generation built in the next two decades than all the fossil fuel generation we’ve built in the last century put together. Even with ridiculously optimistic exponential growth projections of renewables, it is just not going to be enough. Until we’ve sequestered so much carbon that we’re back to pre-industrial levels, there will always be new techs that are “unlocked” by any additional carbon-free electricity generation.

3. We need society to transition to lower consumption of everything in general. Every product or service you buy has a carbon footprint of some kind. There’s a LOT to be done around making smarter choices about what you buy, yes an EV is better than an ICE car, but public transit, electric scooters, bicycles, and ton of other things are better than any car, and not buying things at all if you if you don’t need them is better still.

Capitilizim’s tendency to push towards ever more consumption is the largest driver of the problem here. We can’t have circular economies if the only metric we’re looking at is the bottom line. Our modern mentalities of disposable products, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and other things we’ve come to associate with a “high quality of life” in wealthy nations need to be re-evaluated.

4. We need better data to make better decisions. Corporations aren’t required to measure and report their emissions. We’re still largely making educated guesses at the carbon footprint of things because the only data available for most things are broad estimates and industry averages. Our supply chains are so interconnected, that trying to calculate how much of an impact a particular product has requires data from potentially thousands of companies that they’re not even collecting, let alone publishing.

The EU is starting to mandate carbon reporting, but the US and Canada are lagging in this area. The US SEC proposed last year making reporting mandatory for publicly traded companies but caved to a bunch of pushback from corporations. They did pass a mandatory reporting rule a couple of months ago, but with significant retractions on what needs to be reported and how soon. They dropped a provision that would have required companies to report on emissions they’re causing to occur in their supply chains (known as “Scope 3” emissions), which would have put significant pressure on smaller and non-publicly traded companies to also report on emissions.

Until the vast majority of corporations are tracking emissions, even the corporations that are trying to reduce emissions are limited in effectiveness because they are basing decisions only on how it impacts them directly and not what impact it might have elsewhere.

Anyhow… that’s the “big things”….

There are a lot of interesting little things that could be happening but aren’t, usually because they clash with a particular political ideology. For example, the government could pay contractors to go from house to house and upgrade the insulation, and it would have one of the best emission reductions for the dollar than almost anything we’ve quantified. But politically there’s a “It’s not fair to take money from my pocket to pay for someone else’s insulation” mentality that some people have that prevent many low-hanging fruit things…

And on the flip side, some of the things that we’re doing that generally aren’t working include:

Most carbon offsets on the market are bullshit, including a lot of nature-based offsets. The mentality of “don’t reduce just offset” emissions doesn’t work. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for offsets, there is, but the carbon offset market in general is full of bad actors. It’s trivially easy to misrepresent creative accounting as a carbon offset, even if it’s not intentional. And since there’s no tangible product delivered, some companies will sell the same carbon offset to multiple buyers. If you don’t believe me, I have a bridge carbon offsets to sell you.

Another thing that isn’t working is most (if not all) RECs, GOs and similar market-based instruments for purchasing “green electricity” from the grid. You’re not changing the net emissions, you are literally just paying for the privilege of claiming your electricity consumption isn’t generating emissions. You’re not making more renewable get built, renewables are already cost-effective, they don’t need someone voluntarily paying extra for them for them to happen. If you pay extra for them, you’re just increasing someone’s profits.

Note that RECs and GOs are not the same things as private PPAs, like when Amazon or Microsoft pay to build new nuclear to power their data centres.  Again lots of nuances here, but PPAs are causing additional carbon-free electricity to be built. RECs and GOs where you’re selling renewables that have already been built aren’t changing anything, just upping profit margins.

Thanks, this made me laugh, hard.😊

It’s DNS. Always DNS.

Yeah, already jumped ship when they started the api and mod nonsense. This was a bit before all that.

I’m replying with a sample size of N=1 so don’t take too much from it, but I suspect it’s not the typical response (at least, not yet anyway).

People do often seem to complain about bot accounts but I don’t know how much of those are in the space of stirring up hot topics to generate content, vs informational (or dis-informational) bot accounts posting on requests for help or explanations.

I guess if people are seeking answers for something, having a bot feed responses to suit some kind of agenda is entirely a possibility, so I wouldn’t write it off as something that could happen. To that end, being wary of posts that look like they might be generated due to the tone/content is probably fair enough.

Maybe the only bots are the replies claiming that other people are bots? 🤔

As a large language learning model, I resent the implication. 😂

I’ve just learned not to give a shit if people want to whip themselves into a frenzy so they can feel the rush of being on the “winning” team by parroting whatever their go-to social conditioning coordinator told them in today’s podcast.

There is absolutely still strong reason for concern. Even without looking into any of the documentation regarding negative effects that we’ve got now, it’s simply not possible to claim that we know everything we need to know about it already. Not by a long shot. Simply the ordinary testing regimes that these sorts of products are supposed to undergo are extremely long themselves.