Archive link: https://archive.ph/DuSj7

> To paraphrase Mean Girls, "stop trying to make hydrogen happen." > > For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it's hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles' exhausts. It's just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year. > > Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects. > > But in reality, that's pretty far from true.

As always, "here's how" can be excised from a hed without any negative side effects.

> In mid-2022, when BYD executive Lian Yubo was asked to compare Chinese manufacturing with Tesla’s technology, he remarked that Elon Musk was an example that all Chinese carmakers could learn from. > > “Tesla is a very successful company no matter what. BYD respects Tesla and we admire Tesla,” he said in an interview on Chinese state media. > > Yet just three years later, Tesla’s technological lead over its Chinese rivals has narrowed dramatically. It is fighting to stay ahead in the world’s largest car market, its sales are falling in many other countries and its efforts to develop fully self-driving vehicles are running into regulatory roadblocks. > > Having once scoffed at the idea that BYD could ever be a competitor to Tesla, Musk returned from a visit to China last year with a sombre assessment for his senior management. “He had seen the BYD factories, the cost and their tech,” says one former Tesla executive, adding that Musk believed China was winning the electric vehicle race. > > As Tesla’s sales decline following Musk’s forays into US politics and amid a lack of new models, BYD has overtaken it to become the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs. Its annual revenues surpassed $100 billion for the first time in 2024.

I can't abide an unnecessary question hed.

> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil. The contrast between the online world and my daily reality has only gotten more jarring. > > Since my own work is focused on topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change, I’m aware of the many challenges facing humanity. Yet, it seems striking that people online seem to be just as furious about the finale of The White Lotus or the latest scandal involving a YouTuber. Everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute worst, no matter how trivial. Is that really what most of us are feeling? No, as it turns out. Our latest research suggests that what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users.

Saw this video on another platform and I thought let me go to YouTube so I can share it, only to hear AI voices. I'm like WTF? I investigate and find out that it's auto dubbed and that there's no option to disable it. Huh?

https://youtube.com/shorts/9V90gOkOJBc

Archive link: https://archive.ph/8jkUu

> On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to make 404 Media. “Paid subscription started,” the email said, which is the subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to 404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber had been referred to 404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person clicked a link to 404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber. > > From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded 404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in, this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent more than ChatGPT. > > This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always working. But even for sites that don’t block ChatGPT, new research from the internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling 1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Google’s own AI snippets and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media websites.

Every time "tech" comes up with a journalism "solution," journalists get laid off while the product gets worse. First it was SEO, then Facebook, then Twitter ... you'd think people trained to detect patterns can do better than just hopping on the latest hype that kills traffic.

Hello, technologically minded peoples, I have a question for you.

I would like to know what is the real consumption of a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and what's the real minimum power supply required to feed one the needed juice.

I ask to know if my father also needs to change is current power supply or not. (For the graphic card itself, he doesn't have a choice but to replace it, since his curent one died.)

> The 21st century is turning out weirder than we thought. For the entire history of art, for example, tools could be used and abused and would work more or less well, but generally helped the wishes and skills of the user. They did not plot against us. Now they can – and do. > > Take the painter's palette. A simple, essential, and harmless tool – just don't lick the chrome yellow, Vincent – affording complete control of the visual spectrum while being an entirely benign piece of wood. Put the same idea into software, and it becomes a thief, a deceiver, and a spy. Not a paranoid fever dream of an absinthe-soaked dauber, but the observed behavior of a Chrome extension color picker. Not a skanky chunk of code picked up from the back streets of cyberland, but a Verified by Google extension from Google's own store. > > This seems to have happened because when the extension was first uploaded to the store, it was as simple, useful, and harmless as its physical antecedents. Somewhere in its life since then, an update slipped through with malicious code that delivered activity data to the privacy pirates. It's not alone in taking this path to evil.

One wonders what might be different if making a living wage didn't usually involve deceit of some form.

> When TechCrunch asked Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration in the U.S.?” the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration” in its chain of thought.

> A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this. > > She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks. > > Damn. She was right. I’d opened it. I’d registered it. But I’d also shelved it. It needed a proper reply, and at that moment, I wasn’t equipped. > > Maybe it got lost between revisiting pictures from 2016 and the reminder I set to cancel my Nibble app 7-day trial on day 6. Maybe I got a call? Perhaps I’d wanted to sink back into that Substack article about reclaiming attention, ironically while still on social media. Maybe I was working one of the four jobs I need to survive under capitalism’s boot heel. Maybe I was doing nothing? > > Does free time now equal availability? > > I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotus episode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide. > > The boundaries between reception and response have collapsed.

> Developing nations are challenging Big Tech’s decades-long hold on global data by demanding that their citizens’ information be stored locally. The move is driven by the realization that countries have been giving away their most valuable resource for tech giants to build a trillion-dollar market capitalization. > > In April, Nigeria asked Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to set concrete deadlines for opening data centers in the country. Nigeria has been making this demand for about four years, but the companies have so far failed to fulfill their promises. Now, Nigeria has set up a working group with the companies to ensure that data is stored within its shores. > > “We told them no more waivers — that we need a road map for when they are coming to Nigeria,” Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director-general of Nigeria’s technology regulator, the National Information Technology Development Agency, told Rest of World. > > Other developing countries, including India, South Africa, and Vietnam, have also implemented similar rules demanding that companies store data locally. India’s central bank requires payment companies to host financial data within the country, while Vietnam mandates that foreign telecommunications, e-commerce, and online payments providers establish local offices and keep user data within its shores for at least 24 months.

> Khan's announcement of the now-vacated rule said that too many "businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription. The FTC's rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want."

Good thing representatives only have to tell their constituents why this is bad. No need to take it all the way to voters.

> The new Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2230 is a single-sided M.2 2230 (22x30mm) form-factor SSD that will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities, reaching sequential read and write speeds of up to 6,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s. The Kingston NV3 is also available in the standard M.2 2280 form-factor.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that this is a not-even-glorified press-release rewrite.

That out of the way, it's pretty amazing that 2230 has become viable at large capacities while still hitting PCIe 4 speeds. Sure, it's not the latest gen in the wild, but my guess is you'd need active cooling for PCIe 5 in this form factor.

My first NVMe drive was shockingly tiny -- like, I know millimetres and all, but I'm old enough that our first (20MB) hard drive was full-height 5¼". Being able to get this kind of throughput in such a small space makes a 2280 look like an SD card adapter for a 2230 microSD.

> Climate change could pose a threat to the technology industry as copper production is vulnerable to drought, while demand may grow to outstrip supply anyway. > > According to a report out today from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), copper mines require a steady water supply to function, and many are situated in places around the world that face a growing risk of severe drought due to shifts in climate. > > Copper is almost ubiquitous in IT hardware because of its excellent electrical conductivity, from the tracks on circuit boards to cabling and even the interconnects on microchips. PwC's report focuses just on chips, and claims that nearly a third (32 percent) of global semiconductor production will be reliant on copper supplies that are at risk from climate disruption by 2035. > > If something is not done to rein in climate change, like drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then the share of copper supply at risk rises to 58 percent by 2050, PwC claims. As this seems increasingly unlikely, it advises both copper exporters and semiconductor buyers to adapt their supply chains and practices if they are to ride out the risk.

> Datacenters are slurping ever more energy to meet the growing demands of AI, but some estimates of future demand imply an increase in hardware that would be beyond the capacity of global chipmakers to supply, according to an environmental nonprofit. > > Warnings about the amount of energy that AI datacenters will consume have been getting more strident. A recent report by Deloitte Insights estimated that the total power required by bit barns in the US will increase by a factor of five by 2035, and consultants Bain & Company issued advice to utility companies to revamp the way they operate to support a rapid scale-up of energy resources. > > But what happens if those estimates are overinflated? If power companies invest heavily in additional power generation and transmission infrastructure, but datacenter growth does not come near the forecast level, the cost of that expansion would have to be borne by other customers.

Which ... is already happening. $50-a-month rate hike?! As recently as 2019, I was paying $25 per month for my first MWh, all inclusive.

> Meanwhile, some US power companies are already set to impose price hikes on consumers because of those pesky bit barns, according to various reports. > > The Financial Times said that National Grid, with users in New York and Massachusetts, is to raise rates by $50 a month, while Northern Indiana Public Service Company is upping monthly rates by $23 a customer. > > Reuters reports that PJM Interconnection, which serves a number of states clustered near the east coast, is set to increase its energy bills by more than 20 percent this summer. Its area of coverage includes Virginia, home to the largest concentration of datacenter capacity in the world.

> >Instagram users have told the BBC of the "extreme stress" of having their accounts banned after being wrongly accused by the platform of breaching its rules on child sexual exploitation. > > > >The BBC has been in touch with three people who were told by parent company Meta that their accounts were being permanently disabled, only to have them reinstated shortly after their cases were highlighted to journalists.

> Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values, and emotional states. > > It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip. > > Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior. > > Social media platforms are bringing massive changes to how people get their news and how they communicate and behave. For example, the “endless scroll” is a design feature that aims to keep users scrolling and never reaching the bottom of a page where they might decide to pause. > > I’m a political scientist who researches aspects of technology that support democracy and social cohesion, and I’ve observed how the design of social media platforms affects them. > > Democracy is in crisis globally, and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimize their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats, and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control. > > There are alternatives, however. Some companies design online platforms to defend democratic values.