As we still technically measure company’s success via revenue, and in a lot of ways we still measure progress with GDP, things like this still matter in the short run.

As China transitions into full socialism, I think that things like this will matter a lot less than simply resources and quality of life for employees.

We’re already starting to see China care less about GDP compared to other countries, although they’re still compared using GDP from a lot of sources, even internal to China. And while the success of companies is still dependent on profits, it’s still technically important that they have them.

Shoot, I don’t have it offhand but you should send the Ben Norton video back, where he talked about how China is letting their property sector fail in order to shift their economy to being focused on green energy and tech.

As well, he mentions how morally corrupt it is to use property as an investment and how shifting where your investments are is actually a better idea.

As a communist, I gravitate like a moth to the light towards any anti-capitalist news media. So thank you for posting that this was fake, because I also like to believe real things, and it’s frustrating with stuff like this happens.

On the other hand, it is also frustrating that capitalist news media takes these stories and runs with it without doing any research whatsoever.

How many times has an “onion” story been reported on by some news media?

Okay, unrelated but I gotta ask because it’s the first time I’ve seen this. What’s up with the hammer and sickle hamburger? Lol.

A base on the moon by 2030 is pretty amazing of an ambition already, so I’m looking forward to how that develops. Any sort of Maglev tunneling system would be pretty amazing to witness, even in video.

Back to on Earth. Yeah, that makes sense. Replacing flying is a really big deal. I’m just really worried about the engineering implications of this. If it’s not actually feasible, then they’re gonna waste a lot of time trying to make it happen. Then again, they do have trains pretty much figured out and they can walk and chew gum at the same time as opposed to any Western government which can’t even get the basics right. So at least they have the expertise to at least attempt it.

I guess I just had it in my head that it was basically a big scam and was so infeasible it wasn’t really worth trying. Then again, their public infrastructure is all state-owned, right? So it’s not like there’s some capitalist who’s making bank on selling this idea with no possibility of a product.

Then again, it would be funny if China succeeded in this, where everybody else has failed. Hey, they’ve got the smartest engineers, so I guess I’ll sit back and watch the development.

Okay, so this breakthrough was just Maglev. But they do plan on using a Hyperloop eventually?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Musk releases the Hyperloop thing to try to prevent California from getting high-speed rail? The whole thing is he wanted trains to die so that cars would remain popular so that he could push for self-driving cars for high-speed highway travel that would normally be boring to drive. He always knew that the Hyperloop was basically impossible.

And hasn’t hyperloop been basically discredited as a realistic form of long distance travel? Outside of a kilometer or two of distance, keeping even a moderately low pressure environment is Too difficult, cost ineffective, and a maintenance nightmare.

Sorry for so many follow up questions. I am perpetually away from a high quality research machine, so I can only yell at clouds right now. But this just seems strange to me.

Ahhh, Okay.

So I would normally say ‘gen zee dong’, but its really ‘gen “zed”-ong’.

As an american, I’m now confused. How should it be pronounced?

if the admins saw something messed up, it was gone, with your account probably soon to follow. I never had the chance to take part in forums on the “old internet”, but from my understanding it was similar to them, where the moderators knew a troll when they saw one, generally didn’t take much shit, and the members mostly were fine with it.

Does the lib finally understand how to build healthy communities?

This, as you can guess, scared off most right-wingers. I saw plenty of people from r/RedditAlternatives go there and come back complaining about censorship or commies.

This probably saved Lemmy.

Ooh, he might have a point 😉

you would maybe see a text post of someone mocking western reporting on the Uyghur genocide

Nah, he still bleeds fascist

Honestly the owner <of the wolfballs instance>, though definitely right wing, was a pretty chill guy, and he believed in federation and stuff. Kinda unfortunate the instance died

Yup, still a fascist

But yeah, that’s how Lemmy’s devs, through no fault of their own, probably saved lemmy

God I wish Libs could hear themselves the way we do. The fucking conspiratorial way they sound. “Well the devs accidentally saved lemmy by actually being progressives and caring about a healthy communities… Dumb tankies…” I don’t want to be all stereotypical but OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES LIBS

Edit: Sorry got fired up about this one. I’m calming down as soon as I posted. I still think libs are dumb tho.

Ugh, Liberals. One day MLs are ultra-leftist tankies, the next we’re not even really that left. I feel whiplash right now.

That’s a fair point. I’m not sure where the power usage will bottom out, but low-powered devices might get useful fairly soon.

Ah yes, science journalism is pretty bad no matter who’s making the science. At least it’s not all signaphobic and crap.

But it starts off talking about the Terminator. Weird. And then it mentions that these batteries can be used in AI applications at every opportunity that they could. But these would be terrible for AI applications! AI takes a ton of energy.

But we’ve been using radioactive batteries in niche applications for years, and this is a great innovation in that space. Low-powered satellites and things like that might see a lot of use of these!

They did, but from the sounds of it I’m guessing they’re just gonna be a physically bigger one. This is a very very small battery, but produces very little energy. But easy enough to just slap a few of them together.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the power density or anything like that.

This specific technology will never be in charge of running a smartphone or anything like that. But maybe a tweak or innovation on these radioactive batteries could get them to be a few watts and you could get a super low-powered cell phone device that could be used in emergencies only and last for like 50 years.

Yeah, this was a quick and dirty thought, but effectively that’s exactly what I mean. An application built from scratch today using modern high-level programming libraries will take more RAM and more CPU to do the same thing than an app written in 2005 does, generally speaking.

Of course, for those people who still write C, C++, or choose to write Rust or Go, or some of the other low-level languages, or even Java, but without major frameworks, can still achieve the type of performance an app written in 2005 could. But for people coming out of college and/or code schools nowadays, you just reach for a big fat framework like spring or use a high level language like JavaScript or Python or Ruby with big frameworks, and your application will by default use more resources.

Though the application might still be fast enough, I’m not even saying that an application written in Python will be slow, but I will say that an application written in Python will by default use about 10x more CPU in RAM than a similar application written in Rust. I mean, maybe the application only uses 10 megabytes of RAM. When the equivalent efficient application would use 1 megabyte of RAM, both of those are very efficient and very fast and would be just fine. But when the difference is between 10 gigabytes of RAM and 1 gigabyte of RAM, yeah, at that point in time, you’re pretty much just taking advantage of RAM being cheap.

And it’s not even necessarily a bad thing that we do this. There’s just a balance to be had. It’s okay to write in higher level language if it means you can get some stuff done faster. But major applications nowadays choose to ship an entire browser to be the base layer of their Application. Just because it’s more convenient to write cross-platform code that way. That’s too much and there’s already a lot of work going towards fixing this problem as well. We’re just sort of seeing the worst of it right now.

More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don’t understand how it works.

Yeah, I’m not one to use insulting terms, it’s more of a natural process of an industry lowering the bar to entry.

But there really is something to be said for those old applications that were built rock solid, even if they only came out with a new version once every four years.

More frequent releases of a smaller feature set isn’t wrong. I’d be happy getting high quality application updates every month or so.

But as with all things, the analysis falls on the side that capitalism just doesn’t incentivize the right things. Quarterly profit drives lots of features delivered poorly instead of a few good features delivered occasionally. Of course the developers get blamed for this when really they are just a product of a broken system. We invent insulting terms for them instead of going after the real problem, Because, of course, we don’t have an understanding of materialism in the west.

Oh well.

Without giving anything specific away, I am a software developer and a consultant, and mostly work on web stuff.

I’ll try to keep this short, but in general, yes. Basically, computers keep getting faster, which allows software developers to use higher-level libraries, which are actually less efficient, and thus your average piece of software actually takes more processing power and RAM than back in the day.

As well, because of those high-level libraries, programming is a lot easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, that means that we just hire cheaper developers that aren’t as skilled, and they have a harder time tracking down and fixing bugs. Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can’t always fix things that arise inside of them easily.

But software development companies have basically figured out that shitty software doesn’t really hurt their bottom line in the end. For the most part, people will use it if it’s a name brand piece of software, like Google or Apple or Microsoft. They don’t need to build high quality software because it’s basically going to be used by default. The money will come in if you corner a market or if you build something unique, or contract with another business. It doesn’t actually have to be high quality.

As well, websites make more money the more ads you put on them. So it doesn’t matter how efficient you build it, it’s going to be slow. And it doesn’t matter how slow it is, because you’re going to make more money the more ads and tracking you have. All you need is good search engine optimization and you will get traffic by default. SEO Is easier said than done, but the point is nobody really focuses on performance when it’s more profitable to focus on search engines.

Fastmail is what I use. It’s fast!

Got my own domain too, it’s fantastic as I can manage infinite emails easily, be my own domain manager, and it’s like 3 bucks a month paid annually.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

Eh, still a liberal answer. good luck hitting them in their paycheck without effectively taking their entire business away from them.