Ben Matthews

I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I’d believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.

Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

Indeed to use scala-native you’d need pure-scala libraries, but the core lib re-implements most java lib, and there are now small simple external libs available for common tasks like file management, database, etc. - for example check out the lihaoyi suite.
I mainly use scala-js (to make this) which was formerly a java app - as it compiles to both js and jvm (cross-project) can gradually convert stuff you already wrote. I’ve tried native for stuff like pre-processing data files.

I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

Scala compiles either to native, js or jvm - obviously the IO / interface options vary between these envs, but the lang is the same. Recently Scala 3.5 incorporates a simple-to-use CLI which makes it easier to compile to native (or just run a small file as a script, or experiment with a repl), native binaries are small and fast, and there are some simple io libraries. Since you can also compile to jvm to interop with java, that might help with transition.

I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)

Trying to imagine what’s the application of mats of electric seaweed - if the energy could somehow make them self propelling, and self replicating, could get interesting, big potential surface area …?

Some good digging - indeed it is hard to understand all the different ways to define and interpret climate sensitivity.

Well, in most countries wind and solar are rapidly growing compared to hydro. A more critical question for India is what else could replace the melting Himalayan glaciers and reducing snow cover, as a storage of water for the dry season?

Clearly there’s a big gap between greenwash rhetoric and practical reality, but that’s not unusual all over the world. The big question here is not the design of the central buildings, but whether it makes sense, as long-term sustainable development, to relocate the capital, and it seems to me there are arguments both ways. Jakarta is low-lying, literally sinking into the rising sea, and the island of Java is overcrowded - so something had to change. The new capital will lead to some deforestation on Borneo, on the other hand by bringing elites nearby they may re-evaluate the value of the jungle, it could be harder to hide destruction. The new location has potential for sea transport, but may lead to an over-dependence on air-transport.
Maybe useful to compare with other countries that moved their capital for geographical balance, and to avoid rising sea-level and overcrowding, for example Lagos to Abuja, or the new egyptian constructions SE of Cairo.

Also the global impact would likely be much greater, due to the co-operation factor.
On the other hand, there is a time-lag to policy impact, also exogenous surprises (superimposing past presidents on that plot may be revealing).

Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven’t yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion

Curious that the richer (western) countries seem more enthusiastic about taxing the rich …

It slows down, an effect of cold water from melting ice passing south of greenland, which has a local cooling effect, while the atlantic as a whole gets warmer. Consequence is a greater heat contrast along that front, which may intensify the sequence of low pressures bringing wind and rain, which is what Ireland has just experienced this summer. But the high-resolution models do not show that AMOC stops abruptly, that was a feature of simpler models designed to replicate palaeoclimatic changes at the end of the ice ages, when the amount of ice available to melt was much higher.

Seems like Germany has a good idea to vary it, to reduce pressure on travel. However we should think bolder still, reimagine the whole timing of the academic year which derived from nineteenth century traditions when children helped plant and gather crops. Now instead we should consider climate change, and July became too hot for comfortable travel in most of continental europe. So it would be better to have long holidays in May-June and maybe September, while also investing in cooling for school buildings (maybe more practical than for small homes).

Ireland has a long coastline but most of it near mountains, so there is fortunately scope to gradually retreat uphill. The large flat part is in the middle - the central Shannon basin is only 35m above sea-level, but unless East Antarctica goes too, that’s safe for the moment. As for temperature rise, it’s a cool country that may expect relatively little warming, due to the cold blob south of greenland, at least while ice continues melting. So, Ireland may need to prepare for large influx of people escaping heat elsewhere.

Key message remains that methane is “the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming”.
It’s not runaway, but there is a positive feedback of methane increasing its own lifetime by using up atmospheric oxidising capacity. I note also, new to me - “an increase in decomposition rates from wetlands as higher temperatures interacted with La Niña conditions in the tropics” - so during El Niño we get more CO2 from forest fires, but during La Niña more CH4 … - how to lock-in that carbon ? I also wonder how much methane is coming from Russia recently, whose government cares the least of all.

Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I’m not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I’ve seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to “consensus” principle.

Interesting - especially regarding the linguistic isolation factor, making it easy to dominate media.
Although even among many similar slavic languages, I wonder how many people are listening to other country’s media. And if we look at other isolated languages in Europe, eg. Finland, Basque, Albania, it’s hard to see a pattern in political consequences.

I wonder to what extent the western powers in Trianon were also motivated to punish the experiment with communism during summer of 1919 ? And how memory of this continues to influence modern views?
Later, the Soviet union extracted products and resources cheaply from its satellites - did this contribute to resentment of Ukraine as the transit country (I heard similar from Romanians)?
Today, the rural - urban political divide is similar in many other corners of europe, or even usa. I just wonder why the power balance in this case seems to be skewed away from the younger educated ‘city people’ in Budapest - maybe also specific demographics relating to those borders ?