@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy2025-07-23 18:04:37
International Court of Justice says countries failing to tackle climate change risk breaking international law
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-24/icj-climate-change-advisory-opinion-handed-down/105561282
@arXiv_mathPR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-24 10:33:30
A stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions with trend-following, opposition, and indifference
Manuel Gonz\'alez-Navarrete
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18313
@chrysn@chaos.social2025-07-24 11:09:51
Discussions during the current #IETF meeting led me to write a new draft on a compact CoAP URI expression, Short Paths In CoAP (ShoPinC, following the trade tradition of contrived acronyms).
As not all of the #CoAP crowd is reading the IETF lists, I'm soliciting opinions or feedback from here as well.…
@jake4480@c.im2025-08-24 01:04:13
Starting up Bring Her Back. Anybody seen it, opinions? Guess I'll see. Will probably get to finish most of it before wifey's done with her exam 😂
#horror
@rberger@hachyderm.io2025-07-20 20:16:38
Here’s the key point: Trump’s corruption of justice isn’t just individual; it’s categorical. We have grown accustomed to him rewarding his loyalists and punishing his critics. That he fired the prosecutors who worked on his federal criminal cases while pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters represents a textbook case of individual favoritism.
The Trump administration’s abuse of the civil rights division is something else entirely. It had already initiated a “litigation freeze” on filing new civil rights cases, and it had indicated that it was even going to reconsider previous settlements and consent decrees intended to address police misconduct.
...
Civil rights laws are designed in part to protect innocent citizens — including, of course, innocent citizens from minority communities — from unjust government officials. Here, the legal world is turned upside down. The Justice Department is using its civil rights division to protect an unjust government official who violated the civil rights of an innocent individual.
#USPolitics
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/dillon-taylor-justice-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X08.0DWy.hF58YNdciy3A&smid=url-share
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-22 00:03:45
Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-06-20 18:34:34
On many issues, Americans are deeply polarized.
War with Iran isn’t one of them.
An Economist/YouGov poll of U.S. adults taken in the days after Israel’s attack last Friday found that Democrats opposed entering the conflict by a margin of 50 points and Republicans opposed entering it by a margin of 30 points.
Given these numbers, you might think Democratic leaders would be doing everything they can to prevent President Trump from striking Iran without the approval of Cong…
@carstingaxion@dewp.space2025-07-21 20:37:14
Dear #WordPress people,
If you are publishing Events or already know about or use #GatherPress, I’d like to hear your opinions.
I'm looking for feedback on a new block and would absolutely love, if you could take the time to open this in Playground, experiment with the new "Event Qu…
@pgcd@mastodon.online2025-07-20 18:29:18
I'm almost through The Shepherd's Crown and it's better than I feared - definitely better than Raising Steam, in my opinion.
There are only two things that I find jarring: Nanny Ogg sounds WAY folksier than it does normally, and it's clear he would've edited it massively ("dainty" appears every second page).
Other than that, I have the feeling he wrote the same book in the Good Timeline, the one where the Embuggerance left him alone.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-07-15 16:51:09
Four food truck companies face online backlash following their services at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
https://abc17news.com/news/2025/07/05/4-food-truck-companies-face-online-backlash-following-their-services-at-alli…
