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He compares server requests to radiation. It can be harmful or harmless, and just happens in background.

PSA: units never belong in square brackets.

[R] = Ohm

Never [Ohms]


But heavier than a clamshell laptop.

And just barely smaller than netbooks.

That said, I guess to everyone born after 2000 a PC is considered kaputt if it does not have touch input.

Even my 1994 gf tries to touch every display to see if it is directly usable, or needs an obscure pointer to be moved and click to be found either on keys or tap or press.


PVA also exists, solves in pure water.

Most people don't own or drive cars.

Where? Even in Europe, 88% of households have a car, and on average just over half of all people.

I have seen global estimates for number of people with access to a car to be about 20%. But can't find a link.

Some related stats [1, 2] from which one can infer that the above number is roughly correct.

[1] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/number-car-owners-world-less-th...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1...


I guess if we expand it worldwide that makes sense, though in a discussion about 96GB of RAM it feels like an apples to oranges comparison to bring in the entirety of the world. That is including a whole lot of people who probably couldn't afford the RAM or a car even if they saved most of their income for a decade.

1.6 billion cars in the world. 8 billion people.

Nice, now do Acetminophen vs Dexibuprofen.

Title says that "Strife" could halt production, so who Strife, a payment processor or s.th. like that? No, the word strife from the english dictionary.

I hate title case.


The site starts with

> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...

But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely.

Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?


The best the EU can do is things like Proton, which is to say pretty old, mature services that all the difficult innovation has been done on in the US, and all the risk-taking done there as well on what's a good idea and what's not, reimplemented in simpler forms and sold at a reasonable price. It's like how after patents expire, generic drugs can sometimes be produced very cheaply.

Half the microplastics in our body is from cars. So move to a car-free city district or remote cabin (and then driving train+bike so not to contribute to the problem?).


The silence from that from media that make a lot of money selling ads for cars is becoming quite suspicious.


> Half the microplastics in our body is from cars

I doubt it. The article suggests most is from inhaling indoor dust from synthetic textiles.


If cars are causing microplastic pollution, Im sure bikes and trains are too.

Im seems using rubber/plastic compounds for tyres and brakes is always going to cause this issue on any vehicle.


With cars there are higher energies involved, and things like that tend to grow with square or cube of the energy. I wouldn't be surprised if car was causing orders of magnitude more plastic pollution than a bike per person per mile.


It’s quite intuitive to think about. The entire tread of the tire becomes ground up plastic dust. Cars burn through significantly more KGs of tires in a year than a bicycle.


Thats obvious and goes without saying, but then I didnt state any specific metrics, only that they both casue the same thing even in different amounts


The dose makes the poison.

Most of the bike chain lube at my local bike shop is basically just pure PFAS forever chemicals. Might as well cook with non-stick pans if you are applying chain lube to your bike at home.


Why, do you lick your bicycle chain?


I guess you think its fine for us to release PFAS chemicals into the environment as long as we are not licking them?

No. But I'm not the one comparing something you don't touch to something you eat from, saying it's the same.

Because cars are intrinsicly an inefficient mode of transportation, even if other forms also cause this problem it would still be orders of magnitude less than cars.


The amount of damage to tires is proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axel. That means that for the same journey, a bike sheds (3000 kg / 80 kg)ˆ4 so about 20 million times less. Assuming that the rubber is the same—and not that it has proprietary chemistry that may or may not contain carcinogens. Eight orders of magnitude of difference feels relevant.

Almost every train I know use metal wheels. We can look at the few that don’t, but something tells me people who raise that argument don’t want to look at alternative wheel composition, but rather hope to seed doubt and, in private, lobby replace one metro with thousands of cars, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

So, please, don’t come in here with that bullshit.


Lovely tone, you sound like a really nice person.

I never mentioned train wheels at all. Their brake pads are made from things like carbon, ceramic, and resin compounds. These wear down like any brake pads and so cause the same dust pollution. Remember that some trains in the world are over a mile long and have over 1000 wheels.

I dont see anybody claiming that bikes or trains cause anywhere near the same level as cars, but it is important to remember that they still do cause some and so they are not a silver bullet. Solutions still need advancing in order to completely remove these pollutants from human transportation systems.


'Bikes cause it too' is technically true in the way that a dripping tap and a burst dam both cause flooding. The effect of this framing (intentional or not) is to suggest we shouldn't prioritise the thing that causes 99.99% of the problem until we've solved the thing that causes 0.01%. That's not a serious position, you're just protecting your comfort.


Have you ever seen the damage a dripping tap can do? I have seen houses completely wrecked by it.

Stop protecting your argument by trying to say something small doesnt matter. It all matters, regardless of size.

If the argument is that microplastics are harmful to health, surely we should be looking at all sources of them instead of just the biggest?

My argument is 'Lets try to make all vehicle tyres and brakes from something that doesnt pollute the earth and harm animal life on it.'

Yours seems to be 'Lets ignore the plastic pollution from other transport because cars cause the most, so thats all we need to worry about.'


> Im sure bikes and trains are too. > … for tyres and brakes

You are welcome to edit your comment to clarify.


No need, it is correct.

Bikes have tyre pollution, and trains have brake pollution. Seems like a pretty simple statement to me.

Interesting that you have moved from arguing the point into semantics now without addressing anything else. You are welcome to remove your downvotes.

People seem to get very upset when others point out that transport like bikes and trains still cause the same pollution as cars. yes it is much less, possibly orders of magnitude so, but they still cause it. Perhaps instead of getting the pitchforks out we could work together to find better wheel and brake solutions for all transpotation methods which dont cause so much toxic dust.


You can't downvote direct replies.


[flagged]


You really don’t like factual replies, do you?


I would prefer to keep on topic and discuss the original points personally, but it seems people keep trying to derail into berating each other, commenting on peoples behavoir and pointing out forum rules. Seems strange to me but I get dragged in all the same.

Is it not factual that trains have brake pads which wear down and cause carcenogenic micro dust? Seems I made that factual point and it was ignored in favour of criticisizing my semantics and stating obvious site rules.


> Seems strange to me but I get dragged in all the same.

Maybe it‘s a you thing?

> Is it not factual that trains have brake pads which wear down and cause carcenogenic micro dust?

Not a point I have contested, but yet another suggestion without any sense of scale, and so far you have refused to address that aspect of five or six replies on the topic. Maybe that’s why you are inviting so much hostility?


> yet another suggestion without any sense of scale

> Maybe that’s why you are inviting so much hostility?

If you are somebody who resorts to hostility just because somebody puts forward an argument without full explanation and rationale, then you have my sympathies.

Looking at your other replies in the thread and what other people are replying to you, it seems that you are either a really hostile person or just having a really bad day. I hope it is the latter for your own sake.

Like others I wish you well and hope that you can find peace without having to engage in mud sliging against anonymous people on the internet.


Chess has different pieces, which has higher entropy than a true 1d backgammon or 1d checkers with only one piece a field.

You could play with pieces that have a value of 1..N instead. Starting with 2,3, and 5 value pieces, and splitting them as needed. Making it one-dimensional again, while keeping 100% of the rules.

Final verdict, therefore: backgammon is 1D, not 1.5.

We could pretend that the second dimension was not playing a role in tactics back then, since it was very recently invented, like the brothers Wright invented the third dimension a hundred years ago. Or some hot air balloon at a world faire did it.


The "dimensions" in these board games isn't a mathematical/topology thing, is it? Normally one dimension = one real number space. Every board game ever would fit in 1D then, "2D" chess included.

I'm fine calling Backgammon 1.5-D. Physically you focus on a single dimension, and the second one matters too but it's not the same.


That's a good point, you could surely model full chess in a single dimension, it would just be that each pieces' movement rules would be more confusing

E.g. a pawn can move exactly 8 squares towards its opponents end (16 on its first move if no piece occupies 8 squares away), but can only capture 7 or 9 squares forward (with some extra modulo math to prevent wrapping)


Yeah and it'd be even worse if you want to flatten out the piece colors and types into the 1D array.


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