slightly more seriously: lots of lemmy users came from reddit, but mostly from older demographic (because of old reddit phaseout) and more FOSS-oriented, privacy-aware, tech-literate part (because of API shitshow/alternative apps blockage). there’s some barrier to entry (choice of instance) that would filter off the least technical users. there are some prominent programming oriented fedi servers (programming.dev, infosec.exchange). lemmy in general seems to be more lefty than reddit, less americacentric, and i guess that over half are linux users. i suspect that because of combination of technical skill and older age (compared to reddit) lots of lemmitors have well paying technical jobs (again compared to reddit) which allows/requires them to live in nicer parts of their countries (not specifically cali)

at least this operation won’t leave behind any e-waste, since it all will burn down when orbit maintaining engines inevitably fail

“People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,” Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation

I reasoned that the former Google executive might have bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space.

absolutely not peak of bubble type bullshit, please give microsoft-sized theranos more money, nothing weird or stupid is happening there

last time i’ve seen someone wanting to put compute in orbit it was cryptobros trying to avoid everyone’s jurisdiction, presumably to do some financial crimes there. turns out you can get away with this on earth, so it’s unnecessary

no, all people here are 30-40 years old communist programmers from california

“what the fuck is exponential backoff” - someone writing software for these meters ten years ago

it’s also made worse by the fact that many appliances are turned on in blacked out areas, so when these are brought online, there’s spike in load power that then tapers off pretty quickly. this can be managed by powering on areas on in smaller chunks, as small as single blocks

this is PSA to turn off appliances off during blackout (biggest ones are things that deal with heat: mostly air conditioning/heat pump and all kinds of heaters)

also in Spain specifically some capacity was met by spinning generators from nuclear or hydro or gas powerplants, but also there’s a lot of photovoltaic generation, which doesn’t vary frequency with imbalances in load. after loss of power nuclear reactors that were running at that time are out for a day because of xenon poisoning, and it looks like first nuclear powerplant went online again only yesterday

maybe they’ll update inverters in at least some of generating stations so that blackstart with PV assistance would be possible in future, because from what i understand most of these are grid-following inverters. this might require policy changes and tighter control of PV powerplant by grid operator. hydropower is most useful in starting from complete blackout condition because all power that is needed is just what it takes to turn valves + some communications and remote switching to make sure it goes to other powerplants

for now no one knows what really happened, but i do hope that investigation will allow for figuring out what went wrong and preventing similar failure in the future

it looks like Portugal had it even worse - their power generation dropped to zero (until 15:00), disconnected from Spain, started hydro and pumped hydro to bring up gas and wind power (22:00 to midnight), then solar, then when they figured their shit out connected to Spain again and lent them a couple gigawatts (bigger grids are more stable so it’s good for both)

that’s how you know he didn’t succeed yet

musk and thiel narrowly avoided death in 2000 car crash. can you imagine what could have been?

these are called bribes

the deal:

Who does this appeal to? It’s nonsense.

the fake nerds of silicon valley of course

death of millions for profit - solid business practice, congratulations and see you again at next shareholder meeting

I’m with the old man on this one. Antibodies can clear out amyloid and still it has no effect on progression of disease, amyloid secretion can be blocked upstream (like with small molecule protease inhibitors) and it still has no effect. Maybe this one hits something off-target, or maybe that effect is not even real, or maybe it’s some sort of statistical artifact. You’d stumble upon some false positive after trying so many times.

Aducanumab is dead in the water, trials shown no effect and it was abandoned by Biogen. This one is about lecanemab. Both have massive problems with brain edema and microhemorrages, which probably means these are not suitable for actual use. But don’t worry, they already have received their reward - FDA wanted to have something, anything to show up for Alzheimer and Biogen cashed in when stock price went up

think cold fusion, or EmDrive, or string theory

That’s a weird set - cold fusion or EmDrive can be tested and their physical principles are falsifiable - and they were - but string theory is different, because it’s not falsifiable.

If it’s marginally but truly effective,

That if makes some mighty heavy lifting here. I think that amyloid hypothesis is closer to cold fusion than to string theory in that it had already a couple of fatal experimental refutations thrown at it, but people still shove effort this way because there’s nothing else/copium/sunk cost combination

that’s just internet dementia

Derek Lowe has seen it coming years ago https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lecanemab-and-alzheimer-s-more-data

But let’s stipulate that the result is real, for the sake of argument. That takes us into the very contentious question of real-world utility. As the NEJM paper says, “A definition of clinically meaningful effects in the primary end point of the CDR-SB score has not been established”. Clinicians are already disagreeing over whether the difference between lecanemab and placebo is something that would even be noticeable. That last link features a quote of Madhav Thambisetty, a neurologist at the National Institute on Aging: “From the perspective of a physician caring for Alzheimer’s patients, the difference between lecanemab and placebo is well below what is considered to be a clinically meaningful treatment effect”. This is not an uncommon take.

And that leads to question 3. A constant problem with these anti-amyloid antibody ideas is the complication of brain edema, an inflammation response that can be serious trouble. The term of the art is “amyloid-related imaging abnormalities with edema or effusions”, ARIA-E. This latest trial kept a constant watch for this, as well it should have, and any such trial also has to keep in mind the possibility of “functional unblinding” as any incidents develop. ARIA-E was noted in 0.8% of the treatment group (and in none of the placebo patients, naturally). Overall, adverse events that were enough to lead to patient discontinuation in the trial occurred in 6.9% of the treatment group and 2.9% of the placebo group. Most seriously, two patients in the treatment group have died from what could well be treatment-related vascular issues

There was also earlier anti-amyloid antibody that got approved despite showing no benefit at all https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/they-don-t-know