This is definitely good news. It's too bad they didn't go as far as Cuba on their most recent rewrite of family law, but I'm glad things are moving in the right direction.
I hope Didi gains custody of her son soon enough, that will also be a win when it happens.
I'm definitely curious about the self cleaning property, and how easily it is to produce (is the process sustainable, toxic, expensive reagents, etc.) That was the biggest issue with a lot of the previous radiative cooling surfaces. If I have time I'll try to read into it more.
There was a neat video on how to make your own from readily available material, but not from cellulose, but it had issues with being clean and application onto surfaces. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI&t=1s
Im curious how each agent differs, or is trained. Seems they had doctor and nurse agents, as well as patient agents. This would be a good way to start partial implementation. It would allow some tasks to be taken over by the in a hybrid format which could allow an even richer training environment.
I could never see the west doing this in a way that would actually improve the quality of service.
One of the issues with LLM AIs that we've seen time and again is that it can be extremely confident and perfectly incorrect. I have no doubt they are doing their best to train the AI with the best data, but I hope they are also working to solve some of the underlying issues with LLMs.
I believe it could just be "awe" or "awestruck" with it's roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of "awe" is maybe not quite right.
The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I'm not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.
The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don't know much about it.
So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.
However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.
As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.
This is quite the change. I'm excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it's far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.
The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.
There will definitely be a need to have significant amounts of resource (food and other agricultural products) stock piling as the climate becomes more unpredictable and variable. Otherwise famines will be far more common.
Ultimately it'll mean analyzing the conditions as they currently exist and will exist in the coming decades and having realistic plans based on local and global conditions.
Citys, regions, countries, will need to look at what is currently lacking in their response and put in the resources to address the deficiencies. This could include things like cold/hot shelters, flood mitigation infrastructure, massive food storage infrastructure, backup sources for water and energy supply.
For a resource perspective, we would need improvement to efficiency (including removal of capitalist incentives for making products that are not needed and over marketing them for the sake of profit, obviously), and retrofitting cities for lower overall energy and resource use. Having the ability to run a city on less means the storage and buffers needed in the event of an emergency are much smaller.
It was always projection. It's honestly comical how often that is the case.
It is definitely heavier on the tower defense side. I also usually turn biters off in Factorio, but I found that Mindustry to be well balanced between the logistics and tower defense aspects. You have to build up both constantly, unlike Factorio where you just over build defense and then wait for that to fail before thinking about it again. In Factorio, defense is a nuisance mostly, but Mindustry it's integral to the gameplay loop. Not sure if that answers it for you. I don't think I'd recommend it unless you wanted that aspect of the game.
Mostly I play factory management style games. Top 3 being Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, and Mindustry. Though they've been more mental effort than Ive been able to muster recently.
Then I am also playing Last Epoch as a co-op game because it's been a way to connect with an old friend from school (since we live in different cities it's hard to connect in person).
So nothing too exciting or new.
From what I've seen, the electric cost is actually only a small component, the building, specialized hardware, maintenance and labour make up the majority of the bill for most vertical farming operations.
Further, it's a matter of how much energy density you need within a given volume compared to the available roof surface. Most plants don't need full sun, but you might only be able to supply 2-4 times the roof area as internal grow area (when accounting for efficiency losses and the needs of the plants). You would need to provide the majority of the grow area with LED lights anyway. So it might not be worth the resources/labour costs. Though it might be a good supplemental supply of photons.
~~The only real use case I can see for vertical farming is providing fresh produce nearer to urban centres, or if there is an acute shortage of land, otherwise passive greenhouses (with supplemental lighting and heating if needed) are generally a better use of resources. Specialized produce is another use case, but it seems that we need a lot more research to make it a viable option at scale.~~
A question of where the energy comes from is also important, solar panels in a desert/on roof tops is good, but if they replace a farm field it's pointless. Wind, nuclear, hydro are good options.
I'm definitely curious to see how the field grows within the context of China and socialism more broadly. Many of the constraints in current implementations are only important when the only consideration is profit.
Edit: read the article, they have some really interesting use cases in their facility beyond what I could imagine.
I assume this is an attempt to re-shore manufacturing, especially if as many of us expect, many countries choose to take the tarrif hit so that they can keep trading in their own currency between eachother.
It's a strategic bet, bring home some manufacturing while hurting those who defy the empire. It'll certainly reduce the availability of certain goods in the US as countries choose other markets. This likely would help to encourage some level of reshoring, or at least increase pressure from the ruling class to force more coups of other countries to force them back onto the dollar system.
Whether this will backfire or not will is something that is very hard to predict.