https://www.ft.com/content/341f0aaa-7173-454c-89fd-103287625d38
But there are now signs that China’s thirst for crude is reaching a peak sooner than expected, a development that has sent shockwaves through the oil market.
“Chinese imports of polymers are still really big, but were enormous,” says Healy, referring to the class of chemicals that includes nylon, polyester, polyethylene and Teflon, among others. “The statistic that blows my mind is that the [country’s] imports of polymers are something like 2 to 3 per cent of the world’s oil demand. That’s Germany’s [oil use] in demand terms.”
Echoing Nasser’s remarks, the IEA’s Healy says “probably about a quarter” of China’s increase in petrochemical demand over the past five years has come from wind turbines and solar panels, and says “essentially all” of the growth in China’s oil use going forward will be from the petrochemical sector.
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2024/10/random-thoughts-on-election.html
Because of Americas only-2-party-system you end up voting for people you agree with on some things but not others. I can imagine Mike Pence saying:
I prefer Trump to Kamala on the abortion issue.
I prefer Kamala to Trump on the Hang Mike Pence issue.
Gee, who do I vote for?
Actually he has said he is voting for neither one.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability--along with confidence in that ability--is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/
In the last few months, we have noticed an increase in abusive site crawling, mainly from AI products and services. These products are recklessly crawling many sites across the web, and we've already had to block several sources of abusive traffic. It feels like a new AI gold rush, and in their haste, some of these crawlers are behaving in a way that harms the sites they depend on...
One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day. This cost us over $5,000 in bandwidth charges, and we had to block the crawler. We emailed this company, reporting a bug in their crawler, and we're working with them on reimbursing us for the costs.
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=62243
I remember one meeting with the so-called ‘external’ consultants where the ‘expert’ announced that they were cutting costs by eliminating the use of laptop computers.
When challenged he said: “Why do academics need portable computers when they have desktops in their offices?”
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113801357461741537
What could go wrong with betting markets like this [a bet on whether the Palisades wildfire will spread to Santa Monica by Sunday on Polymarket]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031219
Very curious about this wonderful magic. How were you able to get the call stack from the strace line?
I basically set up my GDB with commands to stop on a specific pattern of "lseek, then close", and if the pattern isn't met it just automatically continues the program.
This is what the gdb script looks like:
set height 0
catch syscall close
catch syscall read
catch syscall lseek
disable 1 2
commands 2
disable 1 2
continue
end
commands 3
if $rdi == 31
enable 1 2
continue
else
continue
end
end
The lseek catchpoint (3) enables both read and close catchpoints; if the read catchpoint (2) is hit first it disables both and continues. This way we look for lseek followed by close without intervening reads.
It generates a few false positives but otherwise fairly quickly stops on the right syscall, at which point I could backtrace and prod the live program.
https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/blog/feeds.html
Around 2 years ago, I made an experimental Mastodon client. Instead of a feed, it presented you with a page per each day, each with a list of people who posted on that day. You could expand out everyone’s posts – but everything started out collapsed. It let you see everything at a glance. If any of your rarely posting friends posted something, you could prioritise them. Otherwise, you could indulge in the usual shitposting of your fedi-addicted friends.
Decided to pick this up again. Maybe.
Hello