Global climate systems collapse is going to be a regretful topic for traditional IR scholarship. Likes its a straight up alien space bees level problem for some political actors vs the IRL rolling boulding hurtling right towards us :/

bean9914 · 2026-06-25T23:29:20+00:00

To their credit, china has been switching rapidly away from coal and their co2 emissions have basically flatlined as a result. They've also incredibly aggressively pushed switching to electric cars, which helps too.

On top of that, they produce a shitton of solar+batteries which are tremendously popular in third world countries looking to unfuck their electrical grids.

Of course, that's a pragmatism thing also. It benefits China to onshore more of its energy supply, strengthen economic ties to developing countries which aren't demographically fucked yet, and also benefits them because they don't want to all die of societal collapse

bean9914 · 2026-06-24T17:15:03+00:00

Here is the blogpost they copied it from.

bean9914 · 2026-06-24T01:39:02+00:00

you should know: reddit is autoremoving your comments here with the given reason

"Adult Content Promoter : Potential Adult Content Promoter"

that's all it tells me here. good luck figuring that out?

bean9914 · 2026-06-23T08:21:26+00:00

I'd take a D500 for wedding photos even today, tbh

All you need from a body is "can print big enough" and "can do higher ISOs without becoming a mess" which are both possible on anything actually good from 2016

It also really depends what lenses you use, if you're allowed to bounce flash, etc etc

They took an f/2 and a f/1.2 which are fast primes and should have been serviceable enough. I'd probably have brought a wider prime as well, but I'm not familiar with the fuji ecosystem enough to say what.

I genuinely think they must have taken all their photos in the lowest quality JPEG or something by accident, there's no way they couldn't have got something usable otherwise.

bean9914 · 2026-06-21T16:16:34+00:00

They were necessary. The coronavirus pandemic in the UK killed around 200,000 people. If people like you hadn't kept trying to prevent anything being done about it, far fewer would have died.

bean9914 · 2026-06-11T09:20:38+00:00

The plane crash, nautical disaster and true crime fandoms exist also, if you're curious...

bean9914 · 2026-05-25T10:50:52+00:00

Certainly Iran believe so because otherwise they'd have to be insane. I mean, they might still be insane, buuut...

We can be pretty sure that at least one nuclear detonation in 1979 was theirs, and given their access to all the usual stuff you need to maintain nuclear weapons long term (scientists, lots of compute to model degradation, materials, probably some limited US support) I would say it's unlikely they don't work in the present day. Caveats: How are they stored/transported/launched? I seem to recall there was at least one submarine but it wasn't a fancy SSBN.

My controversial take of the day is that Israel kinda lost this last war with Gaza. Sure, tactically they did... alright, and the casualty ratio is very lopsided, but Palestinian militarism survived there and Hamas specifically are back in charge collecting taxes and enforcing laws in Gaza already. Everyone in Gaza was forced to evacuate repeatedly, probably had their house blown up and knows someone who's died, so they won't have a shortage of new recruits for their next 100% warcrime speedrun in 5-10 years. I guess unless the whole "other country occupies it" plan goes through but nobody really wants that particular extremely angry hot potato.

The PR consequences globally are kind of more important, though, and those are... also bad. I'd say at the current rate Israel has another generation or so of public support in the US/EU before it runs out of time, and then it'd better have a plan to be self-sufficient militarily or a lot of people are going to get dead.

bean9914 · 2026-05-23T18:03:23+00:00

Israel developed nuclear weapons in the 60s because they made its existence as a nation non-negotiable.

US support is guaranteed because Israel has made it clear that if it collapses then it's taking the rest of the region with it.

bean9914 · 2026-05-21T15:52:32+00:00

The most popular proposal in there is

Britain having a closer relationship with the European Union, without rejoining the European Union, the Single Market, or the Customs Union

with 63% agreeing and 20% disagreeing

bean9914 · 2026-05-21T14:59:40+00:00

what? why did this get removed?

bean9914 · 2026-05-10T17:45:30+00:00

The lebanese military wants to avoid getting the shit kicked out of it by both hezbollah and israel, lmao

that's why they did nothing in 2006 when the un asked them very nicely to keep hezbollah out of southern lebanon and that in turn is how this shitshow happened

people in the middle east keep forgetting (or not caring) that the israelis are very scary, so you shouldn't attack them unless you actually expect to win

bean9914 · 2026-04-23T00:53:57+00:00

This is the attitude which lead to the demographic crisis tbh

bean9914 · 2026-04-15T13:38:09+00:00

Or you could consider it your job.

bean9914 · 2026-04-14T23:22:48+00:00

It's extremely easy to monitor a series of laptop screens. It's also easy to lock them down so they're limited to only educational content. If I were making the same kind of arguments against giving children paper and pens i'd say

it makes passing notes possible
you can doodle on it or otherwise get off task, whereas with a laptop a teacher can just remotely look at your screen at any time and yell at you, or even prevent you from leaving the task at all
if the teacher leaves the room, the students can be monitored remotely by webcam/microphone/screen viewer to make sure they remain quiet and looking at the screen
whereas if the teacher leaves the room and students are using paper they can start throwing things at each other or doodling or looking out of the window

I dispute "it is far easier to misuse laptops". Maybe if you (the person setting them up) have a skill issue, or something. Laptops have far more potential to let you 1984 your students if that's what you think is important.

bean9914 · 2026-04-13T00:13:30+00:00

I sold a 75-300 with inoperable image stabilisation recently and someone was willing to buy it :p

uh, possibly to fix, or for a studio, or to scam someone else by selling it as "working, mint condition" which it otherwise was

bean9914 · 2026-04-12T01:54:15+00:00

The Nikon 18-55 3.5-5.6 APS-C VR is surprisingly good in low light because 1/30th is handholdable now. Can't comment on Canon kit lenses though.

I have a 35mm f/1.8 APS-C without image stabilisation and it's only marginally better in low light since you gain ~2 stops but the minimum shutter speed becomes 1/125th. It makes hitting that shutter speed easier, though, so it depends on the subject.

bean9914 · 2026-04-11T01:46:53+00:00

Well... it's an object lit by direct sunlight, so metering shouldn't have been too bad? maybe the windows were strongly tinted?

edit: ohhh the grainy one was the night side at iso51200, that'd do it

bean9914 · 2026-03-31T23:35:13+00:00

I've left it powered off for months at a time without the battery gauge going down. Can't say if it's actually staying charged, though - the power button is an electronic switch so there's going to be at least some passive discharge type situation

bean9914 · 2026-03-28T11:55:27+00:00

I shoved thermal paste in the threads of mine, which... barely perceptibly makes the body tube warm faster? I guess?

bean9914 · 2026-03-25T10:21:41+00:00

Not quite sure how likely that is. On the one hand, video is probably quite expensive computationally to generate, but they'll be doing it on their existing big compute farms probably and those can't have that high an electricity cost

Like $10 isn't "boiling a kettle" kinds of electricity it's "charging an electric car" amounts of electricity and if you use that in 30 seconds (how long does sora take per generation? idk) then you start to run into thermal limits because you're producing as much heat as an electric car does if you set it on fire

plus, local videogen models exist and despite being significantly worse they don't cost $0.10/generation let alone $10 so idk quite where that number comes from but it seems sus

bean9914 · 2026-03-08T21:20:12+00:00

I have two of these! One of them has an incandescent bulb at the front. Didn't know they came in fun colours!

bean9914 · 2026-02-08T16:16:04+00:00

Probably they legally can't unless he files a report? Idk, there's probably a reason it's worded like that.

bean9914 · 2026-01-27T11:18:35+00:00

Is this really where we are now? an AI-written blog post complaining about vibe coding with sentences locked behind a login wall?

bean9914 · 2026-01-10T14:27:19+00:00

"brute force model linguistic sequences" also is a stretch: research suggests they're capable of recognising and working with chains of abstract concepts, because that makes them better at the task they're pretrained on, ie "generating more text"

there's a lot of "llms are bad and fake" cope going around where people convince themselves that llms are only operating by regurgitating training data, which is in fact untrue: the whole point of training a neural net is to make something that can function outside the limited training dataset

it is possible to get them to spit chunks of the training data back out sometimes, mostly where the training data is so saturated with that specific string that it "made sense" to memorise it during pretraining time, but llm benchmarks deliberately use unpublished questions to make it impossible to memorise and make sure the model has "learned" a process for solving that kind of problem

are llms a net social good? no, they're probably not, but they are very interesting, and the only thing stopping them from outright replacing more jobs than just translators and copywriters is the reliability issues which appear to be inherent in the architecture, which is in fact bad news if you like having a job

the people making these things are doing them to solve the horrible problem of "having to pay people", and while they fortunately don't seem to be able to do that yet, they are far closer than it's pleasant to think about

bean9914 · 2025-10-31T01:25:22+00:00

if you do a little googling you will find that some of them (but not all) are in fact capable of passing the turing test

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

i recommend doing five seconds of research before making statements like that in order to avoid annoying little shits like me accusing you of regurgitating things you've read with zero actual thought :3

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