mattcheck

@owroot Why she didnt want to admit it?

I've been thinking about this for the past few days. My wife yesterday said that she didn't want to admit it but she thinks that maybe things were different before COVID. I feel the same. I was watching a few videos from twitter in 2015 - 2016 and yeah, it feels farther away than 10 years. I don't know if it's just time, but it doesn't feel like that is it. I think WGD is right and COVID was a discontinuity and some kind of break. People are kind of crazier now, more schizo, and that's just one of 100 examples. But they kind of are. Things are just weird or something. I don't know. It was different before. I hate to say that, but it feels true. The times and events that we assign as markers. Are they real or is it just something we come up with after the fact? I don't; know, it doesn't matter. It's just how it is and that's it.

feels weird that you can read replies from actual humans on this site now

@ctindale @johnkonrad How would he when his concern is farming eyeballs instead of not sharing content he deems less relevant right now?

As a shipping guy, do you get what they are saying? It’s an own goal by climate activists . As you know, IMO 2020 removed sulphur from marine fuel. Those sulphur emissions created albedo over the shipping lanes, ports, and transit canals. Think of albedo like sunscreen. Since the removal of sulphur in 2020, sea surface temperatures in those major sea traffic areas have risen sharply. This has accelerated warming, so the policy intended to clean emissions has altered the energy balance in a measurable way. Fossil fuel emissions, by their own IPCC framing, were associated with roughly 1.5°C of cooling from sulphate aerosols. The models did not fully capture the regional dependency on those emissions, and the removal has shifted that balance. In high shipping traffic areas, sulphur emissions acted as cloud condensation nuclei. Each raindrop forms around a particle nucleus, which allows clouds to develop. These clouds provided reflectivity and supported rainfall patterns. In effect, shipping created a persistent cloud-seeding layer that has existed since the era of steam shipping. With that layer removed, regions such as the Gulf, the South China Sea, Gulf Coast , North Atlantic and other major shipping corridors now have fewer particles available for cloud formation. This reduces cloud cover and alters precipitation patterns, contributing to higher sea surface temperatures and hotter regional climates. It’s ironic but shipping aerosols where one of the major climate change mitigation tools and removed it without any research whatsoever

This is your biggest concern right now?

“Everyone always wonders what [Jesus] might have written. ... Jesus doesn't bend down because he wants to write, he writes because he's bending down. He's bending down so as not to look at his challengers in the eye. If Jesus looked back at them, the crowd would feel that it was being challenged in turn... The face-off would lead straight to violence, which is to say to the death of the victim whom Jesus is trying to save. Jesus avoids giving even the slightest hint of provocation.” — René Girard

@physorg_com @grok how bad is burning plastic compared to recycling in light of microplastics?

Hawaii is testing asphalt made with recycled plastics and derelict fishing nets, showing comparable microplastic shedding to conventional roads and potential to cut landfill and marine debris. phys.org/news/2026-03-h…

@aakashgupta we need a study to proof humans like trees first

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

@BerlinReporter @ZDF @grok wer sind die autoren des Logo Beitrags?

Ich habe heute zum ersten mal im Leben eine förmliche Programmbeschwerde beim @ZDF Fernsehrat eingereicht. Die Kindernachrichtensendung Logo hatte in einer mehrere Programmrichtlinien verletzenden Form einen einseitigen Hetzbericht über die Geschichte der christlichen Kirchen gebracht. Der Screenshot vermittelt einen repräsentativen Eindruck des Berichts. Und das auch noch, nachdem es unmittelbar zuvor einen sachlich-positiven Bericht über den islamischen Ramadan gab. Details und Zitate im 🧵, der im wesentlichen den Wortlaut meiner Programmbeschwerde enthält. 1/7

@elonmusk would be cool if you add a non-video non-aislop mode

Algorithm is better today than 3 months ago?

@ZeeContrarian1 I hear you but with truly limited commodities theres a case to be made they at least keep up with currency debasement which is a lasting trend for now right? So until you mine those truly limited resources in space or population totally collapses they should appreciate...

These days, everyone talks about gold, silver, and copper with the same certainty Bitcoiners had at $120,000 - that it’s obviously going up forever. The future is unknown. Any trend can end in a single day-and stay over for a long time.

Pigs don't just feel fear themselves. They also feel the fear of other pigs — and try to comfort them. In one study, pigs watching another pig in distress first showed fear themselves and then tried to comfort the distressed pig through snout-to-snout contact. Pigs who'd previously endured the same ordeal reacted even more intensely — they seemed to recognize what the distressed pig was going through. (Goumon & Špinka, 2016.) On factory farms, pigs trapped in gestation crates aren't just feeling afraid themselves. They're feeling the fear of all the other pigs around them. But the crate's iron bars stop them from even turning toward their fellow pigs — let alone comforting them with their snout.

@paulpowlesland Wild they try to pay the public off with breadcrumbs while the technological solutions for their duties exist.

River guardians do not want bribes that allow Thames Water to keep breaking the law. We want one simple thing: for Thames Water to put spades in the ground & fix every single illegal outfall within the next 5-10 years. A little story to illustrate: 5 years ago I found an illegal outfall spewing raw sewage (with visible turds) into the Aldersbrook (a tributary of the Roding). The EA refused to prosecute, but I created so much fuss locally about it that eventually I got a visit from Richard Aylard, Thames Water’s ‘Sustainability Director’ who had an unflattering appearance in the recent ‘Dirty Business’ programme. Instead of setting forth a timetable to fix the outfall, Aylard offered the River Roding Trust (the entirely volunteer run charity I founded) £50,000 for “river restoration”. I refused this offer, saying there was no point restoring a brook that still had raw shit going into it. I continued campaigning for another three years: taking numerous journalists to the outfall, getting Thames Water hauled before the local council scrutiny committee & relentlessly calling them out on social media. Eventually, after 4 years, Thames spent £1 million fixing the outfall & the brook is now clean for the first time in decades. I have no doubt that if I hadn’t discovered the outfall in the first place, or if I had taken the £50,000, the outfall would still be putting raw turds into the Aldersbrook, a stone’s throw from Ilford town centre. It’s obvious for Thames that’s it cheaper to pay their critics to keep quiet than to do the work needed to fix the problem, but this is not what our rivers need.

@UN_PGA When was the day to combat Christianophobia again?

Across the world, Muslims continue to face discrimination, hostility, and even violence because of their faith. This must change. Discrimination or hatred directed at any community because of its religion has no place in our society. Today, marking the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, we reaffirm our commitment to dignity, tolerance, and mutual respect. Standing up against Islamophobia is not only about defending one religious community. It is about defending our shared humanity.

@ericzakariasson Response to suggested lead question doesnt need tokens to be generated so openAI keeps you spending time on site with near zero marginal costs instead of having to generate something for your follow up prompt.

whats going on with chatgpt these days? almost all responses ends with clickbaity questions "if you want, i can tell you the one mistake that almost everyone forgets"

@jon_stokes I get it but hopefully it is both?!

I think what's happening is not that the big 3 labs are making some fundamental improvements in model architecture or pretraining. Rather, they just have massive amounts of live user sessions to post-train so they can cover more of the space of likely model interactions.

I don't think this is right. I think what's really going on is that OpenAI, Google, & Anthropic have the one thing you need to present the appearance of progress w/ LLMs: large quantities of user sessions to spy on & use for RL training.

@DastDn What do you mean cant pay? If china has a grip on their Water sources and made them dependent at some point they can simply squeeze them for whatever value is left in their country.

I remain deeply curious about the long-term viability of Beijing's New Model Imperialism. What exactly happens when the third world countries can't pay, won't adhere to the predatory contract, nationalize the properties? Does China send in the troops?

@daviddorg Well i hear you but we all know already that theres huge positive impacts from movement so 1 year later we will not know how much was due to screen removal and how much due to more movement. All the best for you!

@mattcheck3 Screen reduction is the intervention, and increased movement is one of its mechanisms. The goal isn't to isolate screens from movement. It's to see what happens to a person who removes screens from their life. Movement changes are part of that package.

“What will change when you go a year w/o screens?” A few guesses from doctors: + Testosterone (1,011 ng/dl) ↑ + Estrogen (45 pg/mL) ↓ + Sleep (5h avg) ↑ + Neural efficiency (tbd) ↑ + Working memory (tbd) ↑ I’m gathering so much data, I’m sure there will be some surprises.

@qthomp Would you insure a tanker that might spill oil and wreck havoc on desalination plants? Id guess the rates would be so high that it doesnt make sense for either party.

Question for all the maritime insurance experts out there - what will it take for the large P&I clubs to reactivate coverage through the Strait of Hormuz? One of my takeaways from this conflict is how few missiles and drones it takes to keep the Strait shut. 30 missiles and 50 drones launched per day seems like something that can carry on for a very long time.