I’ll admit it was a reactionary comment as I see the sentiment a lot without any nuance and it kinda annoys me, considering I make conscientious choices all the time and people like you (maybe not you in this instance) will pass judgement and make me question myself.

I apologize for having come across as “passing judgement.” I was going for a tone closer to this (trying to shock you out of complacency), but missed the mark a bit.

It was also a little strange shitting on a places public transport infrastructure

Technically, I didn’t dispute your mention of Manchester having good public transport (which I have no reason to disbelieve); I shat on British Rail’s intracity public transport. And yeah, I freely admit that Amtrak is infinitely worse: the entire 5-million-people Atlanta metro area is served by one train a day, which shows up roughly at midnight! I figured that just means I know a thing or two about extremely shitty rail, LOL.

You have unrealistic expectations on someone who is vastly in the minority with commutes like this.

If you admit you’re vastly in the minority, then why did you feel the need to chime in in the first place? If you actually aren’t a reactionary concern troll, you need to realize that making the perfect the enemy of the good like that adds nothing to the conversation and only discourages people from embracing alternatives.

And if I’m angry, by the way, it’s because the sort of shit you just did happens every single goddamn time and is THE major impediment to actually getting shit changed. It’s not some small-but-loud minority of coal-roller (or “Chelsea tractor” in your case, I guess) blatant right-wing assholes who are stopping improvements from happening; it’s all the allegedly-well-meaning moderates quibbling everything to death for not being perfect who are the real problem!

Considering that the vast majority of hydrogen isn’t even “green hydrogen” (produced from electrolysis) but rather “grey” or “blue” (produced from cracking hydrocarbons), I don’t think it was anything more than a straight-up greenwashing scam in the first place. Even the niches where people claim hydrogen is suitable (long-haul trips without battery charging infrastructure) would be better off just burning the damn hydrocarbon as-is to begin with!

Even in the best-case scenario – “green hydrogen” produced from electrolysis – I think it would be better to immediately (at the point of production) combine it with CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere to make synthetic gasoline and then handle that with our existing ICE vehicles and infrastructure. It’s just so impractical to store hydrogen (since it’s so small it leaks through everything, yet so low-density that it requires either extremely high pressures or cryogenic temperatures to fit enough of it in a reasonable amount of space) that it’s simply not worth the effort.

You can moan at my boss for not allowing fully WFH.

IDGAF about your boss. If I were gonna moan about something, it’d be about the shitty state of British Rail or some other macro/policy issue, not anything specific to your situation.

That said, I live in fucking Atlanta – the poster child of terrible American sprawl and traffic – and have figured out how to make cycling for most trips work. I have no doubt that you can do better. Get yourself a damn Brompton (so you can easily take it on the train) and turn that 40 minutes of walking + 35 minutes of Metrolink into however many minutes of biking, for example.

I live in Manchester. Which is an amazing city for public transport. I work in Cheshire which isn’t. … Perhaps when I’m more experienced I can find a job closer to home or more remote, but for now this is all I can do.

Nothing you could say will convince me that there isn’t even a single suitable job for you right now in Manchester. Or that there isn’t a single suitable residence for you right now in whichever town in Cheshire you work in, for that matter.

Bike tires suffer similar problems.

But at a much smaller scale, since the tires are made out of so much less material each.

And my bikes go through tires fairly quick.

Quit doing whip skid stops all the time, ya hoodlum!

I mean I dunno about you but where I live it gets really fucking hot. And sometimes it rains.

Blah, blah, blah – quit being such a damn wimp!

The high today in my city is 97 °F and guess what: I get on my e-bike instead of in my car anyway! It is really not even slightly as big of a deal as you’re trying to make it out to be.

No one’s saying ICE vehicles are better for the environment than EVs

I think it’s possible for a diesel vehicle running on 100% biodiesel made from waste oil to be. The problem there is that there isn’t enough of that sort of fuel to go around as long as cities keep getting designed to keep people car-dependent.

expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).

Frankly, I’m skeptical that hydrogen belongs anywhere.

Also, trains have no excuse to be anything other than electric! If you’re spending the money building the track in the first place, it’s really not that much extra cost to put up overheard wires too.

The way to fix everything else wrong with them is to not make cars the default mode of transportation.

Say it again louder for the folks in the back!

The “everything else” wrong with cars dwarfs the issue of pollution. Cars being the default mode of transportation is ultimately responsible for everything from obesity to the housing crisis!

If I’m travelling 6 miles in to town then I’m taking the tram, but it really isn’t feasible when travelling 40 miles to work and back 3 times a week.

“My city is fucking designed wrong so the public transport sucks” isn’t really the rebuttal you think it is. Obviously, the real problem there is your city is fucking designed wrong and the vast majority of people shouldn’t have to be living 40 miles away from work to begin with!

Every definitive trait has some counter example that still counts because people “feel” it’s good enough.

There’s an aphorism in statstics / science: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I feel that the distinction between genuine off-road-capable SUVs and crossovers/tall cars/glorified station wagons or minivans is useful, even if it isn’t completely definitive. Generally speaking, if it’s a unibody vehicle it probably isn’t very good off-road, and therefore doesn’t really deserve to be called an “SUV.”

So does a 2wd “suv” (by your definition) then get declassified?

A 2WD SUV is less general-purpose, but I think they still have enough potential to count (think desert-racing prerunners, which are often 2WD but legitimate off-road vehicles).

That’s the argument I would be making, but it certainly isn’t Microsoft’s (Copilot), OpenAI’s (Codex), etc’s position: they think the output is sufficiently laundered from the GPL training data so as not to constitute a derivative work (which means none of the original licenses – “open source” or otherwise – would apply, and the recipient could do whatever they want).

Edit: actually, to be more clear, I would take either of two positions:

1. That the presence of GPL (or in general, copyleft) code in the training dataset requires all output to be GPL (or in general, copyleft).

2. That the presence of both GPL code and code under incompatible licenses in the training dataset means that the AI output cannot legally be used at all.

(Position #2 seems more likely, as the license for proprietary code would be violated, too. It’s just that I don’t care about that; I only care about protecting the copyleft parts.)

i am vaguely familiar with software licensing is GPL type of open source?

You could say that, LOL. It’s the OG of “copyleft” licenses (the guy that made it invented the concept), although “permissive” licenses (BSD, MIT) existed before.

“Copyleft” and “permissive” are the two major categories of Free Software (a.k.a. “open source”, although that term has different connotations) license. The difference between them is that “copyleft” requires future modifications by people other than the copyright holders to be released under the same terms, while “permissive” does not. In other words, “copyleft” protects the freedom of future users to control their computer by being able to modify the software on it, while “permissive” maximizes the freedom of other developers to do whatever they want with the code (including using it in proprietary apps, to exploit people).

See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Having all AI-generated code be either “viral” copyleft or illegal to use at all would certainly be better than allowing massive laundering of GPL-licensed code for exploitation in proprietary software.

Plenty of large “tall station wagons” are unibody. About the only legitimately capable offroad 4x4s I know of that are unibody are the Jeep Cherokee (the old one) and maybe something like a Suzuki Jimny (edit: nope, even that tiny thing is body-on-frame).

(Consider the difference between a (unibody) Toyota Highlander and a (body-on-frame) Toyota 4Runner, for example: only the latter is a “real” SUV, in terms of being capable off-road.)

I am sure there’s a real distinction

Body-on-frame with a pickup truck chassis vs. unibody construction.

I hate to say it, but I kinda hope the music copyright cartel wins this one, only for the precedent it would set about things like proprietary use of MS Copilot output being an infringement of GPL-licensed code.

Maybe the execs don’t care and the IT folks don’t have the power to override them, but surely the legal department cares, right?

Hmm, good point!

As far as I can tell, this is about an Israeli government propaganda effort spending Israeli taxpayers’ shekels against Americans. While it’s true that your comment could be validly copy-pasted to threads about all sorts of things that the US government has done, this thread isn’t about one of those situations.

Edit: sunzu makes a good point.