Spent today goofing around on it, and on the RGCubeXX, it's pretty busted.
Waking up from sleep has about a 1/3 chance of success, the other 2/3rds of the time the whole thing just hard-freezes and needs a full reboot, which leads into the two biggest issues I had with it:
1. When booting up on a "dirty" filesystem, there's a prompt to power down or press any key to bypass the integrity check. This has a two minute timeout, which is just a ridiculous amount of time to wait. (Also, pressing buttons doesn't actually seem to work to bypass the integrity check)
2. After a power cycle - regardless of whether the power-down was clean or dirty - you lose everything on the microSD other than the OS itself. All settings, all downloaded themes, all ROMs completely wiped. It's as if it's booting from a recovery partition or something. I tried numerous times (gracefully shutting down via the Start-button menu) and each time, it boots back up all wiped clean. Reimaged and started over from scratch - still the same issue.
Different devices have different levels of support. Support for the H700 (the chipset in the CubeXX) has been added a few months ago and the project is still working out the kinks.
Unfortunately we're often limited by whatever blobs the manufacturer provides and whatever is supported by the mainline kernel, as you can imagine there's not a whole lot of people experimenting with the latest and the greatest on these devices so the project often runs into regressions when upgrading. I wish the situation was better but given the prices these devices are going for it's a small wonder they work as well as they do ;) Having (some) mainline support does mean that we'll see updates for years and years so with a bit of luck the situation will improve over time!
For reference the Rockchip devices (RK3266 and RK3566) have been supported for longer and offer a general smooth experience. I've had pretty good luck with my Powkiddy X55!
With regards to 2, just like bazzite and some other distros Rocknix uses a read-only filesystem, you can use mounts to allow certain paths to be overwritten. The default configuration strives to find a balance between allowing some customization and stability.
What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly. I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.
And yeah, I was aware that H700 is the new kid on the block as it pertains to Rocknix. It's just a bit frustrating, especially because (imo) the Anbernic H700 devices are the ones most deeply in need of a solid custom firmware / OS option. The version of Retroarch included in the stock OS is lacking some pretty standard cores (no INTV, no Colecovision, no Speccy, no 3DO, and that's just the "tier 2"s that come to mind, not doing a deep dive into the even-more obscure stuff like the Sharp systems or CDi). And the default Ambernic OS itself is, charitably, "not-great" (why are there two entirely-separate menus to browse games from, why can't I re-scan without rebooting, the list goes on and on and on...)
> What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly.
Yeah, hopefully this isn't intended behavior. :) The ROMs are being samba'd right into the appropriate directories (I tried both "roms-internal" and the third option that isn't "roms-external" - forgot the name and already wiped the card). I can play them fine as long as I don't ever reboot, so it's not like they're just not copying. The themes are downloaded and installed solely through the frontend, I'm not doing anything too obscure or beardy.
It even does this on a fresh install, so the default theme is immediately replaced with the... even-more-default...? theme. That definitely threw me for a loop on the first go-round. The "more-default-than-default" theme actually doesn't look too bad (sort of has a Cosmic Smash [1] vibe), but a lot of text breaks outside the confines of its boxes and it lacks any cursor highlighting in menus, so without screenshots you have no idea which option (or game) you're selecting.
> I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.
I don't use Discord, but I'm happy to file Github issues as long as you think it'd be non-redundant / a productive use of my time. Otherwise, by all means feel free to link my comments in the Discord!
> WhatsApp was the first ever primary convenience brought by the advent of the internet - it fulfilled a legitimate need all over the world by providing essentially free, limitless, boundless communication if you had few megabytes of internet in your mobile quota.
Yes, truly WhatsApp was the first of its kind. It's all the communication of sending a letter through the mail, except delivered electronically - one wonders why they didn't call it "electronic mail", or perhaps "e-mail" for short.
The group chats it offers are another huge innovation - for the first time, people were able to chat with each other by relaying their messages across the internet. Truly a marvel.
Personally, I divide the internet into two eras - "before Whatsapp", when there was simply no primary convenience of any sort to be found upon the internet and all users were deeply encumbered by bounds; and "after Whatsapp", when I and others can communicate, conveniently, via the internet, because of WhatsApp, boundlessly.
Ok, understand the downvote. Probably should have caveated it with 'in my social circle'.
In my country, there was no universal messenger app circa 2010s except WhatsApp.
Not everybody had a Facebook account to use Facebook Messenger, adults did but children and elderly didn't. Not everybody had an Apple device to use iMessage.
Nobody knew each other's email outside of work and business - the digital revolution came much later than the US to many parts of the world, and email was a tool for personal communication only very briefly, and only if you already knew that person's email, which most likely you didn't.
The reason WhatsApp took off is because it didn't require anything other than a person's phone number - which was usually the only type of digital pointer you had about a person.
SMS was not an option - it was expensive and limited (to this day still is, unlike the US!), only used as a last resort.
I'm sure many countries around the world would share the same sentiment, though maybe not most. Esp. Europe and South America, probably.
How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting. Luckily we’ve gotten away from the locker room behavior being the median and now the median is approaching good-manners behavior. This is one of the situations where the Overton window shifting makes us better as a species instead of worse.
IMHO it's made the world worse. We're not sterile robots. To deny us mischievous ASCII art is to deny the very things that make us human. Bring on the IDE penis. Make it widescreen if you like. It's not nearly as offensive as having a censoring big brother overlord telling us what is and isn't acceptable for the workers' enjoyment.
As a gay dude, I'd have no problems at all with this out of a garage game developer.
And any reasonably well adjusted straight male would probably get a good laugh out of the art, same as I would.
We now live in a world where female colleagues can speak in whispers about how a male colleague is hot/attractive, but male colleagues cannot engage in the same behaviour.
Trust me, I know. Because of media stereotypes about gays most female colleagues don't have any problem engaging in "girl talk" once they know I'm gay. Like damn I don't care, I'm just a dude.
> How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
Once again: So what?
> The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting.
I'm part of this "median" you seem to hold in such high regard. If you try to silence all data points outside your preconceived notion of what the "median" view is, then what you have there isn't a median, but just a few vocal people who happen to be on your side.
Why would you assume other men want to see that shit either? It's weird, creepy, unprofessional, and weird and creepy. Mostly weird and creepy though. Like are you so lonely and horny that you need to plaster your shit with half-naked women?
Even if you restrict yourself to talking about men, asexual and gay men exist. And honestly, I suspect that such people are more common among developers than among the base population.
Funny that I and my coworkers have figured out how to make the office not an "unpleasant sterile place" without doing so in a way that alienates so many classes of people.
Oh yeah it's so unpleasant not having to see creepy and gross shit in the work place because some horny dork never grew up. Gosh won't someone please think of the incels?!
Interesting. How is that comment homophobic? Might be factually incorrect, but not homophobic. Quite the contrary, it implies that women prefer looking at women too.
It's teenager-ish, and the kind of thing that would make people uncomfortable if they saw it at our own workplaces. We can argue about whether companies 'should' punish people for stuff like this, but I can say for sure that I don't feel like I'm missing out on much here.
The Son of Sam claimed his neighbor's dog was telling him to kill - better demand dog breeders do something vague and unspecified that (if actually implementable in the first place) would invariably make dogs less valuable for the 99% of humanity that isn't having a psychotic break!
Articles like this seem far more driven by mediocre content-churners' fear of job replacement at the hands of LLMs than by any sort of actual journalistic integrity.
> Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader.
Nah, it's mostly just reached the stage where there's nothing left to do - all the "objective" stuff works as it should, and any feature adds would be a pretty heavy undertaking. It was updated a little less than a year ago, and when I contacted the author he was very responsive.
Would it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut for proper [1] cuesheet creation (ironically, all the options except the proper one have keyboard shortcuts)? Yeah, but I've learned to live with it. Would it be nice to have super-duper tagging options? I dunno, from where I'm sitting, it seems like it'd just be duplicating a bunch of foobar2000 features for negligible gain.
[1] Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track, which is not how Red Book audio handles it, and means that the "proper" cuesheet format is technically a non-compliant cuesheet.
> Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track
Side digression: For regular albums, where the pregap is just two seconds of silence I can absolutely understand that and prefer to put the pregap at the end of the previous song myself.
However for live albums my feelings are a bit more torn – on the one hand there is something to the music starting immediately when playing a random track, but on the other hand any stage patter that might be present in the pregap usually refers to the upcoming track, and having that incongruously stuck at the end of the preceding track is at least to me somewhat annoying during random playback, too.
The database idea is neat, but I'm not really sure what the web emulator part adds besides bloat. Either an animated .GIF or an HTML5 object with buttons to click to demonstrate, e.g., standing horizontal jump trajectory vs running horizontal jump trajectory would not only be less overhead, but much more immediate.
In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts.
The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died.
Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story.
This devastates the large publishers' traffic.
I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...
I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose.
Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article.
What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.
I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.
The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.
There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.
I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.
This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/
People get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.
> Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time
They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.
I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.
Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.
> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.
Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:
A recent article on HN was about small sites being destroyed in traffic, not large sites. And not just small, but small with essential human-written info.
Nah, Webrings were an extension of the link page ... but not the same thing.
The Link page was curated by the site operator and usually a linear list. IT's main goal was to say "Hey, this is cool, too".
A webring was more like a collective, whereas individual webring members did not necessarily know or agree with every other site in the ring. And it usually was not a list either, but more of a mini topical directory, often with a token-ring-style "Visit the next / random / prev site" navigation you could add to your own page. Webrings were already geared to increasing visitor numbers to your own page ("Others will link to me").
What was the organisation of a webbing like? Did you have to email two people to arrange to insert yourself as a node at the same time to avoid breaking the ring? Or iframe'd in from a central point?
Webrings were usually a centralized and automated entity. You'd add your site to the index (either through a webform or by emailing the maintainer), then link to http:// web-ring.tld /cgi-bin/ring?site=currentsitename&action=next or something similar, which would then redirect to the actual next site in the ring.
In their heyday, there'd also be "start your own webring" sites, so you didn't need cgi-bin access on your GeoShitties or AngelFucker or TriPoop or xoom [1] site in order to start up a webring.
[1] The dry and square history books will claim that the most exciting thing about xoom was its large storage allocation (10mb at launch! 25 soon after! You could upload an entire three minute mp3 at 128CBR "CD-Quality" bitrate and still have tons of space left over for two-frame .gifs!) or its simple members.xoom. com/username URL, but the true soldiers of those bygone battledays will know it was xoom's resiliency to childish renaming-mockery.
The publishers were just chasing traffic just like everyone else. Link pages were replaced by inline links which were preferred by both search engines and users. The goal was to provide relevant resources on relevant context rather in one big bucket dump no one's going to dig through anyway.
Early Google PageRank was notorious for how much additional trust a given page had based on many links back to it existed. It was why certain bloggers had massive ranks early on, because they would be in big webs of conversations with lots of high quality links out and back in.
Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.
The ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point?
I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.
You can't blindly trust sources, either. Or, sometimes, you ability to understand the sources correctly.
I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do.
If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be pretty useful.
Dictionary.com isn’t likely to just outright make up word meanings. There is such a thing as a trustworthy source, even if you can’t “blindly” trust it. You can still trust it and quote it and cite it. You can’t do any of those things so far with an LLM.
You're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.
The tech community, correctly or incorrectly, is broadly seen as "anti-tax cuts", so - regardless of the actual merits of this particular tax cut - I'm not sure how well-received this campaign will be.
I'd brace for some rather heavy sarcasm on social media for anyone brave enough to tread those waters.
It bothers me when other software devs assume everybody is the same as them. In CA, sure likely most engineers are likely democrats. This does not mean they’re the majority. In fact many republican devs are still scared to speak out because of the censorship and canceling during COVID. You cannot make this assumption that we are broadly against tax cuts.
I paid for 1024x768. Because of your frames, the content I'm actually interested in is now restricted to some disgusting and dismaying fraction of that. The borders of my bitchin' 15" CRT are now committed to navigation (which I have to scroll horizontally to actually make sense of) and what is likely a LinkExchange banner on the bottom that adds absolutely nothing to my experience.
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU
For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too.
At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions.
One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.
Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.
If it's used to generate electricity or usable heat and not only to get rid of it, plastic would substitute for another fuel, so it's not as simple as looking at co2 from burning plastic vs co2 from dumping it in landfill.
I don't have numbers, but if burning plastic replaces some coal or fracked natural gas, that could be a win, all things considered.
Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
And evwn if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
> Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
My argument is not that burning plastic is more efficient than burning whatever fuel. My argument is that extracting, transporting and burning waste plastic may be more efficient than extracting, transporting, and burning whatever fuel. Waste to energy might need a lot less transportation if the plants are near where the waste is generated and/or where it is already collected.
> Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
There's already sorting and education for recycling, so the question becomes what's the incremental input needed to get a usable waste to useful energy pipeline.
> And even if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
Yes, but I don't know how that relates? My argument is that the emissions of burning plastic for usable energy might not be as bad as it looks because it would reduce lifecycle emissions from (direct) fossil fuels. That's not an argument for or against burning plastic, it's an argument that we need to get marginal emissions numbers for the alternatives, and if emissions is the only criteria, then it would make sense to burn plastic in cases where the marginal emissions are in favor of burning it; but even that wouldn't be universal. It might make more (or less) sense to setup trash for energy plants in isolated locations where transport of other fuel is difficult; it almost certainly makes less sense to setup trash for energy plants in places where natgas is a waste product, natgas is a clear choice there.
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I am) talking about plastic bags.
I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.
> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately 13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75 ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags even affect the last decimal of that number.
Why would we discuss plastic bags exclusively? Singling out one item like this makes little sense - the problem is the aggregate of all plastic we use, not specifically one item. If we only used plastic for our shopping bags, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The oxygen is not contained in the 150kg of plastic, it’s pulled out of the atmosphere. You’re actually “burning” substantially more than 150kg if you include all the reactants.
Burning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would expect the number to be around 500kg (quick calculation) max.
Polyethylene is roughly CH2, and burns into CO2 and H20. So 1.5 moles of oxygen (O2) for each mole of polyethylene. The molar mass of CH2 is 14 and oxygen is 32, so 1 kg of CH2 will result in ~4.5kg of CO2.
How do you figure that? 14g of CH2 results in 44g of CO2 (water we can ignore), so 150kg of CH2 becomes ~470kg of CO2. 1kg of CH2 would give ~3.1kg CO2. Or am I missing something?
I don't disagree with anything on this chain but I think things like hypothetical miles deep landfill can't be worse than burning, it'll stay there for million years and the next iteration of life to do the same discussion as being done here.
To me a "miles deep" landfill sounds like a wonderful way to contaminate groundwater.
I think it's facile to imagine that the Earth is large, thus that burying something can "make it go away".
But the Earth is also an incredibly dynamic place over long enough time scales (which for the purposes of this discussion can simply mean decades or centuries) so much of the lightweight matter you bury deep in dense rock can find a way to buoy back top the surface far sooner than in millions of years.
We know for sure that CO2 is a huge problem in the next century, and even earlier. We are already seeing massive impact from global warming today.
Any theoretical other concern from possible impacts of plastic in a landfill (which already will contain many other unknown pollutants) is at best secondary, unless we have some solid evidence otherwise.
Consider also that some significant amount of plastic in landfills is inevitable regardless of any sepatate collection policies. Especially with current recycling practices, you are encouraged to only separately collect certain kinds of fairly clean plastics. If you have a dirty styrofoam container that you just ate out of, you're not even supposed to throw that in the plastic recycling - so it will go to a landfill anyway. This means that landfills have to be mindful of potential plastic pollution even if we burn a lot of the plastic we use.
Plus, if we're truly worried about the health impact of plastic use, the only solution is to massively reduce plastic use. The fact that we "cleanly burn it" instead of letting it seap into groundwater is not going to help one iota when we store and transport and sometimes cook much of our food directly in it.
We also vastly overestimate the amount of trash created by the human race. Last time i did the math, a 1km cube could contain basically all the trash currently in every landfill a few times over. The plastic pollution problem is containable, literally. We just need to stop certain countries from dumping it into rivers.
Yes but humans have an innate need for apocalyptic thinking. If the world isn’t ending because of something we did, we will invent reasons to believe so
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.
Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.
Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.
And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.
I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our civilization. With current global warmig trends, countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other issues.
> Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does.
I also wanted to answer this. This is non-scientific BS based on literally nothing. Risks don't work like this: unless you can quantify them, you can't act on them. Any activity has some potential risk of unknown catastrophic effects. Maybe there is some chance that after a threshold, flushing our toilets will cause tidal effects that rip our planet apart - it's unlikely but it's possible. So let's all stop flushing our toilets. And stop using 5G if we're there, some people think that has a high risk of causing cancer or whatever.
Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
> CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
By what possible measure? Despite clear, well documented science, including very clear dire economical impact, and all within an extremely clear and short term time frame, with escalating effects already visible literally everywhere in the world, we have had almost 0 progress in combating global warming. The best we've done is slowing the rate of acceleration - as in CO2 release is still accelerating, just not as much.
Plastic waste has environmental impact, especially in the oceans, but nowhere near to the level that 2-3-4 degrees warming will have. And that is what we are currently on track for by the end of this century.
Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
That consists to a great extent of maritime generated garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in the middle of the ocean.
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".
However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...
Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water.
You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells?
>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature
Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.
Nothing made of atoms is truly chemically inert, not even noble gases. It's just more or less reactive, and when/how.
But even if it was literally un-reactive, sometimes it's enough to just be in the way. Imagine folding a protein, or assembling a structure of RNA origami*, but some big lump of un-reactive molecule is in the middle — the ultimate shape is different, leading to different biochemical results. Grit in the gears.
Or even just heavy: deuterium is chemically identical to hydrogen, but still has a lethal concentration** because it is twice the mass.
** Replacing 50% of the hydrogen in a multicellular organism with deuterium is generally lethal, unless this is a widely believed myth that's about to get a bunch of debunking
Not all harmful effects are caused by direct chemical reactions. For instance, asbestos causes health problems through the physical process of friction and piercing. Small particles that aren't removed by the body can do a lot of harm.
Two scenarios here:
1) They don't react with anything, meaning the billions of tons we produce keep increasing. Forever.
2) They do react, break down, get into the soil, water, blood, people, and have studied detrimental effects, and many more yet unstudied.
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.
If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.
The goal is get every last drop of unwanted water out of the Titanic. We can at least theoretically spread heavy canvas over some the huge gash in the bow, so you are focusing on a leaky water cooler in the stern.
No, I'm just saying that we shouldn't start taking buckets and pouring more water in. The default behavior is to store garbage in landfills. Let's leave it like that, rather than burning it to produce even more CO2.
Waking up from sleep has about a 1/3 chance of success, the other 2/3rds of the time the whole thing just hard-freezes and needs a full reboot, which leads into the two biggest issues I had with it:
1. When booting up on a "dirty" filesystem, there's a prompt to power down or press any key to bypass the integrity check. This has a two minute timeout, which is just a ridiculous amount of time to wait. (Also, pressing buttons doesn't actually seem to work to bypass the integrity check)
2. After a power cycle - regardless of whether the power-down was clean or dirty - you lose everything on the microSD other than the OS itself. All settings, all downloaded themes, all ROMs completely wiped. It's as if it's booting from a recovery partition or something. I tried numerous times (gracefully shutting down via the Start-button menu) and each time, it boots back up all wiped clean. Reimaged and started over from scratch - still the same issue.
The sleep issue seems to be a known thing and newer version will fix this by... removing the ability to sleep (see https://github.com/ROCKNIX/distribution/issues/1609).
Didn't see anything about the "clean" (more like "forcibly-sterilized") slate after power cycling.
Not ready for the big leagues, at least not on the CubeXX.