oce 🐆

I try to contribute to things getting better, sometimes through polite rational skepticism.
Disagreeing with your comment ≠ supporting the opposite side, I support rationality.
Let’s discuss to refine the arguments that make things better sustainably.
Always happy to question our beliefs.

  • 4 Posts
  • 140 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Some projects are spun out from major corporations.

    This is most of the FOSS projects in data engineering and data science. They come from tech giants or some dudes who just left tech giants to create a FOSS tool with a paid managed version, and those may get bough back by other tech giants later.

    Example:

    Analytics and AI giant Databricks reportedly paid nearly $2 billion when it acquired Tabular in June, a startup that was only doing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Bloomberg. That’s a pretty outrageous exit multiple, and it was purportedly fueled by a battle between Databricks and Snowflake.

    Tabular had over $30 million in funding, backed by Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Zetta Venture Partners, when it was acquired just three years after it was founded. Tabular’s valuation was tied to Apache Iceberg, a popular open source table format that the startup’s founders created while at Netflix. The startup quickly became an expensive pawn in the war between Databricks and Snowflake.https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/14/databricks-reportedly-paid-2-billion-in-tabular-acquisition/







  • Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it

    Don’t you think most plastic products are used because it’s convenient?

    I fight against it, but it is hard to not recognize how a plastic bottle is much lighter than any other bottle material, how convenient it is to get a plastic bag at the shop when you forgot yours, how convenient it is to get a ready meal in a cheap plastic box instead of an expensive and/or heavy washable container that you may have to bring back etc. Even compared to paper bags, plastic bags are more resistant, lighter and more compact.
    There are probably much more similar convenience uses in the industry.
    Plastic is mostly used because it’s convenient, not because of a big plastic conspiracy.

    So to solve the issue, we need states to make it expensive enough that people will overcome the inconvenience. Making people pay for plastic bags at shops works very well, for example.

    I speak as someone horrified by the over-abundance of plastics in Japan. Some fruits have 3 layers of plastic around, even bananas come in plastic bags, because modern Japan is all about looking clean and being convenient, zero fucks given to ecology.




  • Ok, I got time to read it. Drones are only mentioned in one paragraph of the conclusion. Here it is:

    ‘Eco-friendly’ fireworks, which do not use perchlorate and have lower levels of heavy metals, do exist (Fan et al. 2021); the problem lies in their higher cost of manufac- turing (Palaneeswari and Muthulakshmi 2012). The future of ‘firework’ displays may lie in the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones and visible-wavelength lasers for light shows have the benefit of being reusable, have no emissions, and are quiet (Daukantas 2010; Zerlenga et al. 2021). Drones come with their own issues for wildlife, however, usually flying at low altitudes where there are most likely to come into contact with wildlife; a review indicated that many taxa react negatively to the presence of a drone (Rebolo-Ifrán et al. 2019). Even so, drone light shows are less likely to disturb animals, wild or domestic, with noise, nor do they deposit large amounts of pollutants.

    The use of drones is an opening hypothesis, not the subject of the study. Impact of drones is not quantified, it is hypothesized to be lower. The linked papers that I have also checked also don’t quantify the impact but similarly mention it as a potential eco-friendly alternative.

    Would you have a different reading of this article?