Time Nick Message 00:43 MTDiscord I see pgsql_mod_storage_connection in src/server.cpp however doc/world_format.txt is missing this. Is this just an omission or is there history such as the feature being unstable / unsafe / experimental / something there? 00:45 MTDiscord its a new feature in 5.7 00:46 MTDiscord see https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/12879 00:50 MTDiscord Great, thanks! 00:52 MTDiscord anyways, if its not documented, file an issue, or better open a pr 00:54 MTDiscord I was considering doing just that lol. 01:24 MTDiscord Why not: #13113 01:24 ShadowBot https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13113 -- Document mod storage psql settings in world_format.txt by Awkanimus 01:25 MTDiscord (that's to say, I created the pull request. It's two lines in the documentation but may save others from greping through code) 01:35 MTDiscord how does the up parameter of vector.dir_to_rotation() actually work? the documentation didn't help me understand it well. 01:37 MTDiscord i couldn't visuallize how the roll angle is determined from up 03:43 FavoritoHJS i must be missing something, why do build tools tend to be so opaque, what happens if a depenency is gone, how do i swap it if i don't even know where it searches... 12:22 Luris lettuce 12:25 MTDiscord lettuce? 12:25 MTDiscord cabbage 12:26 Luris lettus 12:27 Luris cabagg 12:27 Luris qcumbr 13:28 lissobone Greetings. 22:38 FavoritoHJS i fear mankind is doomed. so many important subject, such as nuclear weapons or climate change, have become so cloudy that effective action is not being pursued... at the point where we absolutely need massive action to prevent a complete breakdown of society. 22:38 FavoritoHJS and even if such massive action could be made, we have plenty of catch-22's that will make it fruitless anyways. How do we stop fossil fuels when renewables are iffy, energy storage is nil, fission can only be entrusted with a few nations and fusion is too far away? 22:38 FavoritoHJS how can we prevent the fragile cycles that keep our planet as it is from breaking down, when they are already failing, and further failures will result in even worse breakdowns? 22:40 FavoritoHJS please tell me i'm wrong, as i'd not want to live my life with the knowledge that all will be for naught, for the signs have arrived and apocalypse is near 22:41 MTDiscord FavoritoHJS: Apocalypse is not near. 22:43 MTDiscord Nuclear weapons have been there for more than half a century now yet humanity has not annihilated itself. 22:43 FavoritoHJS so that's one problem less... but at this rate it's the lesser one 22:43 FavoritoHJS after all, "kill me and i'll kill you" has proven a decent deterrant 22:44 MTDiscord Indeed 22:44 FavoritoHJS for now, at least... i can only hope it remains that way 22:44 MTDiscord one might even argue that this balance of terror has prevented many pointless deaths 22:45 FavoritoHJS however all that means is that nuclear weapons aren't as dangerous 22:45 FavoritoHJS climate change, however... 22:45 MTDiscord Climate change will not render the planet uninhabitable anytime soon; it will just make it harder to inhabit it, but humans will adapt. 22:46 FavoritoHJS at a huge cost 22:46 MTDiscord Projecting a breakdown of society still seems overly pessimistic to me though. 22:46 FavoritoHJS i doubt any of us will be alive in 2035, that kind of huge cost 22:46 MTDiscord That is an outrageous claim. 22:46 MTDiscord I hardly believe you can back that up. 22:47 FavoritoHJS if the climate heats up much more then crop failures are inevitalbe 22:47 FavoritoHJS that means famines, crisis, death 22:47 MTDiscord Quantify it. 22:47 FavoritoHJS potentially enough that some crazed person would launch nukes... 22:48 MTDiscord It seems unlikely to me that crop failures within the next decade would be large enough to cause first-world loss of supply; after all it is very well possible to raise farming capacities. 22:48 FavoritoHJS i'm not a historian, but i'll say around 50% crop failure, causing basically any non-first-world country to starve to death, likely taking down much of the rest 22:49 MTDiscord FavoritoHJS: I don't see how history would help with quantifying the crop failure? 22:50 MTDiscord Where do you source that number from BTW? 22:50 FavoritoHJS more of a ballpark 22:50 MTDiscord Your ballpark estimate probably is highly subjective, being fear-driven 22:52 MTDiscord I assume that agriculture will have to shift to colder reasons which will warm up. 22:52 MTDiscord Humans in general will probably want to move towards the poles. 22:52 MTDiscord colder regions* 22:53 FavoritoHJS which will be dificult when said colder regions are ever more densly populatex 22:53 FavoritoHJS also, assuming they can even get there in the first place 22:53 MTDiscord e.g. the abstract of a paper reads: "Shifts in breadbaskets may cross national borders as crop yields will increase in Canada and decrease in the US as a response to a changing climate." 22:54 FavoritoHJS all that matters at the end is "will be there enough food so people don't starve" and i'm fairly certain that the answer will be no 22:55 MTDiscord FavoritoHJS: Doing twice as much farming is no rocket science. 22:55 MTDiscord Even taking your very likely exaggerated figure of 50% crop failure. 22:55 FavoritoHJS doing twice as much farming when fertilizer, fresh water and potentially land are in scarce supply, however... 22:57 MTDiscord Why would there be a shortage of fertilizer? 22:59 FavoritoHJS fertilizer is kinda expensive to produce, especially in energy, but i'll retract that point as i might have overestimated the difficulty 22:59 muurkha fertilizer is not scarce, yeah 22:59 muurkha fresh water is only scarce in a relative sense 23:00 muurkha that is, desalination is now cheap enough to grow most crops at a price most people can afford to eat 23:00 muurkha but not cheap enough to compete with crops grown with rainfall 23:00 muurkha I think the current yield of grains alone is about five times the number of calories needed to feed the world's human population 23:01 muurkha but most of them get fed to cows and other livestock 23:02 FavoritoHJS so it seems like climate change could be less bad than I feared... but much of what would make it less bad depends on recognizing and adapting around it 23:02 FavoritoHJS something i fear isn't being done fast enough 23:02 MTDiscord We've only had only mammal (Bramble Cay Melomys in 2015) go extinct due to climate change so far, saying everyone will be gone in the next few ten years is definitely extreme :P 23:03 muurkha well, climate change is pretty horrifyingly bad, but sometimes people do overestimate its speed 23:03 MTDiscord We keep passing goals by miles, and are constantly hitting the so-called no-return points they keep moving 23:04 FavoritoHJS the thing about those no-return points is that they don't attack right away 23:05 FavoritoHJS they would take years, decades to go from "just past no return" to "pretty f**ing bad alright" 23:05 MTDiscord if something takes more than a few years to have a bad effect no one with enough authority to do anything will care 23:06 muurkha yeah, that's why we're in this mess 23:06 FavoritoHJS which is my greatest problem 23:06 muurkha most of the really bad effects are 50, 100 years out 23:06 muurkha I think the situation is a lot brighter than it sounds, though 23:06 muurkha fossil-fuel energy is now far too expensive to compete with cheap renewables in most of the world 23:06 FavoritoHJS sure, it will take a few decades for disaster to strike... but it will strike, and it will hurt 23:07 MTDiscord it won't strike, it'll gradually arrive 23:07 muurkha Amory Lovins has been tooting this horn since maybe 02014, but it keeps getting more obvious 23:07 FavoritoHJS i'll repeat myself: How do we stop [using] fossil fuels when renewables are iffy, energy storage is nil, fission can only be entrusted with a few nations and fusion is too far away? 23:08 MTDiscord by using less energy, but good luck with that 23:08 muurkha no, by using dramatically *more* energy 23:08 muurkha which is what happens every time energy gets a lot cheaper 23:08 FavoritoHJS now you see why i'm afraid? 23:09 muurkha renewables aren't iffy, and energy storage is only nil because so far fossil-fuel baseload and peaker plants are sufficient to cover for renewables' variability 23:09 MTDiscord I find it incredibly we don't have more fusion plants though, Germany even closing them 23:09 MTDiscord *incredible 23:09 muurkha *fission 23:09 MTDiscord gah 23:09 FavoritoHJS by iffy i was thinking more of intermittent--they usually produce power, but sometimes they don't, and you need to store energy for that 23:10 muurkha fission plants are even more expensive than coal plants though; everything outside the nuclear island is basically a coal plant 23:10 muurkha and coal plants are too expensive to compete with renewables in most of the world (though Germany is at a special disadvantage there, being polar, cloudy, and not windy) 23:10 MTDiscord Meh, we'll have fusion reactors soon anyway 23:10 MTDiscord now that's optimistic 23:11 muurkha no, it's just realistic 23:11 FavoritoHJS well, soon is 10 years... every time 23:11 FavoritoHJS 10 years ago it was 10 years, 10 years from now it will be 10 years 23:11 muurkha fossil-fuel advocates keep sticking their head in the sand 23:11 FavoritoHJS don't plan for it 23:11 MTDiscord Last time we didn't have functioning fusion reactions 23:11 MTDiscord Its not my job to plan for it, ill let helion do that 23:11 muurkha if you do the numbers, you'll see that even with today's battery tech, grid-scale energy storage sufficient to cover the intermittency of renewables without any fossil-fuel production at all 23:12 muurkha newer battery tech might end up being cheaper, but demand response is an easier gimme 23:12 FavoritoHJS that's assuming you can make that many batteries 23:12 muurkha yes, but I did the math, and you can 23:12 FavoritoHJS and you can make them affordably 23:12 muurkha so it's not an assumption, it's a calculation 23:12 MTDiscord Salt ion batteries are arriving too, so 23:12 muurkha you mean sodium-ion batteries 23:13 MTDiscord No I store energy in my table shakers 23:13 muurkha they might work, or they might not, but they aren't necessary 23:13 muurkha me too, I put them on a shelf 23:13 muurkha they release energy when they fall off 23:13 MTDiscord Mine also release energy when the contents are ingested 23:14 muurkha maybe you should switch to sodium chloride so you stop burning your mouth 23:14 FavoritoHJS about batteries, for grid application i imagine cost per x storage is more important than area per x storage 23:14 muurkha yeah 23:14 muurkha thermal energy storage with phase-change materials or thermochemical energy storage is likely to reduce the amount of battery required and be enormously cheaper 23:15 muurkha this has been common for decades for things like skyscrapers: freeze water with cheap baseload power at night, then circulate coolant through it to air-condition the offices during the day 23:15 FavoritoHJS which might be why you simultaneously can and can't make enough batteries: can't with lithium-ion but use something else (return of lead-acid?) and it might become possible 23:15 MTDiscord Again, sodium ion 23:15 muurkha and of course my grandparents called the refrigerator an "icebox" until they died, because the iceman used to deliver ice every morning 23:15 MTDiscord But anyway 23:15 MTDiscord Carry on 23:15 FavoritoHJS but all this "can be done?" skips a question, "will it be done?" 23:15 muurkha new battery technologies might or might not materialize 23:16 muurkha it will, because the economic incentives are strongly in its favor 23:16 muurkha low-cost energy is one of the most important economic advantages a country can have; it's what produced the Industrial Revolution in the first place 23:17 muurkha the astounding PV price drop from 02009 to 02019 is the first time something like this has happened in 200 years 23:17 MTDiscord FavoritoHJS: Yes, it will be done. 23:18 muurkha countries that find a way to take advantage of this will become the new economic superpowers; those that outlaw it, perhaps out of a misguided notion that sunlight is something you can conserve by not using it, will be left behind 23:18 FavoritoHJS and will it be done fast enough? as if it's by 2040 or so it's too late, but if by 2025 we might advert catastrophe 23:19 muurkha even if it's by 02040 we can avert catastrophe with atmospheric carbon capture, which is eminently feasible if you have abundant cheap energy, even if it's intermittent 23:19 muurkha most of my notes on this topic are in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html if you'd like to read them 23:20 muurkha we're on course to cross over to majority renewable around 02030 23:21 FavoritoHJS i sure hope you're right 23:21 FavoritoHJS though about that crossover... do you mean worldwide or just on some countries? 23:21 muurkha worldwide, though some countries will surely be left behind 23:21 muurkha some countries are already majority renewable 23:22 muurkha here in Argentina we used to be 23:23 FavoritoHJS and another point i worry about is those crossovers. by the time we stop turn off the oven, will we have locked in too much heat? 23:23 muurkha no, but we'll need atmospheric carbon capture 23:24 muurkha but we probably also need Fischer–Tropsch synfuel in order to move the transport sector off fossil fuels 23:24 muurkha and that will probably also need atmospheric carbon capture 23:26 muurkha we might experience some extremely bad things with positive methane feedback though 23:27 muurkha the fact that they will be short-lived bad things won't be much consolation to those who fail to live through them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis 23:27 MTDiscord hmm I should read into carbon capture, afaik it just takes tons of time & energy. little motivation for anyone to do it other than saving the Earth 23:27 MTDiscord i.e. no profit from it, so who's gonna do it? 23:28 muurkha well, synfuel will be profitable at a high enough oil price and a low enough input energy price 23:28 muurkha even without a carbon tax 23:29 FavoritoHJS but that means the carbon would go right back into the atmosphere 23:30 FavoritoHJS stupid idea number 8: i've heard that careful use of charcoal can help improve soil quality. Considering finding good land to farm on will probably be the key difficulty in post-climate-change farming, that could be huge 23:30 muurkha some of it, but carbon at the output of a power plant (whether in a fixed building, on a boat, or on a vehicle) is enormously easier to recapture