What country is that?

Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.

The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?

I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.

Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.

Please share oh enlightened one

I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.

The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.

I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.

Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.

Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.

Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.

Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.

Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.

And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.

Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.

The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.

Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.

A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.

If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.

The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.

Dude looks to be tarnished already, he doesn’t have a choice in this.

I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.

The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.

Isn’t Banjo the one where all the girls have massive tits? And the witch turns into a total hottie as well. Need to get me some of that Gruntussy.

ChatGPT offline, go back to monkey brain for the first time in years. Monkey brain says: Just ask ChatGPT.

End up catatonic in a corner.

Always has been.

And I’ve been using Microsoft since my first computer in 1984. Recently got DOS 2.0 with hacked FAT16 running on my first computer, would have blown my mind back then.

No the “AI” isn’t a threat in itself. And treating generative algorithms like LLM like it’s general intelligence is dumb beyond words. However:

It massively increases the reach and capacity of foreign (and sadly domestic) agents to influence people. All of those Russian trolls that brought about fascism, Brexit and the rise of the far right used to be humans. Now a single human can do more than a whole army of people could in the past using AI. Spreading misinformation has never been easier.

Then there’s the whole replacing peoples jobs with AI. No the AI can’t actually do those jobs, not very well at least. But if management and the share holders think they can increase profits using AI, they will certainly fire a lot of folk. And even if that ends up ruining the company down the line, that costs even more jobs and usually impacts the people lower in the organization the most.

Also there’s a risk of people literally becoming less capable and knowledgeable because of AI. If you can have a digital assistant you carry around on your pocket at all times answer every question ever, why bother learning anything yourself? Why take the hard road, when the easy road is available? People are at risk of losing information, knowledge and the ability to think for themselves because of this. And it can become so bad, when the AI just makes shit up, people think it’s the truth. And in a darker tone, if the people behind the big AIs want something to not be known or misrepresented, they can make it happen. And people would be so reliant on it, they wouldn’t even know this happens. This is already an issue with social media, AI is much much worse.

Then there is the resource usage for AI. This makes the impact of crypto currency seem like a rounding error. The energy and water usage is huge and becoming bigger every day. This has the potential to undo almost all of the climate wins we’ve had for the past two decades and push the Earth beyond the tipping point. What people seem to forget about climate change is once things start becoming bad, it’s way too late and the situation will deteriorate at an exponential rate.

That’s just a couple of big things I can think of on the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more issues (such as the death of the internet). But I think this is enough to call the current level of “AI” a threat to humanity.

The thing is, once the userbase dies the game is non-playable. Maybe they’ll update it so you can do stuff without the whole online bit, but I doubt it.

I regularly play games like SMB3 or LTTP, in my opinion masterpieces of gaming which still hold up today. Imagine being a kid today and wanting to replay a game from your childhood later in life. Too bad son, without the live services the game simply isn’t playable.

So I feel the argument can be made for live services being an addition to the game and not the core mechanic.

And just about anything you try to do to actually read the description would start the movie, including doing nothing for 10 secs (because you are fucking reading the description). Till you hit the back button which just boots you back to the home screen, so you can start the selection process all over again.

Helpfully they do include IMDB scores when browsing for stuff, sadly all their stuff is total shite so all the scores are low. But hey, at least they include them.

The only way to watch anything on Prime is to make your selection in advance somewhere else and then search for it. If you type in the literal title of the movie, it will mostly be in the top 10 of the search results. This includes resuming watching something you were watching, like their hit series Fallout. You would expect the resume watching thing to be proudly the first item on the home page. OMG you actually watched something of ours, we are so happy. Nope it’s buried away on the 5th or 6th line and you need to scroll to get to it. It also happily resumes the previous episode at the credits, without the helpful next episode button. If you do manage to get to the next episode, you will need to watch the first 5 secs of same ad you’ve seen a million times (because they only seem to have the one ad on their platform) before you can skip to the content.

I don’t know what those guys are smoking, but their app is total garbage.

Usually big corps collect all your personal information and tell you it’s a good thing because they use it to make useful recommendations. That way you at least get something out of it. At Amazon they just take all your personal data and when it comes to recommendations it gives you a big middle finger. I don’t know here’s a romcom from 12 years ago, you like that stuff right? Whatever fuck off.

Oh cool, what distro are you running? I use Arch btw.

Don’t forget about the MSX, Commodore 128, the Sega Mastersystem and the Gameboy (although that used a custom modified version of the Z80, but very similar)

Fun fact: Red Dwarf did this joke in 1988

For those not in the know: The big issue with quantum computers is decoherence. This is (simply put) noise produced in the system, which interferes or overwrites the calculation / signal we want to get out of the computer. A large part of this is thermal energy, all that energy bouncing around destroys any chance of reading out the signal. So the solution would be to cool the machine within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, which is hard but not impossible. Then there’s also EM radiation coming from all around us (wifi and cellphones, but also things like radio), this is relatively easy to shield against. A bit of a pain, but still something that can be done. But then there’s cosmic rays, there’s a real chance a cosmic ray hits with enough energy to disrupt the calculation within milliseconds. Milliseconds isn’t enough to do a useful calculation, so that’s a problem. Shielding against this is also pretty hard, since cosmic rays can have a lot of energy.

Then there’s the issue of measurement itself, measuring automatically means putting in energy to the system. This means it’s very hard (or maybe even impossible) to read out the results, without destroying them. Even if you get the damn thing stable enough to do a useful calculation.

The more qubits in a system, the more powerful it becomes, and you need quite a number of them to do anything useful with the machine. But the more qubits the bigger the decoherence issue.

This is why some people (me included) don’t believe the current form of quantum computers we are researching can actually work in the real world. We need some kind of big breakthrough on this to create an actually useful quantum computer system. With all the cooling and shielding requirements we certainly won’t be using them at home any time soon.

But of course as with anything these days the marketing department and media runs with everything they can, spouting out nonsense about quantum computers becoming mainstream any day now and all the amazing things they can do. This can make it hard to figure out what the actual level of development is right now. Plus anybody working on this is putting in billions of dollars and sure as heck won’t share anything with anybody. So maybe someone has already made a breakthrough, but I doubt it.