Sorry, I was wrong. VMware and Parallels now run on ARM, but they do not (and seemingly will not) support a virtual machine running an OS compiled for Intel. They say that Rosetta 2 doesn't support this arrangement. However, they can run ARM-compatible OS's that have Intel emulation built in, e.g., Windows 11 for ARM.

So it sounds like your best option is either to run an ARM version of Linux, possibly with emulation support for Intel binaries (if that exists).

Some more info available here and here.

Virtualization software was one of the few types that couldn't run under Rosetta 2 at first. Which is understandable, given how deep it goes into the system architecture. But I think both VMWare and Parallels now support Intel virtual machines, and the whole bundle (including the virtualization software) gets run under Rosetta 2.

Do you know that unemployment is an insurance system?

If undocumented workers pay for health insurance, should they not get care if they get sick? If they pay for unemployment insurance should they not get support if they're laid off?

These workers pay more into the unemployment system then they would take out. You propose to just keep those payments and kick them to the street? Who's the leach in that plan?

Could an asteroid make Earth less hospitable than the moon or Mars? Maybe it would make more sense to focus on how to survive a global disaster for a few years on Earth without going anywhere?

On a multibillion year time scale we have to worry about the sun swallowing the Earth, but we could probably leave that problem to future generations.

I know this is meant as a joke, but I can't tell whether or not you believe the underlying statement. If you do, then your perception is wildly out of line with any evidence about recent elections (please cite one example where election officials were bought off and threw an election).

If you don't believe it then I guess you're mocking the rubes who do? But that's not particularly funny and it risks reinforcing their view by echoing it back to them (i.e. they'll read this as standard dark humor from someone who agrees with them).

This is way too much rumination on a joke but I'm curious what you're actually thinking.

The article has an update at the top saying this was just a thought experiment, not any kind of simulation or test. So this is a fairly standard critique of hypothetical autonomous AI.

Let me know the final cost when it's finished. Recent nuclear plants have gone way over schedule and way over budget. e.g., Vogtle 3&4

To compete with solar power and batteries at today's prices, a fusion power plant would need to be 25% cheaper than a nuclear fission power plant is today. That's a stretch, especially to achieve on a massive scale in the next 25 years. And if we're looking 25 years ahead, solar will be continuing to get cheaper. By then, solar may well be cheaper than the non-nuclear side of a fission or fusion plant (plumbing, turbines, cooling system, generator). At that point, there is no hope for fission or fusion: even if the reactor were free, solar power would cost less than the parts of the plant that convert the nuclear heat into electricity. And those parts aren't getting cheaper over time; they're the same type of equipment we've been using for 120 years.

Here are the numbers:

Solar power plus storage currently costs $1,808 per kW installed according to U.S. national modeling data, which is pretty conservative. Large-scale solar projects produce power about 28% of the time, so you would need about 3.2 kW of solar+storage to produce as much power as a nuclear plant running 90% of the time. So solar plus storage today would be competitive with a nuclear plant costing 3.2 x $1,808/kW = $5,786/kW, if we ignore the cost of fuel and disposal, which are negligible with fission and even lower with fusion.

However, according to the same U.S. national modeling data, nuclear fission plants currently cost $7,777 per kW. So to compete with solar+storage today, a fusion reactor would need to be 26% cheaper than fission plants are today.

It will take time for the cost of fusion reactors to come down to this level if they ever do. But meanwhile, solar will be continuing to get even cheaper. In the last 25 years, the cost of solar power has fallen by 83% (a solar-only plant has fallen from $4,556/kW in 1996$ [$8,520 in 2022$] to $1,448/kW), and in the 25 years before that it fell about 94%. If solar+storage falls by 75% in the next 25 years, nuclear plants will need to reach $1,400/kW (25% of $5,786) to compete. That's about the same cost as a combined-cycle natural gas plant, which has roughly the same equipment as the non-nuclear side of a fission or fusion plant. So at that point, the nuclear reactor itself will need to cost $0 in order to compete with solar+storage. And if solar falls further than that, there is simply no way nuclear can compete.

One critique of this is that there may be days or seasons when there's not enough solar power to meet loads. But guess what? Nuclear has the same problem: if you build enough nuclear capacity for typical loads, you won't have enough for the peak hours. In either case, you can get around this by building extra capacity, but it gets expensive to build capacity you will only use a small fraction of the year. Either way, you'd probably want to fill in with some fossil fuels or electricity-derived fuels for the last few percent of the year. Also note that the solar costs above include storage that can move solar power from times of peak production each day to times of peak consumption. The hypothetical nuclear plants don't have that. So we would actually need to build extra nuclear plants to meet the peak load each day. If that peak is 120% of average, then nuclear will need to be 20% cheaper than I outlined above to compete with solar+storage.

So sure, maybe solar power will stop getting cheaper, and maybe fusion reactors will get incredibly cheap incredibly quickly. But would you bet on it?

Why is this such a sticking point?

You indent the code blocks when writing in your favorite language, don't you? And you apply the "don't repeat yourself" principle when coding?

So why is it such a problem if the language drops the redundant brackets around code blocks and semicolons at the end of lines?

And before you come at me about how wind and solar are intermittent and OTEC or nuclear are steady: I'm amazed at the technical pessimism around here when it comes to energy storage or syncing demand to supply in the grid.

With a few batteries or simple tech solutions like better scheduling of water heaters and EV chargers or storing cooling energy as ice, we can use 95% of wind and solar power on the same day it is produced.

And on days with more wind and sun than we need (most of them), we can make hydrogen and store it easily for the last 5% of demand, on days when there's not enough wind and sun.

This approach can also scale to solve a lot of other climate problems, e.g., electrify all commuting and most freight, provide hydrogen for steel production and fertilizer, and eventually maybe synthetic hydrocarbons for air travel and plastics.

This is not that difficult.

No.

The article says wave power could be equivalent to 57% of current US electricity production. Meanwhile wind power is several times that and solar is hundreds of times that, and they occur inland, not just at the coasts.

Further, wind turbines and solar panels are mature, mass-produced technologies that are already cheaper than fossil fuels and get cheaper every year. Wave and OTEC could move that way, but they're up against some pretty big barriers (1) a corrosive, difficult environment for installation, operation and maintenance, and (2) a lot of what they need to do is pretty low-tech -- e.g. mechanical movement of buoys or pumping lots of water -- which doesn't have so much room for cost savings from learning-by-doing.

In particular, OTEC is inherently inefficient due to the small temperature difference (check the Carnot efficiency), and the small difference also means there's a low amount of energy per kg of water moved, even if it were 100% efficient. Together these mean OTEC needs to move a _lot_ of water per kWh of electricity produced. That means you need a lot of turbine and plumbing per kW of capacity, which is inherently expensive, for materials, manufacturing and installation. And we have already made a lot of turbines and plumbing, so there's not much potential for large-scale OTEC to bring these costs down via additional learning-by-doing.

EVs get about 4 miles per kWh, so 1 mile of charging can give 13 miles of range according to your math.

When 538 was first bought, it was tied closely to ESPN. Sports have a lot of statistics, so it kind of made sense. But maybe since then it's moved more out into the news area under ABC? They're all owned by Disney, one big media conglomerate.

Or TFS:

I wondered about that. The periodicity of the planets does seem to be the reason for the 819 day calendar, which I guess was the main point of the article.

But presumably if the planets had different periods there'd be some other number that worked equally well (I think that's your point). So it's no miracle that these patterns exist and maybe no miracle that the Mayan's spotted them.

That's probably especially true if you allow for the fact that the Mayans probably only knew the synodic periods to within a day or so. From that, they could identify various patterns that worked over their lifetime and maybe not worry about the fact that it doesn't _exactly_ reproduce over the giant cycle I mentioned (Jupiter would be about a third of an orbit out of place after 1140 repetitions of the 819 day cycle, rather than coming back exactly to it's starting point. But that would be hard to tell even from a lifetime of observation.)