The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

As holder of the domain aardvark.co.nz I can already feel the benefit.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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The videos you watch don't have intrusive sponsorship segments then?

I suspect it has in most households -- even boomer ones.

The problem is that nobody wants YouTube to be just like broadcast and cableTV was. The thing that made YouTube so compelling and so popular was its authenticity and variety -- but the management at YouTube are carefully killing the very thing that made it great.

Ever-growing levels of ever-more intrusive advertising. Ads that are (at times) 90 percent scams. Ads and content that are low-value AI-slop which, once the novelty value wears off, will drive people off the platform rather than onto it. Endless spambot comments on videos. -- all these things are slowly souring the formula that made YT what it is today.

Creators are complaining, viewers are complaining and pretty soon, advertisers will be complaining because viewer numbers will decline.

Many creators (such as myself) are now switching to self-hosting via a federated network of servers that we host ourselves (PeerTube or similar). Doing this frees us from the tyranny that is YouTube's arbitrary and unchallengable AI content moderation and it's unwillingness to deal with bogus copyright claims and strikes.

We have reached "peak Youtube" and just like so many companies that have become a huge part of our ever-day lives, it will now begin an ever-steepening decline.

If YouTube doesn't deliver what viewers and creators want they will find an alternative and the self-hosted federation of servers overcomes the single largest hurdle to creating a YouTube competitor -- the problem of matching the company's vast storage, processing and bandwidth capacity.

Watch this space... things are about to get exciting again!

That's right... you don't *really* think YT is giving you a choice do you?

I do not make shorts, I do not want shorts but without using plugins I can not avoid shorts. Successful companies are generally built on tailoring their offerings to match the needs/wants of their customers so YT once again proves that WE are not the customers, we are the product!

Just as with their AI deepfake detection system, YouTube has once again created a problem (Shorts addiction) so that it can deliver a solution (this auto-turn-off function).

I'd actually prefer that it didn't create the problems in the first place.

YouTube is a trainwreck right now and mid-tier creators are not valued at all. Just look at what they have to put up with

YouTube creates a problem (by integrating VEO3 into its platform) and then offers a solution -- but only if you surrender your government ID to them.

This is dystopian.

If you're stupid enough to buy a bed that goes berserk when the Net goes down then you deserve to wake up vertical and sweating!

Why on earth would such a contraption require cloud-based support for its core functionality?

This subscription-based model has gone way too far when, if the internet goes down or you don't pay your subscription, you can't even get a good night's sleep.

If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are doing complex calculations across sometimes a couple dozen worksheets, where changing one number can take several seconds to recalculate everything even on a reasonably modern computer.

Hey, I'm still waiting for the year of the LAN and the paperless office to arrive. Linux on the desktop... that's a long way off (says the guy who's been using Linux as his go-to OS for nearly 20 years and has no regrets.

Unlock all interactions? No. Unlocking a specific interaction? Maybe.

For common uses (like the public web), the most likely approach to decrypting a specific interaction is to break the RSA (cert-based) on the outside and then the Diffie-Hellman (ephemeral per-transaction) on the inside, then recover the symmetric encryption key to decrypt the rest of the conversation. But this is not trivial, and it requires more work than to just toss the transaction into the quantum computer.

The ephemeral layer is where things get harder. Even if you can derive the RSA key on a regular connection, you've got the first layer, but the DH layer is redone for each new connection. (Some sites don't use DH, or are vulnerable to downgrade attacks where DH isn't used, but DH is pretty widespread.) Every ephemeral negotiation has to be individually cracked. Tor uses DH or x25519 on all connections, so each has to be individually cracked. It is expected that breaking an individual 2048-bit RSA or DH encryption would take several hours if one had a quantum computer of sufficient power. Cracking 3072- or 4096-bit RSA/DH will take even longer, if it's even possible on the same systems. However, we appear to be a long way from such capabilities, and the NSA isn't likely to use it to break arbitrary Tor connection encryption, saving it instead for much more practical items. As soon as the NSA has practical quantum computing, it's going to have decades of backlog to go through just for the international signals, and getting anything moved up in line is going to need a damned good reason.

Sad I used mine to buy pizza :-(

> Making Alexa is not THAAAAT hard

Last year, the WSJ reported that Amazon lost $25 billion on Alexa from 2017-2021, partially from selling devices below cost but mostly because of development costs. It seems like it's harder than you think.