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Comment Re:Raise the costs even more! (Score 1) 52

AFAIK, nobody has demonstrated a viable SMR prototype of any kind. No, marine reactors do not count, they have the wrong characteristics and are far too uneconomic for this, even worse than civilian designs. The two that exist (Russian and Chinese) do NOT come with any or any believable cost figures. In addition, the he Russian one is a military design and the Chinese one is a highly experimental pebble-bed reactor based on German patents. The Germans wrecked three of these and two are still highly radioactive ruins that nobody know how to dispose of. On the plus-side, pebble-bed reactors cannot melt down, which is a decided plus.

Still, anybody that has high confidence in the approach is simply an idiot.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 18

I probably just crossed some age line where "everything I have now is good enough dammit!"

I am still using a 13 Pro Max, so you're not alone.

This whole "buy a new expensive phone every year or two" mentality has always bugged me. Yes, "battery life is better" on a new phone versus a not-new phone... but the question SHOULD be "is the battery life on that not-new phone actually an issue?". And yes, the cameras on a new phone are probably better, but is there an actual practical difference the end user will actually see?

A lot of those arguments seem to be post hoc justifications for a purchase decision that was already made.

Comment Re:Easy Fix... (Score 1) 33

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

Comment Re:AI as a sacred prestige competition (Score 2) 24

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

Comment Re:Air cooling (Score 1) 24

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.

Comment Re:Who would dare opt in? (Score 1) 30

Who would opt in to this? No matter how well the company tries to police this, there will be AI generated slop of artists singing terrible lyrics that they would never do in real life. Does is matter that the company can issue take down request after the fact when your new hit single "Adolf's Solution" featuring your likeness adorned with a silly mustache has already gone viral? Maybe that's on the nose enough for an LLM to shut down, but there are plenty of other terrible things that can be made with this and 4chan will try to make them all.

It's a license between an AI music generator and WMG. Presumably someone can ask for it to be generated and it probably gives you a 30 second sample before you have to pay for it. At that point the artist likely will have the ability to veto the creation, or to take it as their own,

And I suppose it's a way for smaller artists to make some money because obviously the AI maker is going ot have to pay WMG for the license to do it.

If the artist approves then whoever created the song presumably just has to pay up for it and they get the download. And chances are it's non-exclusive, so WMG and/or the artist get the ability to have that song for them as well.

And there's likely to be logs to, so if someone did do a deep fake, you have their billing address and know who actually created it so you know it was AI generated. The fact it's not anonymous is likely a huge guardrail in what can be preduced

Comment what is a reserve? (Score 2) 59

a government or anyone may decide they need a reserve of something in case it later becomes unaccessible when needed. When can a government *need* BTC? Needing oil or food or water or weapons or gold is understandable, those are real things and it is possible to run out of these items and be in a position where access is limited.

If one "needs" crypto currency they may either purchase it in the market freely or just start their own, even Trump has done this on multiple occasions.

Note, it says "a reserve", not a speculative asset to gamble on its price.

Comment Re:HTWingNut (Score 1) 75

I do not doubt that. We have some large-ego-small-insight "tech" people here, same as any tech forum. These then state total insightless nonsense with confidence. People like that are unable to tell when to fact-check, but have total confidence in their knowledge. And they are always around in some form.

Come to think of it, modern LLM communication is modelled on these idiots, because they can convince people. People like that also do well in sales, religion and politics.

Funny thing: I was asked about the same thing about 15-20 years back by a security consulting customer (very large bank). They wanted to store their Root CA secret keys by just putting them on bootable memory stick in a safe. My recommendation was to use industrial CF instead (which are essentially SLC FLASH with better properties that has 10 or 20 years data endurance and that endurance is in the data-sheet), but by any means to have several laser-printed copy on paper in addition. As CA secret keys are small, they went wit that. But they would have faced a real possibility of an expensive disaster otherwise.

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