I looked at the eVinci website and it's hilarious. It tries so hard to avoid mentioning the major downsides, and even has a mock-up of it being transported on a trailer. The actual text notes that it needs a shipping container, presumably a very special one that it able to withstand the most severe road accident imaginable without leaking nuclear fuel all over the road.

It produces 5MWe, and 15MWth. That means it's pumping out a LOT of heat. Despite them claiming that it can work in any environment without cooling water, the reality is you need one hell of a heatsink of that. They quote "as little as" 2 acres but that will be the best case scenario. Already the portability claims are starting to crumble.

The only thing they say about spent fuel is that you can return it to them, presumably at considerable cost. Still no plan to deal with that mess, and they only mention refuelling once. That's a red flag - if they even can refuel it, there will probably be a load of waste generated from the process. They sound highly disposable.

Safety wise it's got the usual flaws where damage to the cooling system is a nuclear emergency situation. They claim that the control drums are passively safe. They must be spring loaded or something to rotate into the shutdown position unless held in the on position, but rotation in a system that experiences large temperature swings tends to be less reliable than gravity assisted rod insertion. If a drum jams you are in a pretty serious situation.

Gamers Nexus reviews Chinese GPUs and CPUs sometimes, and they tend to be broadly in-line with the claims. The GPUs, for example, do perform as advertised, but have compatibility issues with many Western games as they are aimed at the Chinese market. For games that Chinese gamers like they are decent, and GN saw significant improvements in both the hardware and drivers from one generation to the next.

People always make the same mistake of doubting that Chinese anything can be any good, until it becomes undeniable like with EVs... Although there are some who are still trying to pretend that they aren't top notch. Instead we should take these as warnings that we need to step up our game and prepare for stiff competition.

In a balanced budget, taxation exceeds spending, like it did at the end of the Clinton administration and just before George W. Bush went to war. The highest federal income tax bracket at the time was about 40 percent. What broke the budget was a misguided attempt to stimulate private business by cutting income tax on the richest American taxpayers.

That created a problem for dial-up users and laptop users back in the day. That was solved in two ways. First, Valve fixed the bug in early Steam that was causing it to fail to store purchase receipts for offline mode. (Users at the time were experiencing this as a need to be online for switching to offline mode to work.) Second, the home Internet market as a whole phased out dial-up, and even in areas not served by fiber, cable, or DSL, dial-up users largely switched to satellite Internet.

Unless it's something like DuckTales Remastered that gets delisted from Steam after a couple years on the market. This particular game was an adaptation of a Disney product identity, and Capcom's license from Disney had expired.

It's yet another example of something that governments should be funding. The flu costs billions every year in lost productivity, and lost sales as people stay home. In the UK you can already get the flu shot for free, paid for out of taxation, because it's understood that the cost is less than the benefit to the economy and the tax take.

Indeed, Loonsong announced they have server CPUs that are comparable to Intel ones from a few years ago now. Chinese designed GPUs are catching up rapidly too.

It's probably already too late, the decision was made and the Chinese government isn't going to pull back from pushing for high end CPUs and chip fabrication now.

I had that problem back in the day with an original Leaf, and its small battery. Would pop in to IKEA for some free charging and lunch, and my phone would notify me of the charge ending before I was done eating.

You would have less illegal immigration if there were more legal ways to immigrate. Not just work visas, but family reunion visas too.

Work visas need to be for more than just skilled people. Americans don't want to do the hard, unpleasant work of picking crops for minimum wage. That's fine, it's a choice, but you need someone to do it.

Then there's the fact that your whole economy is based on the premise of never ending growth, and your birth rate is falling. Either you start with the handmaid bullshit, you make up the numbers with immigration, or you tell the billionaires that they need to adjust to a shrinking economy while still increasing your wages.

Human beings are not machines, they do not produce a constant stream of output while they are working. Outside of simple manual jobs, at least. They get tired, they have lives outside the office, stress and overworking make them sick.

Turns out that 5 days a week is less efficient than 4 days a week for most people, i.e. they can get the same amount of work done in fewer hours if the duty cycle is reduced. It's a win-win - the employee has more free time and better quality of life, the employer loses nothing in terms of productivity and saves money on their energy bills.

It's main advantage seems to be that it knows where the pieces are on the board.

I've had ChatGPT forget the current state of things with other stuff too. I asked it to do some web code, and it kept forgetting what state the files were in. I hear that some are better like Claude with access to a repo, but with ChatGPT even if you give it the current file as an attachment it often just ignores it and carries on blindly.

In fact one bug it created was due to it forgetting what it named a variable, and trying to use a similar but different name in some new code.

Speaking of which, EV articulated lorries (big trucks) are a thing in Europe and seem to be working just fine. Norway has EV ferries too, some with wireless charging.

Once people own an EV and understand what the range means and how charging works, they tend to lose interest in hybrids. You have so many downsides - a whole ICE that you have to lug around and maintain, combined with a small battery.

To give you an idea, Bjorn Nyland does 1000km tests of EVs against a reference PHEV that he filled up with dino juice. The PHEV clocked in at around 9.5 hours, and the best EVs are under 10 hours. He hasn't tested the ultra fast 5m charging ones yet.

Most people will want a break on a 9.5 hour journey, so in practice the difference is zero. Charge while you get a coffee. Even the more affordable cars like the MGS5 and Renault 5 add less than an hour, which again is typically less than most people spend on lunch and comfort breaks.

25% VAT is normal in Europe. To be part of the EU or EEA you have to have VAT between something like 20% and 25%, I forget the exact numbers. It's on the high end, but not massively out of whack with what most Europeans pay in tax on cars.

As for it being a "small" country, it is physically large and has a fairly hostile climate. That makes it good for stress testing EVs, and they have proven to cope better than fossil fuel powered cars. In particular, EVs offer much better comfort in terms of things like climate control and noise levels, as well as driving better in low grip situations. Some of them charge faster than you can refuel a fossil too.

Most EVs in Norway are not made there, they are imported from elsewhere in Europe, or from China. There is no shortage of vital materials. The issues in the US seem to be largely because of Trump's tariffs and China's reciprocal limits on exports of rare earths there.

It's getting to the point in Norway where it's inconvenient to need fossil fuels. Pumps are being ripped out and replaced with EV chargers and battery swap stations.

Other than that new versions of mainstream operating systems and web browsers make it harder for the owner of a device to trust the root certificate of a particular private CA. I seem to remember, for example, that iOS and Android put a scary warning on the lock screen if one or more user-trusted root certificates is installed, and Android application developers have to opt into user-trusted root certificates through a "Network Security Config".