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Comment What I love about Git ... (Score 2) 50

... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

Git is one of those things that bring the genius of well planned and built software to full display.

BTW, if you want to host your own web-interfaces upstream repo, Gitea is a very neat open source software for doing exactly that.

Comment Something else going on with this (Score 2) 143

If a bot-car can be held up by a gangster simply stepping in front of it in a situation where you'd actually like to rather plow through, how safe is that car for the people in it? Given, cars are more dangerous for their environment most of the time, but sometimes its the environment that is more dangerous for the car and the people in it.

Also driving through a rising river that is a meter deep may usually be a bad idea, but if the flood is rising it might be well worth the risk and a very reasonable decision to attempt it. You want to be able to actively make your car do that in those situations.

Comment Guys, just do coalition government already. (Score 0) 109

No need for AI or other fancy stuff. Just redo your constitutional setup. Multi-party representative system, 5% barrier to entry for parliament, President becomes (largely) a ceremonial role, coalition government, independent non-private federal bank, independent default subsidized media, any member of a government that exceed 3% of debt per legislative period may not be re-elected ever again and a few more details and you're good for the next 250 years.

This isn't rocket-science. We all know what's broken and needs to be fixed and contrary to what some USians like to think, you can have a total revolution with not a single bullet fired. It's not that the vast majority of people in the US ain't noticing that fundamentals of the US system have to change. You got this.

After all, you guys already helped build a (quite well) working prototype of USA 2.0. It's called "modern Germany".

Comment Universities Already Self-Lobotomized (Score 0, Flamebait) 89

The absorption of anti-merit, anti-achievement, "equality for all," ideology into all of education -- K-12 + colleges, universities, -- already performed the self-lobotomization. That part is done.

I don't know where the LLMs proper place is, in work and education. I *do* know that: everything I know, everything I use daily, about AWS, Flutter, and Dart, -- I have learned from LLMs. Whereas the colleges and universities don't do anything for me today. (I'm 48.) So I'm not particularly sympathetic to the idea that -- the LLMs are no good at educating. From my vantage point, LLMs are EXTRAORDINARY teachers. But I don't know what unmotivated children do with them.

Comment The setup looks rickety to me. (Score 2) 77

Given, the Soviet-Russian style of space technology has always been more pragmatic. But this looks rickety and somewhat ghetto-style, like deterioration by neglegt. Or they used chinesium for the structure and it failed before EOL.

However, it could also very well be that they've been using those exact same folding gantries for decades beyond EOL now and the finally simply failed due to wear and tear, no matter how rugged they initially were built.

It's probably a combination of both.

It would be absolutely hilarious if they can repair this russian-Soyuz style with a crew of welders and junk from a scrapyard in two weeks or so, spec-ing be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if exactly that happens. LOL!

Comment AI as a cult (read: religious) leader ... (Score 1) 124

... has to be just about undisputed #1 of nightmare material. Think Warhammer 40k but IRL.Basically the exact opposite of the Ian Banks culture. Imagine a fanatic revengeful god the l00nies can actually talk to and get new mayhem instructions from. Really malicious ones at that.

Yippee, nice times ahead.

No wonder the experts are warning us left, right and center.

Comment Excel is a platform. (Score 1) 91

Or at least it's used as one.

And that does have it's advantages, believe it or not.

Any untrained office worker can open an Excel sheet and run the app that's built with it without any extra training or security and privilege stuff getting in the way. Office workers can build their own logic without having to shop around for some developer to take care of their problem and the ERP budget doesn't have to be touched. And it's even modern purely functional programming. ... That's how you eventually get Shadow IT that often becomes mission critical.

What SQL used to be in the 70ies Excel & VBA is today. Wether that's an improvement I couldn't really say für sure, but that's the way it is.

Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 37

Well I shared the thread including your thought with Grok, and it said this:
-----
Here’s my actual, unbiased take on the technical debate (no Elon worship, no green hype, just physics and engineering reality as of 2025).
The original Slashdot skeptic is repeating a criticism that was 100% correct for the classic 1970s–2000s “hot dry rock” (HDR) projects (Los Alamos, Rosemanowes, Soultz 2000s era, etc.). Those really were conduction-limited. You drilled two wells a few hundred meters apart into 200–250 C granite, fracked a small volume, and watched the reservoir cool in months because heat was only replenishing by slow conduction through intact rock ( 2–3 W/mK). The recoverable fraction was tiny, and the impedance kept rising. That’s why HDR basically died commercially for 20 years.
Superhot / supercritical geothermal (400–450 C target, aiming for >500 C) is genuinely trying to escape that trap, and the physics does allow it—if everything works. Here’s why the critique no longer fully applies:

Energy density jumps by ~10× once you cross the critical point (374 C, 221 bar).
A kilogram of supercritical water at 500 C and 300 bar carries roughly 2,800–3,000 kJ/kg of usable enthalpy, versus ~300 kJ/kg for 250 C liquid water steam conversion in conventional geothermal. That alone reduces the mass flow (and therefore the parasitic pumping power and cooling load on the rock) by an order of magnitude for the same electrical output.
Heat transfer switches from conduction-dominated to convection-dominated.
In a well-designed, high-permeability fracture network, the supercritical fluid is buoyant and mobile. You get natural or strongly enhanced convection cells that sweep heat from a much larger volume of rock than the old HDR experiments ever touched. Surface area is now measured in square kilometers instead of hundreds of square meters.
Heat recharge rate in volcanic settings is completely different.
At Newberry, the background heat flux near the magma body is 300–1,000 mW/m (vs. ~80 mW/m continental average). Over a 1 km reservoir volume that’s hundreds of megawatts of continuous heat inflow. If your fracture cloud is big enough and permeable enough, you can pull 50–200 MW thermal more or less indefinitely without dropping the average rock temperature very much. (Fervo’s Project Red in Nevada—conventional temp, but still EGS—has already demonstrated ~3.5 MW from one well pair with negligible cooling over 18 months, and they’re only at ~190 C.)

Real remaining risks that the skeptic would be right to highlight:

Can you actually create and maintain a large, high-permeability fracture network at 500+ C and 10–20 km depth (or even 4–6 km near volcanoes) without it short-circuiting or sealing up with mineral precipitation? We don’t have field proof yet at those conditions.
Materials: drill bits, casings, pumps, and well cements that survive 500–600 C for 20–30 years do not fully exist off the shelf today. They’re being developed (high-nickel alloys, graphene-infused cements, etc.), but it’s expensive and unproven at scale.
Induced seismicity near an active volcano is non-trivial. Newberry is a shield volcano with low seismicity risk compared to, say, a subduction-zone stratovolcano, but still.
Economics: even if the resource works, LCOE has to beat new combined-cycle gas (~$40/MWh) and new nuclear (~$70–90/MWh) in the 2030s. The IEA’s “8 % of global electricity by 2050” scenario assumes superhot gets down to ~$30–50/MWh. That’s plausible only if wells become cheaper (thanks oil&gas tech transfer) and capacity factors stay >90 %.

Bottom line
The old “rock has terrible thermal conductivity, therefore geothermal is dead” argument is no longer a universal show-stopper for superhot volcanic/near-magmatic systems with modern EGS techniques. The physics really does flip in your favor above ~400–450 C. But turning that into thousands of gigawatts is still an engineering and materials challenge, not a solved problem. Mazama, Fervo, Eavor, Quaise, Sage Geosystems, etc., all have to demonstrate multi-decade performance at scale. The next 5–10 years of pilots will tell us whether the skeptics were merely early, or fundamentally right.
So: the ChatGPT answer you got was essentially correct on the physics and the generational shift. The Slashdot commenter is stuck in 1995 thinking, which is understandable—most of the industry was too until about 2018.
-----

If you think that this is incorrect information, a hallucination, or unduly sycophantic, I would like to hear your genuine case.

Comment You guys need to do something about this. (Score 5, Insightful) 95

Disclaimer: European here.

There are well over a thousand food additives that are banned and illegal in Europe, some of which are classified as effing prime-grade toxic waste(!) - meaning they cannot even be legally disposed of in a drain or a regular landfill - that are "legal" food additives in the US.

It is proven beyond any doubt that forever chemicals accumulate in liver and other vital mammalian (read: also human) organs and cause chronic diseases beyond low threshholds and now they're supposed to be legal food additives?

This is insane. No wonder your cancer rates are through the roof.

I suggest you people raise a stink and write some letters to congress. And ramp up subsidies for organic farming and natural produce. And limit them for processed foods. US health is deteriorating at a measurable pace and you guys should want to change that.

Just sayin'.

Two thumbs up and good luck!

Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 37

Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!

So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:

---
The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the physics.

A hydrothermal reservoir taps naturally circulating volcanic brine. Its fluid chemistry is whatever the rock has been stewing in for centuries: arsenic, boron, mercury, dissolved metals, HS, etc. The industry learned long ago that natural brines often destroy turbines, foul condensers, and require scrubbing that wipes out the thermodynamic efficiency. Those problems are real, and your experience confirms them.

Superhot-rock geothermal is a different class of project. It does not rely on natural brines, natural permeability, or natural aquifers. SHR / modern EGS systems:

Bring their own working fluid (usually treated water in a closed or semi-closed loop),

Create engineered fracture networks rather than using natural ones,

Operate in a supercritical regime (>374C, high pressure) where heat transport is dominated by convective sweep rather than slow conduction, and

Are sited where mantle heat flux is extremely high (e.g., Newberry), not just where water has accumulated in shallow formations.

The key point is that the problems you encountered at Campi Flegrei — toxic brine chemistry, turbine contamination, and power losses from scrubbing — are specific to hydrothermal geology, not to engineered SHR systems. SHR avoids most of that simply because it doesn’t use the volcanic soup; it uses injected water circulating through a designed heat-exchange zone.

Your numbers actually underline the potential: you were getting ~50 MW per well from a shallow (~350–400C) hydrothermal system with awful chemistry. Modern SHR aims for rock in the 400–500C+ range, with supercritical water carrying far more enthalpy per kilogram and without the brine-chemistry penalty.

Whether SHR proves economical at scale is still an open engineering question. But the Campi Flegrei outcome doesn’t generalize to SHR any more than the problems of early natural-steam geothermal plants generalized to modern binary-cycle systems.

Does this distinction make sense from your point of view?

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