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Comment Re:Why Does Productivity Decline? (Score 1) 82

Why does productivity change at all?

I take it you don't have the latest Teams installed, or never used a corporate laptop loaded with all that rubbish management software? A few years ago an 8GB RAM laptop ran perfectly fine. Nowadays on a corporate machine you can't even have office apps open while in a Teams call without paging to disk. My 2 year old laptop is absolutely tanking my productivity. That wasn't the case 2 years ago. Teams didn't take up 3GB of RAM just to do a damn video call back then, but then it also didn't have AI loaded auto translating bullshit with fancy animated background graphics, etc, etc, etc.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 82

Again, explain how a PC which is three years old reduces productivity in this day and age.

You clearly don't work in the corporate world. The adage of "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" is still very much alive. My 2 year old work laptop is running like a dog with 4 broken legs thanks to the enshitifcation of groupware. It's at the point now where if I am running teams with a video call I actively close every damn office program that isn't absolutely necessary for the call because the computer runs like shit thanks to Microsoft + corporate spyware.

I have a relatively new laptop and it's absolutely affecting my productivity.

Comment Re:The Enshitification Effect (Score 1) 82

Hardly. Devices on the hardware level aren't that enshitified. Yeah the headphone jack is gone, but those tears should have dried up 10 years ago. For the rest of it, hardware has just been on a steady albeit incredibly minor improvement.

With the average device age still well within the OS update period, the enshitification in the software stack is adopted one way or the other.

Comment Re:Quick tip: this is where MS lost it (Score 1) 83

Notepad go-to use was to "clean" the clipboard

I'm sorry what? Why are you opening an app to clean your clipboard? If you need to strip short text just literally paste it into any text field, heck paste into the windows search field does the job. If you're cleaning paragraphs of text then it sounds like you're pasting into something that supports paste-special. Notepad isn't a tool for this, literally any windows textbox works equally for this.

Nothing more, nothing less. For every other usages there was a better tool

Actually it was more. Plenty of people use it to open text files, or make quick edits. You may not, that doesn't mean people weren't using it for its actual namesake. You're right, other tools are better, which makes me wonder precisely why you didn't predict this.

The question isn't why is Microsoft doing this, it's a question of why did it take so long for them to make this incredibly obvious change of developing Notepad further.

When microsoft execs wonder "why are people not happy with out products?"

Precisely why would any of them wonder that? Have you seen their share price and remuneration package? They have literally no reason to question their current product approach, none what so ever.

It is impossible for most of us to understand how far removed people making these decisions are from the real world.

To be fair, this is Slashdot. It's impossible for most people here to understand the real world as well, everyone here is very far removed from how the billion other people out there use their PC. I mean the other day someone complained that Windows always needs messing with Powershell to fix something, that will of course be news to the normal users who don't even know what Powershell is.

Slashdotters are not normal. We're power users, neckbeards, BSD / Linux running nerds. Most people here are detached from the reality outside of this. You as well if you think people only open notepad to "clean a clipboard" (a phrase that already makes most users scratch their heads).

Comment Re:Buggy (Score 1) 83

This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what people use Notepad for.

What people? Be specific, there's a billion PC users out there. Do you speak on behalf of all of them? Or just the tiny niche techie minority (sorry guys we are not the common user).

Notepad into a buggy piece of shit. Each update, more and more basic features have become unusable. They even broke basic ability to type into it in certain circumstances, ya'know, literally its most basic core feature!?

Curiously what bugs have you encountered in Notepad? So far I've hit none. Can you describe in what scenario you weren't able to type in Notepad? I'm curious.

Comment Re:Japan's high speed trains (Score 1) 218

That would be the Sanyo Shinkansen then, and it's 100% grade separated, and always has been.

If it was near the Marine Corps base it would have been the Sanyo Main Line. I don't know what the historic speeds were, but these days the maximum is 130 kph. The Shinkansen line is some distance from there.

130 kph (about 80 mph) might not seem like much, but it can appear pretty quick when you are very close to the train at a crossing. The Shinkansen line was around 250 kph when you were there I think, now up to 300.

Comment Re:A complete failure (Score 1) 51

The primary job of a lecturer is design of the lecture, select the material and structure it.

If that was true then we don't need lecturers anymore since all the material already exists. No the primary job of a lecturer is to *teach the subject matter*. Whether the material used are AI generated or not is irrelevant. The question is a) are they correct, b) are they able to be understood. If a lecturer checks this then there's no reason not to use AI to generate it.

You said the second most important thing is that lecturing is more than just standing there. That I would argue is the most important thing *in the course*. Critically *someone* needs to do it at some point. Not necessarily in the lecture. Some of the best courses I had had the worst lecturers. But the way exercises, practical activities, and labwork was designed is what generated a lot of learning. Really I think some of my lecturers being replaced with AI could have been an improvement.

The risk is outsourcing the thinking itself to AI. That hits all the problems you mentioned.

Comment Re:Adapted? (Score 1) 111

The last time I looked, oil and gas drilling was done with strings of pipe a few inches in diameter.

Firstly, no they aren't. The final drill pipe may be a few inches in diameter, because that is all that's needed, but the initial hole is actually quite wide often wider than 1m. This allows the drillers to create stacked casings to handle the pressure of the oil field. You only see the few inches drill pipe, or the top of the drilling rig, but much like a Forstner bit fits in the chuck of your drill but is able to drill a 2" wide hole in your cupboard door, it's misleading to look only at what you see on the surface.

As well as the reactors, they've also got to get the heat-exchangers, turbines and generators down there too - all of which will require regular maintenance.

For regulator maintenance you just winch the thing back up. It only needs to be done once a year or every two years anyway. This isn't a problem.

Finally, they've got to have mile-long cables to bring the power to the surface - which need to be capable of supporting their own weight when strung vertically.

Also not a problem, this is where you actually can look to the oil and gas industry. They are talking about 15MW/reactor, the weight and self supporting requirements of this cable will be far less than a typical drill pipe, and also it doesn't need to support its weight, it just need to have buoyancy control. The whole point of this project is to be immersed. It doesn't need to support its *surface* weight, it needs to support the remaining force not covered by buoyancy at a specific segment at a specific pressure/depth.

That's the end of my non-problems.
There are MANY problems with this scam project. Partially economical, partially that they aren't solving any real world problem, and partially that no one has built such a small reactor.

Comment New version of Rectum (Score 1) 37

New version of Rectum now produces shit at 3 times closer to shit consistency benchmarks than previous versions of competitors Anus and Colon. Given that we've already decided that you just need more shit constantly and forever and will shove it into every aspect of your life, this must make you very happy.

Comment Re:Such BS (Score 1) 111

That's literally what they are talking about. A small SMR generating less power than a single wind turbine, dropped in the bottom of a 30" wide hole.

The problem here isn't digging the hole, it's that no one has built an SMR the size they are proposing, and that the economics are fucking horrendous. They buried the lead a bit in TFS. For the 1.5GW "groupings" they were literally talking about drilling 100 of these holes next to each other.

Comment Re:Just keep digging (Score 1) 111

While you're right you're missing something important on the other end of the pipe. 100C steam is great for making tea but you cannot generate power from it. You need pressure. Pressure changes the boiling point.

At horrendously inefficient turbine may only just provide a limited amount of energy at around 160C. But typically you want FAR higher than that. For practical reasons you want a large power plant to run a turbine with >150bar saturated steam. Ideally to actually get some actual efficiency in your rotating equipment you want supercritical steam above around 220bar. The steam temperature most thermal powerplants aim for is in the order of >375C.

You'll need a deeper hole, or you need to face the fact that a lot of geothermal plants are located in specific regions for a reason.

That's not to say a 1mile deep hole is useless. This kind of temperature may be very suitable for district heating. That sounds not very relevant until you see what percentage of energy consumption actually goes into heating houses in colder climates. So we can swap that heatpump with a liquid/liquid heat exchanger and with our 1mile deep hole not generate electricity, but rather reduce its consumption.

Comment Re: I'm no nuclear engineer (Score 1) 111

With a normal power system made up of spinning generators and spinning steam turbines, you have a built-in "flywheel" effect that smooths out those surges, which gives you time to do things like back off the power a bit.

That is simply false. Firstly "flywheel" effects are far superior with grid forming inverters than rotating machinery. It's why batteries are currently overtaking traditional rotating peaking plants in the role of stabilising the grid (not actually providing storage for the night). Secondly solar can react far better to changes in the grid for load shedding.

The problem in Spain had nothing to do with the actual grid makeup, it was exclusively regulatory failure. The Solar / Wind were not asked to be involved with frequency regulation so they didn't disconnect from the grid during the overvoltage event, and traditional spinning plants didn't do it despite having the capability to completely avert the outage. This was analysed and given the equipment operating on the day there was no reason for the grid to go down if the generators were given the correct instructions by REE. The fact that the entire morning there were frequency oscillations were a good indication that too many plants were operating as load followers rather than frequency regulators

This was purely a grid planning SNAFU where the wrong people were told to do the wrong thing. All technical equipment was in place to handle the situation and the traditional spinning storage (your all important flywheel) were actually the first to disconnect itself which initiated the cascading failure. Those blaming solar and wind were exclusively politicians with an axe to grind and a few people within REE who tried to cast blame away from themselves (despite their own report).

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