Solar -> Electricity -> Electrolysis -> Hydrogen -> Combustion Turbine -> Electricity

Why not:

Solar -> Electricity -> Battery -> Electricity

It would appear that the latter would have a better end to end efficiency. Bypassing the losses in electrolysis and combustion.

Right. But I'm still not buying Coke.

My prediction, raising prices even to break even will cause "interest" in AI to plummet.

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

I was not actually suggesting that you were saying to abandon anything. I may not have been clear enough. I was simply saying that, even if we devoted all resources for developing power sources entirely to nuclear, it would be impossible for it to bear fruit for quite a few years. It is not a strawman argument, just a recognition that there are finite resources to devote to this. In other words, there is an opportunity cost to choosing one over the other. That does not necessarily mean in terms of exclusivity, just that if we devote, for example, 50% of resources to one thing, we only have the remaining 50% of resources to devote to another. So we should devote our resources to whatever has the most utility. That can mean a hybrid approach of course, when one option has benefits the other lacks, and vice versa, so we have to consider all the relevant pros and cons. Cost is, of course, part of the calculation. Also, we have to consider what resources are being devoted because, while they may translate to monetary costs, all resources are not equal. You might be forced into, for example, a 60-40 split because using above 60% of a resource required for one choice would be unacceptable.

All that said though, there do not seem to be fundamental resource constraints that would prevent you from going 100% renewable, so that leaves the pros and cons. From what I can see, renewables have lower cost (even with battery backup), as well as a considerably shorter period to active power production, plus far greater flexibility in placement, cluster size, etc. The advantages nuclear plants seem to have are a fairly high capacity factor, around 93% and a relatively small land footprint (although geographic location is a tradeoff between either needing premium waterfront property, or increased cost and land usage to air cool). An argument about longevity is also often made, but it is not actually clear if that actually is the case considering the potential longevity of modern solar panels and the fact that the parts of wind towers that need replacing seem to have a similar schedule of replacement per MWh generated as their analogues in nuclear power plants.

So, given those tradeoffs, it could make some sense if there were severe land restrictions but, in most places, there are not. It could also make sense if there were a real concern about extended power outages if, for example, both the wind and sun stop. However with battery storage and other means of storage like hydro where available, combined with the size of the grid, and geographical variation, we're talking about once a decade or more events. Also, if you consider an overall goal of replacing not just electric power generation, but also primary power through electrification, and add in smart grid features then you have additional storage in the transportation sector in people's car batteries, and, if heat differential storage devices (not exactly unheard of in the form of hot water heaters and ice boxes) are put into places that heat pumps to increase the efficiency of the heat pumps by leveling out the peaks (in Winter, capture heat during the warmest times to use on the coldest nights, in summer, expel heat on the coolest nights to store cold for the hottest days) then that means a whole lot of extra electrical generation to cover dips with storage, storage both electrical and non-electric to offset usage, automatic conservation by smart grid aware devices, etc. With all that, there would not be a lot of need for the high capacity factor of nuclear power.

So, from my point of view, there is not a compelling benefit to nuclear that overrides its negatives in pretty much all but niche applications. Sure, maybe great for small, isolated places that are simultaneously too small for renewables, but also big enough to support a nuclear power plant (which can't really be economically scaled down below around 1 GWe). Also extreme remote locations like Arctic or Antarctic stations or deep space. For grid-connected, large countries without problematic weather anomalies and not too close to one of the poles to get good insolation, nuclear seems to make little sense. There's pretty much no way that a nuclear plant started today outside of niches where renewables aren't suitable couldn't be beaten to the punch by a renewable project started at the same time.

But without AI, how are the automatic doors going to sound authentically self-satisfied when they say "glad to be of service"?

OK, then. That's just full on moronic.

Actually, I am a pragmatist who is quite interested in nuclear technology and its applications. I am also a pragmatist. I am also quite interested in technology in general. Due to those things, I evaluate technology based on utility. By virtually every metric I find suitable for measuring, current renewables seem to beat nuclear power as pragmatic power sources for the majority of both electrical generation and, longer-term, primary power generation. I have listed the reasons why over and over and over again.

I have looked at those numbers, evaluated them in the larger context of overall decarbonization of power, questioned the change over time of the numbers and, most critically pointed out that the 19 grams of CO2 per kWh generated seems to be impossible considering that France burns garbage to generate electricity and still has overall about 6% of its electricity generated by burning things. Since pretty much the absolute most efficient thing in terms of CO2 produced that you can burn for electricity is natural gas at 450 grams of CO2 per kWh, that 6% should have France up at least at 27 grams of CO2 per kWh, and probably higher. I have asked you about that multiple times and you just will not answer. Also, you go on and on about how much France generates from nuclear power, but it's actually 6% from burning stuff and about 67% from nuclear power. What do you think the other 27% is from? The simple fact is that you have not actually done any sort of critical analysis. You can play the schoolyard game of trying to turn the accusation around on me, but it is pretty obvious that you're the one who does not bother to inform themselves and ignores inconvenient facts due to your fanaticism ("Nuclear for life" as your .sig says)

For electricity generation alone, or for primary power in general? Also, can you confirm that France actually does meet this since your 19 g per kWh seems impossible given the facts.

Uh, sure. You know Volkswagen stopped being a state enterprise back in the 1960's, right? Technically, there were still some government owned shares, but they were divested years before the scandal. Also, there were a whole lot of car companies that were cheating (and let's face it, continue to) cheat on emissions testing. Yet another reason to move away from ICE vehicles, but not exactly some sort of indictment of the German government when it comes to figures on CO2 emissions from power generation. I mean, it's kind of hard to fake those numbers since the fuel consumption, efficiency of the plants, and typical CO2 produced when burning a particular fuel are all pretty well known and EU regulators as well as a ton of others would be all over a discrepancy in the numbers. All that said of course, I do not think that you are particularly reliable at sourcing your numbers because of the France CO2 per kWh discrepancy I have noted over and over again. I will give you the benefit of the doubt over whether you are cherrypicking, but I do suspect you may be comparing apples to oranges.

I don't recall having to pay that much for rentals, but like I said, these trips were when I was younger. They were also when I would splurge after saving up. In any case, it's not like I always did rentals, just when it made sense.

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

... no NSA officials could be located for comment.

.. barely.

Do I have to put out a hit on a whistleblower who exposes my illegal business scheme?

if your PC meets the Windows 11 Hardware Spec.