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Comment Re:So basically... (Score 2) 181

I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.

Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitability anytime in the near future, especially since xAI is blocked from so many enterprises and doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the big three at all. As Starship production scales up, the costs are going to increase, and they need payload revenue to offset those costs. There's so much focus now on the Pez dispenser and the lunar mission that I haven't seen any hints of the conventional payload delivery version (aka, "Chomper") in a couple of years. Maybe it's being quietly worked on. I hope so, because the big space station payloads that were talked about a few years ago will need it.

Comment Re:Sigh. (Score 1) 89

It seems like it should be just theming, but there's a separate architecture to it. Even the APIs are different, with new using a GraphQL-based API and old using a more traditional structure. The core data (users, posts, comments, etc.) is the same, but the pathways are completely different. New has links into capabilities that old doesn't have (especially around abuse and scraping), and old has capabilities that new doesn't always have (especially around mod tools, which new apparently breaks on a regular basis).

Comment Re:They just want to get rid of it (Score 1) 89

When they do get rid of old I think that is going to be it for many users, me included.

"Many users" is going to be relative. I saw some numbers recently that only around 1% of users go through Old Reddit, and in many of the largest subs, it's a fraction of a percent. I don't think it will have the impact that some people think. I prefer Old Reddit on desktop, but it's clunky on mobile, so I stick with the new interface (I don't use the app).

Comment Re:Everyone Saw This Coming (Score 4, Insightful) 56

I guarantee there's someone, or a few someones, at t-mobile who saw this coming. They're mid level support or engineers. I'm sure they were screaming to all that they could find about what was coming, but upper management and the powers that be ignored them. None could confront the mass migration that was necessary if this group of someones were right, so they must be wrong.

Until they weren't.

And so this group will be rewarded with all the shit-work needed to get the migration done, while the very same people that ignored the timebomb ticking in their closet will be rewarded for their "vision" and "decisiveness".

God I don't miss corporate.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 242

For global energy, that typically includes transportation. As more economies have expanded, there has been more use of cars, trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft, almost all of which are powered by fossil fuels.

Global electricity generation has changed. In 2000, 64.1% of global electricity came from fossil fuels, 16.7% came from nuclear, and 18.7% came from renewable. In 2023, despite overall electricity generation roughly doubling, fossil fuel generation was down to 60.1%, nuclear was down to 9.1%, and renewables were up to 30.23%. Looking at the renewable mixes, in 2000, it was 17.4% hydropower, 0.7% biofuels, 0.2% wind, 0.01% solar, and 0.3% geothermal. In 2023, it was 14.6% hydropower, 2.2% biofuels, 7.75% wind, 5.4% solar, and 0.3% geothermal.

That's still a lot of fossil fuel electricity generation, but it is declining by percentage and their growth curves are flattening. Renewables are up by quite a bit and still growing. Nuclear is declining, and isn't likely to recover in any meaningful numbers. This program is a lot like past programs meant to encourage new nuclear power plants. Odds are that maybe one will get started, and it might not get finished.

Comment Re:We don't need them (Score 1) 242

These are going to be quick and dirty installations in order to power AI data centers for people that bribed trump. It's your taxpayer dollars going to finance AI slop.

Construction isn't expected to start until 2030 at the earliest. From TFA:

Energy Secretary Chris Wright cited “tremendous interest” among developers of data centers that would buy the power, as well as utilities and energy companies. The nuclear plants could begin construction by 2030 and become operational in the mid-2030s, Wright and other officials said Tuesday.

By that time, the AI bubble may have burst, or the grid may have gone even further into renewables, or both.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 4, Informative) 242

We need more power, but nuclear isn't the way anymore. I was a supporter of nuclear until around 2020, when I saw how fast solar and wind were gaining. Both have consistently shown enormous growth because they are not as specific in their land requirements, can be installed in small numbers, and the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for them has plummeted to become profitable even without subsidies. Storage is still a challenge, but we're seeing rapid improvements in that, too, with sodium batteries rapidly catching up in capacity.

TFA says that construction on these won't start until at least 2030, and if they make that, it would be amazingly fast for how reactors are built these days. In that time, wind is expected to expand by almost 50 GW and solar by 40 GW. Battery storage is expected to almost quadruple in that time. By the time the reactors are built, they will be a tiny fraction of the new power generation installed and they will probably be the most expensive part of it.

Comment Re:israel builds its own jets now? (Score 1) 184

IAI hasn't build a fighter since the Dagger/Nesher that Israel sold to Argentina after the IAF was done with them. They tried to build an F-16 competitor, the Lavi, but stopped when the US refused to allow any funding to be used towards its development.

Israel likely has the technical capability to build a modern fighter. Whether it has the money to do so on its own is an entirely other matter.

Comment Re:Everybody Hates Documentation (Score 2) 86

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

Comment Re:Thanks to Trump (Score 1) 185

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

Comment Re:Thanks to Trump (Score 2) 185

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.

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