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Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 140

You're right: civilian nuclear programmes are not cost effective compared with renewables. But, there's also the military aspect to this too. Military nuclear benefits by hiding/sharing some of the costs, industrial infrastructure, training, expertise, supply chains, etc with a civilian programme. If there was no civilian nuclear programme, the defence budget would be much bigger to fund things like the nuclear navy.

Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 140

The UK is at 46% renewables, and that number is increasing rapidly. Why hasn't it collapsed yet?
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Spain is at 56%:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Iceland is at 100% renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

You fail.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 97

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 86

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

Comment Expedia and Hotels.com (Score 1) 93

These are the same thing these days!

After Expedia bought Hotels.com, they killed off their rewards scheme and all their prices went up against others like Booking.com. They backtracked on the rewards scheme, but it's still not as good as it was before. They also made things like the login experience harder (why are they sending me 2FA emails instead of text messages, which are faster and auto populate in my browser almost immediately?!).

I haven't booked through Hotels.com for years because they are more expensive. Expedia gives the same results for hotels, so it's pointless. I only use Expedia to search for flights because it's more reliable than sites like Skyscanner, but then I go to the airline's website and book direct. I'd rather deal directly with the airline if there's a last minute problem with the flights than have to try to get Expedia to help.

Comment Re:It's just like The Osbornes! (Score 1) 70

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 3, Interesting) 86

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

Comment Re:It's all about navigation, not politics (Score 1) 274

It would probably do us all a favour if Russian's didn't have an overinflated sense of how large their country is compared to everyone else's. West to east across North Africa is the same distance as a large part of Russia, although you wouldn't believe it from traditional maps, and north to south is even more exaggerated.

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Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce

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