We know clouds are a problem in computer modeling. But the headline says "their computers".

The public scare about long half-lives is particularly weird when considering other aspects of nuclear vs. fossil power. Nuclear is known for rare freak events such as Chernobyl, which kill a bunch of people at once, while it's fossil fuels that are killing a lot more people in the long term. This is so even if we don't consider global warming, due to effects such as fine particle pollution. Here nuclear is the scary one, because there are no sudden deaths due to fine particle pollution, and because people are bad at statistics and long-term thinking. Besides, we're just more familiar with fossil fire. A fireplace symbolizes cozy, old-fashioned life, even if it's actually a worse polluter than a car due to the incomplete combustion.

But when it comes to nuclear waste, suddenly the hoi polloi worries about long-term effects. I'm not saying we should ignore the radiation of long-term nuclear waste, but it seems easier to contain than the CO2 and fine particles from fossil fuels.

I'm aware of it and I've set it up, but suitable packages are rarely available, especially for 32-bit x86.

A piece of nuclear waste contains a certain amount of energy. If it's released steadily* over 1e5 years, the radiation can't be very intense. Conversely, materials with short half-lives are "hotter". So I'd be more afraid of having the latter in my back yard, but for some reason the public scare is always about the long time scales, rather than intensity.

*(Exponential decay is not strictly "steady" as in linear, but for these purposes the details don't really matter.)

AI or not, chip makers and IT service giants aren't going anywhere. While the Big 7 companies are overvalued due to AI, they don't just do AI, so picking stocks based on binary AI criteria is problematic. Things are clearer with the smaller AI-only companies, but they don't count as much in the big picture of index funds.

I maintain a Gentoo system on a 2005 laptop with i915 graphics (Gentoo, because modern desktop distros such as Mint are too heavy for it). It's become impractical to update Mesa as it needs LLVM, which is a heavy build even on my AMD64 cluster. Incidentally, I started to look into alternatives about and hour ago, and I found Mesa Amber branch where the old non-LLVM drivers are maintained.

You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Diversity in promotions and hiring has lowered standards throughout corporate America as well as in government.

An example: a manufacturing company in the western U.S. needed to replace a mechanical engineer who was leaving. Hiring manager located an excellent candidate, but could not get sign-off to hire, because the candidate was a white male. He was told, “That would hurt our POC metrics.” The departing ME was a south Asian with dark skin, so they counted him as a POC in their ESG reports. After a battle, the manager was able to hire him. True story.

Boeing Corporation has aggressively pursued the hiring of underrepresented minorities, which necessarily has dumbed down what was once the world’s foremost aeronautical engineering company.

NASA same. Whistleblowers and general staff inside the agency have been complaining that the previous leadership was overly focused on racial equity and gender bias training and similar wastes of time. The previous administrator stated that it was NASA’s goal to land “the first woman and the first person of color on the moon”.

Then we could discuss how the FAA has been dumbing down Air Traffic Control. It is rampant.

And no, DEI is not about fairness. It’s about making whites in positions of power feel virtuous.

The Biden Administration sued Tesla for hiring on merit rather than skin color.

Even 2D desktop stuff has used OpenGL and other "3D acceleration" features for years. 2D is a subset of 3D, and there's no point in maintaining a separate API and hardware features for 2D.

More technically speaking, the "3D" part is a slight misnomer, as the end result of OpenGL rendering is always a 2D picture. Besides, OpenGL internal coordinates are actually 4D, and of course you can use any dimensionality internally in shaders. I can't speak for other graphics systems, but I'd guess they work rather similarly.

What dictator?

A helium leak was reported prior to launch, yet they proceeded with the mission because it was “minor”. Then, it became a major issue and they were forced to scrap the mission. Do I have it right?

The old NASA made occasional mistakes, but they had a culture of must-not-fail; each team had to prove their subsystem was nominal before the mission could proceed. Their dedication was legendary.

Politicization, DEI, and the general decline in American technical standards and work ethic have ruined Boeing and NASA.

Grants from art foundations are very different from basic income schemes. Slashdotters might be more familiar with grants for scientific research, such as PhD or Post-doc programs, and it's basically similar for arts. There are many more applicants than available grants, and you have to spend a considerable part of your time on the application process, rather than doing the art/science itself. You also need to show your worth in some way, basically working for years and years without grants to build a decent body of work.

As another commenter pointed out, it's the beginners that need the money more than the established professionals, so basic income makes much more sense.

I also have a used Thinkpad that seemed intact, except for some wear on the outer case corners. I'm guessing it was always used with a dock, so nobody has touched the keyboard or the display.

OTOH, I also have a used Chromebook with a school's logo painted on the top cover, but otherwise looked intact. It doesn't have a docking connector (traditional or USB-C) so it could be a "surplus" item, although that too seems unlikely for a school.

I made this a while ago: http://algoristo.com/teknohog/...

The car was invented in Europe, and this includes both internal combustion and electric variants. We also had the first Nazis. Tesla is just another Nazi electric car, and even its name is stolen from a European inventor.