These are awesome and I would absolutely embrace the upgradeability and open standards fully if they had the devices I use: a rugged laptop (rain, snow, drop, etc proof, covered ports, washable like my Getacs) with upgradable, fully Linux compatible hardware would be awesome. My trackpad and touch screen are both generic mice according to Linux.

Then, pls, make a phablet with optional LTE/baseband (or none, not a phone at all). Short range radios, but zero base band, otherwise a rugged, reliable, durable, upgradable phone-like form factor, super extra bonus points for interchangeable camera modules. Double extra bonus points for easily removed/swapped battery. Add a LoRa radio instead of LTE, why not?

There have been a few projects to make a good Linux phone and while the PinePhone is impressive engineering, it falls short of being a usable replacement for a flagship phone. There's a solid market for brick/tank phones and they have plenty of room to provide usable, all day battery capacity for a Linux device but the current collection from vendors like Blackview, as nice as they are with very useful features like thermal imagers or NIR illumination/sensors and excellent durability are all Android Certified and the Droidocalypse is going to effectively brick them all in September.

Any aggregation of radioactive elements is inherently dangerous, always, no matter what safeguards, simply as a material that is hazardous to health. Most radioactive hazards associated with fissile materials represent health risks with atypically, even for poisonous elements, pernicious qualities. Not many people would be sanguine with health-impacting quantities of fissile materials in their environment, unlike say, lead or arsenic, both quite awful but a whole different scale of awful.

Any intentional aggregation of fissile material is intrinsically a risk to human health and safety. Nuclear advocates (many of whom would qualify as frothing fanbois) dismiss such concerns claiming they know of a "safe" reactor design, some of which are quite clever and are, indeed, intrinsically quite safe when operated correctly. Such fanbois will sometimes make the entirely valid point that the rate of death from even older reactor designs is way below the mortality rate induced by burning coal (true) and that nuclear power is much less carbon intensive than fossil fuels (also true).

There are compelling arguments about a diversity of sources, above the reliability of fissile power, about the longevity of investments, and about immunity to a range of possible weather (storms, extended rain) or geopolitical constraints (international fuel shipments), all of which (and more) have merit and should be considered carefully.

I consider four counter arguments that should be considered when contemplating the relative merit of fissile power generation over other methods:

1) Current advanced nuclear power plants have a projected LCOE of $0.11/kWh (DOE) standard new at $0.118-$0.192/kWh (lazard) while solar currently runs $0.05-$0.06/kWh (lazard) and $0.086 (NREL) for battery-backed 24/7 solar, declining to $0.047/kWh by 2050 (NREL). The economic justification for nuclear power is weak in all but a few geographic locations occupied by humans.

2) Uranium is a finite resource, the cost of which is rising and currently $86.8/kg (tradingeconomics). The total proven proven reserves are sufficient for about 2 years of total human consumption in standard light water fission reactors. Breeders and advanced systems have significantly different total reserve values, but such systems come with significant risks, either in proliferation (breeders) or technological (advanced reactor designs). While it is an entertaining speculative argument to discuss technologies that might extend fuel supplies, solar panels and storage (PSH or grid-scale battery) are well proven and widely available today.

3) National security policy: defense against external antagonist: any centralized civilian facility is a target and nuclear reactors, even intrinsically safe ones, are a particularly tempting target. While containment structures are designed to be robust against, for example, the impact of a large passenger aircraft, they are not robust against "bunker buster" style munitions. Consider the consequences of a relatively trivial drone impact with the Chernobyl sarcophagus. As these sorts of attacks are democratized by the proliferation of low cost, long range, difficult to attribute munitions they will inevitably become more common and the only practical mitigation is decentralization. While nanoreactors such as the Zeus (1-20 MW) might make targeting more difficult, they're still vastly more expensive than a few more drones making them juicy asymmetric targets for any NSAG and proliferate the next concern:

4) National security police: defense against extremist state takeover or occupation: "safe" nuclear reactors assume operation remains in the hands of moderately responsible, reasonable people, an assumption not supported by recent history. There is no fission design that does not rely on a concentration of fissile material, intrinsically radioactive. There is no such concentration that cannot be widely dispersed with a properly engineered application of conventional high explosives. Every nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, is a pre-emplaced nuclear munition. To quote the (poor) AI transcription of Serhii Plokhy from the Economist's Intelligence podcast https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40 "The taboo on the occupation and military attacks on nuclear sites that existed before 2022 had been broken. It is gone. Now, the war in Ukraine is the war of drones more and more. And the non-nuclear country. Can very easily go nuclear by attacking somebody's nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants." Chernobyl is occupied, Zaporizhzhia is occupied, the Ukrainians got close to taking Kursk; if an occupying force is forced out, might they be tempted to salt the earth they're forced to leave with fissile debris? Might one of the many political parties animated by an Armageddonist eschatology consider a nuclear reactor an inexpensive and readily available doomsday munition, a sort of clarion call to whatever deity they are waiting for? Even if they're wrong about the level of doom a conventional detonation of a fissile core might achieve, the consequences would be far more lasting and terrifying than a fuel depot or even grid-scale lithium battery fire.

This isn't really surprising.

The "AI experts" (oof) are the people who are best poised to reap any economic rewards either through being in tech pushing AI, or being otherwise invested (personally or financially) in AI succeeding. These include the people who magically think that productivity gains will benefit workers, as opposed to owners, which ignores 100 years of productivity-gain data.

The "non-AI-experts" are presumably regular workers who see the C-suite and owners salivating at AI as the fastest way to stop paying actual humans to do a service, or for companies to degrade quality with a magical-thinking "I can't believe it's good enough!" mindset that actually gives customers a worse experience (for a greater profit).

What this divergence doesn't rule out is that the "expert" class has well-founded reason for optimism, and the "non-expert" class has well-founded reason for pessimism. It just suggests that one side sees itself as the owner class in a corpo-owned dystopian cyberpunk future where wealth has access to skill and skill doesn't have access to wealth.

The unstated but obvious reason they are taking the time to remove it is because they want to train their LLMs on the messages.

Sorry, the linked summary is really just the same hype cycle I've seen.

Programmer friends at Google, Meta and Amazon have certainly convinced me that code is being assisted successfully by AI. However, the author's level of extrapolation to other fields and situations destroys any credibility he had.

For example, the author - Matt Shumer, who is an AI company founder, booster and frequent submitter to other AI-hype websites, but apparently is not legally trained - spends many paragraphs and anecdotes talking about how a partner at a law firm now has to use AI because he "knows what's at stake" and that AI can do legal work better than their associates.

Nope, the reason that partner is doing it is because he's scared of being left behind, which is the entire motive behind hype pieces like this. I'd wager that hypothetical partner is not the one who beats out all his colleagues and becomes "the most valuable person in the firm" but rather the one that gets sanctioned for submitting briefs with hallucinated cases (which is still happening in the wild regularly). As a lawyer, I can say even current flagship AI models cannot solve the problem of lawyer bar-required ethical duties which require effectively re-doing the work AI does so we can attest it is correct, taking more time than doing the work ourselves the first time.

Shumer similarly gives an "oh god, it's getting so good so fast!" timeline that includes AI passing the bar. That 2023 story was debunked in 2024 and somehow this guy is unaware of that. Why in the world would someone so unable to identify reliable information be trusted on AI reliability?

There may be some functional AI work - like coding within specific environments and circumstances - but there is a huge AI bubble built on this silly "it will do everything better" hype.

Despite impressive results, submarines cannot swim.

I too, call for a ban on time travel.

...it's

The obvious answer is to simply disconnect regions that impose internet-breaking restrictions. If a region believes the rest of the world is responsible for parenting their dumb children, and in particular they're willing to sue when someone else fails to live down to the standards they think their little sheltered idiots need to engage the world and that they're too incompetent to provision themselves, then merely politely tell them their entire region is insufficiently sophisticated to interact and pull their plug.

We really need a FOSS maintained "Gilead regions" IP block list, v4 and v6, for independent operators and national ISPs and DNS providers engaged to banlist those regions from interacting with the an internet that doesn't work for them. They have every right to decide for themselves, but not for anyone else.

FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not as good as pure FreeBSD.

Moving from SVN to git kinda sucked, but now it works well enough and gets the job done and keeps the Linux heads happy.

whut?

Time out, it kinda got ahead of us, everyone needs a break. Just unplug the whole internet and let NIST catch up. It's not safe to be connected without a current CVE database.

Yes!

We must build an absolute monopoly on inventions which is permanent and heritable even if by so doing retard the progress of science and the useful arts. Without legislative protection, innovation would be like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Society must give a permanent exclusive right to the profits arising from them, lest they be denied by their nature the status of property.

...well, not that shocked.