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.

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.

The important thing about the new equipment is that it has improved creature comforts and that it's longer, thus creating more capacity. One of the more significant problems with the first generation Acela trainsets is that they're only six cars long. Journey time is more a function of the track than the equipment, and the Avelia Liberty acquisition doesn't address that (nor was it meant to). The Shore Line between Providence and Stamford is still full of curves. The Metro-North Railroad still handles dispatching between New York and New Haven. Furthermore, even if the Avelias can make better times for various reasons, Amtrak's not going to change the timetables while the first-generation trainsets are still running. Also, I guess none of us read the article since it likes to a CNBC article about AI adoption and job loss. Guess I've been trolled.

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

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.

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.

Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.

In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.

If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.

What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?

Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.

Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ahh found the 2b2t player.