Of course, there are power outages in Germany too, just a lot less.

While there are certainly power outages in Europe and I guess it depends also where you are in Europe and in the US, it still matches my experience living in California for a couple of years. I can't remember having experienced any power outage in Germany for decades before moving to California, where this then happened regularly. Since moving back to Europe, Germany and now Austria, I have stable power again. I think there was a very short (30 m) power outage 2 years ago where I live now.

You can use a safe string type in C as many people do and use other language features to get bounds checking in C.
For example: https://godbolt.org/z/4Tn8jaGM...

It is not clear to me why people do not use this more, but I think the constant misinformation that this is not possible in C is not helping.

It surprising that people still get this completely wrong even though it is not terribly difficult to understand. Base load is the level of power you always need even when demand is low, and base plants are plants that can provide this base load of power cheaply when they are always running with constant output. So in the past this could be plants that are very expensive to build but cheap to operate such as nuclear. But once you have more variation on the grid from sources that are also very cheap such as solar or wind, they will cover some of the base load when production is high so that the left-over demand becomes smaller that traditional base load. In consequence, you need more dispatchable power sources such as gas peakers or storage instead of base load plants. So the need for base load plants becomes less and they become less economical. This is terrible for nuclear.

Indeed, this is the most hilarious part of the story, that they think you could ask an AI why it did something and get an actual explanation.

Economical consideration are still important. I disagree that the choices are nuclear or coal. The choice is nuclear and renewables, or only renewables. I am would bet that the later is cheaper.

All this is actually evidence that science is progressing from less knowledge to having better understanding of the world, not that all theories are always wrong which is the claim you made above.

According to the link I posted, the contracts were signed in 2013, so this was more than just a declaration of intent.

Why did with gave the scientific illiterate access to computers? There should be basic physics questionnaire or something before being allowed to use any modern technology, so that we do not have to read politically motivated anti-science comments from uneducated people such as "These guys in 1958 are vastly more convincing than modern climatologists". I mean, even completely ignoring future issues, this nonsense hurts my brain.

This is not how it was. Microsoft announced the move in 2013 and LiMux was cancelled in 2017, but politically attacked already the years before including by the mayor Dieter Majer who as mayor from 2014 until 2026 and involved already with the Microsoft move in 2013 as head of economic affairs: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/mu...

I find it rather absurd to even consider anything orbital or flying as a solution. This seems based on a grotesque misjudgement of scale and economics. What needs to be done is known very well: Massive and quick rollout of renewables in combination with more efficient and smarter use of energy.

Luckily, we know that growth can be decoupled from CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions from Germany and the EU are decreasing since 90s and of the US and high-income countries overall since the last 20 years (per capita emissions in the US are still relatively high in the US due to wasteful lifestyle and processes). China also seemed to have peaked now due to rollout of renewables. Unfortunately, CO2 emissions are coupled to stupidity and I see no end here.

As a scientist, I somehow doubt you know much about science or the scientific method.

The main fallacy here is to assume there was a lot of effort spend making old C code safe. Maybe they did some fuzzing, etc. and this is great. But if I were takes to make legacy C code safe, I would go over and replace every open-coded string or buffer manipulation by a safe string or buffer abstraction. Yes, nobody want to do this, because playing with AI or new languages is so much more fun.

Even the fact that an issue was fixed in one caller of the function, but nobody considered the other callers before, tells you that the least possible maintenance effort was spend on these issues before.

I like to add that there heavily regulated industries that successfully brought down cost - such as aviation. The reason nuclear industry is not able t bring down cost in general is because building plants is slow and there is also no scale in numbers, so you can not iterate and optimize. Bringing down cost also did not work under favorable political circumstances. SMR try to address exactly this, but the problem is that there are also many fixed costs so building larger plants is more efficient. The gains from building many small reactors must be large to overcome this. I would not bet my money on this.

I think the idea that "evil people killed nuclear by adding pointless regulations" is a bit of a fairy tale nuclear proponents tell to rationale the economic failure of nuclear. The fact that there is indeed some element of truth to this may be very misleading.