Actually, the people who forget that seem to be in the business of marketing and press releases. QC has been the apocalypse that would turn the world on it's head breaking crypto left and right in the next 2 years for at least 10 years now. It still can't do prime factorization better or faster than a sixth grader with a pencil and paper. And the sixth grader won't charge as much.

Perhaps it will be useful one day, but not today. It may well take 100 years. Remember about 3 years ago when the size of quantum computers was going to double overnight? And how it went radio silent shortly after? The problem with QC isn't that it will never get here at all, it's the damned hype machine that promised it would be here now.

It's the same hype machine that told us we would be using crypto currency for all of our everyday transactions by now. The same hype machine that claims AI will replace everyone next year.

We know that boats built 1.1 million years ago (so around the time of the split) were capable of going long distances up/down rivers between settlements, and across open waters beyond visual range to islands. This places certain language requirements on the hominins of the time, although we can't be sure hobbits had full access to all of those requirements. (There's not much evidence of boat building.)

However, they must have genetically had the capability, whether or not their brains were large enough to make any use of it.

That is all perfectly true, but we have a problem. Boats were capable of navigating reliably and robustly up/down rivers and across open sea beyond visual range. This requires much more complex communication than a gorilla or a chimpanzee is capable of, but obviously orders of magnitude less than a modern human or a Neanderthal.

It would seem reasonable to say that homo florensis was as much like us as those who first built deliberate boats for voyages requiring complex navigation.

The homo genus arose 2.2 million years ago. Evidence of complex communication exists as far back as 750,000-1.1 million years ago. Homo sapiens arose 300,000 years ago and are technically the "modern humans" as far as outward physiology is concerned. The brain was the size of modern humans for much of the 2.2 million years, but it is disputed how much. Since homo florensis is clearly not being likened to modern humans in the morphological sense, it would seem reasonable to conclude that they must be talking about some intellecual capability.

Fusion is going to be necessary at some point, and you can't start those with solar panels. Reducing wilderness is acceptable up to a point, but beyond that you start to screw up vital corridors and endanger whole sections of the food web - including those not directly impacted by the panels. So yes, you can increase solar and wind, but there are upper limits you absolutely should not cross. We're nowhere near those in the US, yet, but they shouldn't be ignored.

Nuclear as a general purpose fuel is dangerous, yes. So you need much much higher standards for designs and maintenance to keep them safe, and you really need Gen 4+ in order to be able to use nuclear waste as fuel (as we've a lot of that and can then dispose of the energy locked in it quickly and safely). A few more nuclear plants won't cause problems, provided they are Gen 4+ and preferably molten salt not water.

It's hard to not blame TEPCO to some level, as the tsunami was a one in 500 year type and was around 500 years after the last one of that magnitude. Although they're not exactly clockwork, it does become kinda obvious that you need to take such things into consideration. Yeah, yeah, there was no "legal obligation". Honestly, that isn't worth a damn. Either you update the design as new risks are determined (regardless of the law) or you knowingly take that risk.

However, you're absolutely right that the tsunami and the earthquake caused most of the property loss.

That's not how this works. There are a few ways to send an image to the bare display, but HDMI isn't one of them. If you actually look up the item list from TFS you will see that.

You didn't expect them to actually explain how you could manufacture an e-ink panel starting with sand and some chemicals in your kitchen, did you?

AD or BC? This matters. If Bill Gates is a time-travelling reptile from the Pleiades, and put chips into vaccines, it could be that all who took the vaccine will be spirited back into the Bronze Age and offered up as human sacrifices.

The truth is way out there.

600km is 0.0020014 seconds at the speed of light.

Or 2 milliseconds.

Birth rates are at record low since WW2:

www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

So there are fewer people, but they are living longer.

Which is probably the balance required, and probably explains WHY they're living longer too.

But it's not just the multi-billionaires. It's the many more multi-millionaires that produce nothing but wedge themselves into every transaction.

Look at any product that can be bought from an American company or direct from China. That HUGE price difference is how much the American company is skimming off the top.

The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

Gosh, that must be worth at least a trillion dollars.

Better scramble and invest in their hype of... a handheld box that can run AI... like... phones do.

So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.

But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?

It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.

It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.

Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."

30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).

Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:

£

(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).

Depends where you live.

Here in the UK, most employers started insisting on payment to bank account years ago, and cheques stopped being used at retail when the cheque gaurantee card scheme was shut down in 2011, but they are still used in other contexts, particularly for one-time payments. Traditional high street banks still issue and accept cheques, though I've heard that some no longer hand out chequebooks by default and some of the challenger banks are more problematic.

I understand in the USA, Canada and France cheques are far more widely used than here. OTOH many European countries are much further along the path to getting rid of them than us.