Europe's first lithium mine just opened in Finland a couple of weeks ago.

Also, why are people comparing the ingredients of a battery — which is recharged a thousand times — against petrol, which you need to extract and process anew for every fscking "charge". I keep seeing this over and over, and I'm never sure if it's a new level of stupid, or just a very hairy troll under a very large bridge.

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I also notice that the Hormuz Strait is being closed. Gas guzzler owners all over the world are whining over rising oil prices, while the civilized world is moving into energy sources that don't depend on access to conflict areas. The grandparent whines about China, but it's not exactly the sole source of Lithium. They even opened a mine here in Finland.

3.11 for workgroups

Did you mean: NASSA?

Also, does anyone remember when web browsers were considered thin clients? I think the last time this was true was in the late 00s with netbooks. Then, more than a decade before the Al craze, browsers became these turbocharged Javascript engines that need multiple gigabytes of RAM to run.

I've heard the opposite argument: quantum computers don't have enough applications to make them business-worthy. So I for one welcome our new quantum algorithm overlords. Of course, the hardware projects also have their technical challenges, but which budding technology doesn't?

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.

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.

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.