Nuclear Fission, the only functioning form of nuclear power we have right now, isn't cost-effective. The Germans did the math, came up short and decommissioned their ambitious Fission related projects such as the Kalkar Fast Breeder and the Wackersdorf Replenishment Plant. And eventually Fission in general. And after closing down all Fission plants and after 5+ decades of searching they still haven't found a place to put their nuclear waste.
They're nanosecond pulses. The instantaneous power is 8 kW but the power on average is around 5W, and that's only when it actively ranges, which happens for only a short time at each cycle.
And then if it's been asked to range too many times within a few seconds and the number of joules per second delivered exceeds the eye safety limit - some ISO standard I don't recall - the device refuses to range until the eye safety counter "cools off" so-to-speak.
With infrared, it's all about limiting the average power to avoid cooking the eyeball like egg white. The thermal inertia of an eyeball full of water is such that you can deliver quite a lot of power in one sitting for a short time, then stop, and it's perfectly safe.
The most powerful devices range up to 32 km and can actually damage their own sensor when ranging something close and reflective. They use 1550nm pumped IR lasers and each pulse pumps out 8 kW. They're eye-safe but they certainly aren't camera safe.
I'm talking cross-platform.
A Python v2 or v3 file will usually run equally well on Windows, Linux, whatever... in the same version of the interpreter.
Python does break stuff on a regular basis and create headaches because they still don't give a very big shit about backward compatibility. But my point is, whatever works or breaks on one platform with work or break more or less the same on another.
Java on the other hand is a complete crapshoot, depending on platform, which JVM and which version you use, whether the moon was blue the night before...
Python is the real no-nonsense, no headache write-once-run-everywhere.
... by just looking at overall stock value you're being silly.
Point in case: Shut down the ultra-specialists in Germany, Netherlands or France and global chip production comes to a grinding halt. These companies build devices and technology that others are flat-out incapable of reproducing without significant time and effort going into ultra-high-tech R&D.
Another example: Airbus is basically by-and-large a Euro-Government project. If you just look at market cap they may seem unspectacular but right now they're the only ones building passenger jet aircraft with good quality. Nobody in their right mind would claim that Boeing is at the same level right now, no matter how high their market cap might rise next week due to somebody moving bazillions of cash into their stock. Same with AI. Sure, the big AI companies are quite often based in the US of A, but look at cutting-edge specialized work with FOSS LLMs and suddenly some provincial university in a mid-sized German town is leading the way in that field.
I could go on but I think you know what I'm getting at. Proficiency in tech and leading high-tech certainly isn't only measured in gross stock-value. QED.
With Trump's tariffs set to raise prices up the wazoo, many people will lose their homes. 22% of fewer US homes is less energy than the headline suggests.
DOGE only hires sketchy teenage cybercriminals like him to "handle" our sensitive government data. He would fit right in!
Google is still marginally better at DDG / Bing at finding relevant answers to very precise, very obscure technical issues or error messages. Other than that, I never use it.
My search engines of choice are:
85% DDG for general and technical search.
10% Google for technical search when DDG fails.
5% Yandex for porn - don't bother with DDG first, Yandex knows smut best.
I don't think Pavel Durov would be safe in the US right now.
... are going to use AI to decomission the higher ranking jobs and the income streams they are tied to.
This is more of a social thing than a job performance / skill issue. More senior folks are offloading their work to AI and enabling they job to be more chill. As a senior webdev I'm observing this first hand. AI enables me to do in hours what I would've needed days or even weeks to do just 18 months back. It's like having the core team of devs for a given software toolkit sitting next to you, eager to hand out appropriate code-snippets or give precise and elaborate explanation on details of the stack and tech involved. I'm the sole senior webdev in a company of ~70 lawyers and my team is updating their mode of working on a monthly basis right now. Just half an hour ago my boss sitting across from me now booked the newest ChatGPT codex subscription and is using to solve a data-migration problem he was brooding over yesterday. Things are moving at a breakneck pace right now and I don't really expect my world to look anything like it does right now in 12 months.
Ergo: Anybody doing a desk-(bullshit)-job who thinks he's going to be spared by AI is being delusional, no matter how "senior" they are. When a 20 Euro/month AI can speed up a lawyers summary from 8 billable hours to 30 seconds shit is about to get real. Epic style.
EVs are superior in just about every metric. The sooner ICEs behind quaint vintage oddities, the better. We're late enough as it is with the fossil fuel turn-around.
L00ny or not, you have to give Elon Musk credit for being a key figure in making this happen.
JS is one of the most prevalent PL in layer 7 these days. For good reasons, even if some of those are historic.
- open standards (Web)
- cross platform (FOSS Web)
- lots of shiny clicky touchy stuff (Web)
- lives in a space that is based on documents and static data and only introduces Turing as an afterthought (Web)
- the strict typing thing needed for bigger stuff is also an afterthought done with a trivially simple FOSS superset of JS that you can pick up and use in 5 Minutes
2 Eurocents from a seasoned Webdev.
Generations of brilliant engineers have been keeping this marvel of US technology alive for decades.
But you know what's most amazing? That fucking Elon Musk hasn't fired everybody involved in keeping Voyager alive at NASA.
... demand anything political.
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Incel, definition
Incel (involuntary celebate) is a gender neutral term. Coined by an incel woman(!). The largest group of Incels are handicapped and/or disfigured people, followed by people with non-hetero-normal sexual orientation, then followed by heterosexual men, the vast overwhelming majority of which aren't misogynists but timid, shy, intimidated by women and/or the mating game and - often as a result - depressed.
To emphasize: Noisemakers on the internet aren't representative of Incels, despite what the misinformed public or some dimwitts on reddit think about the term.
Please stop perpetuating this ill-informed misrepresentation of Incels at large.
Thank you.
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"
