I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals:

1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free.

2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.

3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.

A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.

I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.

1 - fusion reactor in the sky is not that easy to capture 24/7 due to nights/winter. BESS can partially alleviate the problem, not solve it. 2 - geothermal has an inconvenient property to lower output over time. 3 - nuclear requires far less grid investments, far less mining/materials 4 - If we are serious about nuclear we should investigate up to smallest detail how hitachi deployed first ABWR for such a short time/low cost and do that in series, en masse. I can bet in 20y Germany will still have far worse emissions than France

The new response works for me, because in my mind I’ve always defined “woke mind virus” as a a mental virus which causes people to become absolutely pathologically obsessed with fighting an imaginary enemy they call “wokeness”. It’s the only definition which makes sense. “Woke” itself was never that viral.

Call it woke derangement syndrome.

People obsessed with fighting whatever they perceive as "woke" which remains ill-defined on purpose so they never have to actually formulate a rational take down beyond their emotional response

I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?

It’s clear they have something very interesting.

We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.

We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.

The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.

If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter

I think by this point they demonstrated basically all the characteristics of their battery well enough, except for the density, but then that was a pretty damn important and big claim. I'm not sure they can afford to delay that much longer. Or the actual shipment of products.

They didn't share third party tests. They shared tests done by a party they contracted, and whose test reports don't back up the claims to the extent that they claimed.

Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.

The danger of batteries doesn’t have much to do with their capacity. Many solid state batteries are far safer than liquid electrolyte ones, while also having higher energy density.

Nothing market leading about AirPods? I find it telling that it’s one of the only Apple products that LTT Linus is using, despite not working as well with Android as with iOS. And they have around 30% market share in their product category

Not GP, but I also find it telling that Influencer with a free pick at any sound equipment at any price point, famously not super onboard with the ecosystem (Bar recently with the Neo) still does pick them

Linus is not an audiophile by any means, but he's also exposed to more and better equipment than even most of the already significant outliers in HN

The upshot is it could accelerate the development of smaller local fertiliser factories running on solar power. There’s a few that have been built and demonstrated. If we start to build them in large numbers hopefully the costs will become reasonable.

That’s for nitrogen. Sulphur is another matter. I suppose in the long term we should just adapt food production to what can actually be sourced sustainably and locally.

Amazing, and people wonder why there is this immense backlash to environmentalists.

"Tons of people will die, but thats fine if it achieves my political/environmental goals"

7 million people per year die prematurely from air pollution alone. Are you suggesting we should just keep killing those people indefinitely instead?

Those 7 million lives were apparently never worth fixing things for; now maybe we can shift away from a fossil fuel-driven economy and cut back on a lot of that pollution, and maybe save a ton of lives in the long run.

Yes it is horrible that people are going to die from famines, no one is arguing against that, but maybe it will result in shifting our economy to something where people don't die of famines and also don't die of air pollution.

The number of people who'd die from famines will be much much higher than 7 million per year.

I don’t think Microsoft’s approach to perpetually support old apps is unequivocally a good thing. It seems to be getting them into a deeper and deeper mess over time.

As a consumer I prefer Apples approach. If I were an industrial customer relying on old software to operate my machines i would prefer Microsoft’s approach.

Why do you assume that solar and production of food is mutually exclusive on that land? Agrovoltaics is a thing and can often have benefits to the growing of crops.

The only way to simulate what real hardware does is to synthesise the design, get a net list and do a gate level simulation. This is incredibly slow, both to compile and to simulate.

You could, of course, simplify the timing model a lot. In the end you get down to “there is some time passing for the signal to get through this logic, we don’t know how much but we assume it’s less than any clock period”.. in which case we end up with delta cycles.

Real hardware has clock trees. Wouldn't all (most?) problems with delta cycles go away if the HDL understood the concept of clocks and clock balancing?

That’s overly pedantic.

Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.

The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.