The patches that reach Linux are typically filtered by 2+ layers (maintainer(s), then subsystem head). If those people — who should know better — let a 2kLoC slop patch reach Linus' mailbox, the old Linus will come out to dispense a righteous, well-deserved chewing out.
Teams are international already.
Why do they bring people to the US at all?
A nice office in Bukarest or Krakow or if you really need Munich or Zürich is good enough for most Europeans. I am sure there are equally nice places in Asia.
Optogenetics is one of the most scify technologies I ever had the pleasure of working with:
Imagine implanting a light guide and then setting a translucent port to allow a pathogens safe way to couple into nerves deep inside the brain, imagine transient gene therapies that introduce channelrhodopsins and holographic projections that create volumetric excitation patterns.
Seriously, thinking machines are super impressive, but that stuff really alien in its possible applications.
My prediction is that true neural interfaces will be based on light not wires.
The issue with 'sovereign' is not about sneaky things a foreign entity might put in there, it's about control of the stack.
Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues, it's almost impossible to get some random European company to think about buying anything other than 'whatever US or China' are making.
There has to be very concerted push to make a difference.
Legal mandates around sovereignty (be very careful here) could make a difference.
But there will also be market reaction: US/China companies will bend on some level and provide things like 100% EU hosted and even comply with some data source stuff.
The only real path is to be more competitive as a continent.
We're talking about owning the stack - who gets to use what text, for what reasons, under what circumstances etc. Competitors, other nations, Russia / China, the 'global south', military contractors etc. etc..
The EU AI act isn't primarily about "geostrategy". It's about protecting society.
AI models act as a force multiplier for intelligence, in particular for generating information according to someone's wishes.
I.e. deepfakes and social media mis-/disinformation campaigns are a thing and having powerful AI allows you to do those at scales that can overwhelm society's resilience.
In general, even if you have "aligned" AI: aligned with whom or what?
Whom are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?
> In general, even if you have "aligned" AI: aligned with whom or what?
> Whom are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?
This is why each country needs to educate and maintain their own researchers across as broad a spectrum of disciplines as possible. Also why there needs to be healthy locally financed (through taxes and grants in addition to consumer spending) ecosystem of reporters and media, so that social media (and LLMs) can be easily discarded as sources of social truth and information like other entertainment products in favour of the trusted ones.
As for technical truths, I don't think using informal social media like the stackexchanges or LLMs to explain how camera lenses or checksums work yields materially worse outcomes than consulting Wikipedia or Knuth. For most things, where it doesn't matter, the blind copy/pasters will prevail. Where it does matter, the organization of the work itself has to set out with establishing accountability that encourages the appropriate amount of diligence anyways. And also the point above about having some local expertise.
"This is why each country needs to educate and maintain their own researchers across as broad a spectrum of disciplines as possible. A"
There is no such thing. Countries spend gazillions on Academia, the Academics do waht they want.
There are no real government places or jobs for that kind of thing. It comes at great expense and vague outcome. Or it gets entangled in bureaucracy.
What you're hinting at is a form of 'utopian governance' - like - it perfectly makes sense on paper, and it's actually rational. But it's completely unworkable in the context of how governments and organizations actually work.
It could on work in theory, not particularly well in practice.
> Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues
You clearly haven’t worked in enterprise in the EU. Location of data processor is the first thing they check. That’s why every major cloud has regions with different offerings, not just for HA and redundancy
Yes - security concerns are now very real, but do not fall for this idea that anyone really cares about structural concerns.
Tons of EU companies are still selling crap to Russia, happy to look the other way wile the bear devours a neighbour, as long as profits are there.
What has happened is that Trump has given a face to the reality, and so companies are adjusting on some level.
But 1) it will be nominal 2) Trump will be gone and the impetus will fade 3) the conglomerates will react 4) modest legislation will mean ...
The can will get kicked down the road.
The invasion of E. Europe by Russia has not even caused defence spending or the size of Armies to change, doctrine is barely changing.
Nothing will make those beheamoths change other than other forms of structural concern.
The 'Riet of the Right' - partly due to collapse of Auto / China (among many other things) might cause some change. But the change won't happen until well after the damage has been done.
Brexit should have been an opportunity for institutional reform of the EU, but no - they blamed it all on populism.
Certain governing entities in Europe will try to move away from Microsoft, they will be pulled back.
There is hope, and certain champions can rise and causes pieces to collapse.
If SUSE had any true entrepreneurial whereiwthal - they would create a true consumer / prosumer / enterprise-user friendly variation and brand their flavour of Unix - and make sure that all Euopean governments us it exclusively, which would cascade into widespread use.
There are variations of insta, youtube, netflix that should all be Europe based that could 'theoretically happen' but it needs some structural impetus.
Things usually don't change. Usually there needs to be a collapse and re-order of the system for that to happne.
The people in charge just want to keep their jobs, their very high salaries, and protect their retirement, and will be happy to 'sell out' whatever other imperatives along the way.
Ending with a positive not - I would say current conditions mean the change is now 'plausible, it not likely' whereas before it was 'not very plausible'. So there's a candle, a bit of wind, but not a lot of tinder or dry wood.
That is a very good idea and there is a market for that, especially if a company manages to source the hardware and then install the stack on a german or EU customer site
It depends on the use case, but I believe SLMs can do great with smaller tasks. People got so attached to 'general purpose' that they forgot software can be designed for specific, smaller use cases.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel.
A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
Official? It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
> But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
No, if they did they wouldn't have anyone on the border.
Dear reader, notice how they shifted their claim from "And everyone just happened to not be at their posts" to the official story (wink wink although I offered no real evidence) is that the border was lightly manned.
Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Maybe they would find it easier to get trade partners if they hadn't spent most of a hundred years murdering the extended families of all their potential trade partners. Somehow I'm finding it hard to have sympathy for their inability to find trade partners.
I admire your optimism for the future. I cannot share it despite living in peace, stability and a region much les affected by planetary changes than others.
> Since October 7 Israel has signed major missile defense and military tech export deals with various European countries including just recently Greece which is also part of a special military alliance with Israel and Cyprus.
Often times when communicating an idea you need to repeat yourself.
In this case I also mentioned the Greece Israel Cyprus military alliance which I didn’t before. This is an alliance which is due to the threat from Turkey which transcends a lot of the petty ideological issues with Israel coming from Western Europe.
Or it's an indication that you're trying to push an agenda (Israel = great, Israel = winning) which from your other comments in this thread is pretty evidently the case.
And it would be one thing if you were doing this in a thread discussing geopolitics, but this one is about satellite evidence showing the total destruction of a city. And your response is to boost the state that caused this?
Total destruction of cities is generally the way that wars end. This is simply a historical fact and anyone who studied history with any sort of interest would understand this.
This wouldn't be an answer to anything, even if it were true (which it isn't): how exactly does this translate to praising states that persecute such destruction?
This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
I wish I could share your optimism, but the fact of the matter is that American politicians are beholden to their sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and the military industrial complex and American imperialism which Israel is a part of, are both popular initiatives among their primary funding sources.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
> Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
Any sources that aren’t just anecdotes? I’d love to see some details about “Arabs” understanding and respecting the atrocities in Gaza, because many news organizations including English available ones like Al-Jazeera don’t seem to.
I hear that myth repeated sometimes but never with any evidence. Like a masterful propagandist, "monideas" has a talent for making claims that are hard to believe but also hard to prove wrong.
Also Mileikowsky and the roving gang of international Zionists and Chosen Ones have veto power over 90% of the governments in the world.
The US congress and senate get their laws and edicts directly from the top brass of the IDF.
Every single head of state in the Eurozone (bar Perro Sanxe, who is controlled by Morocco instead) and every single bureaucrat have to follow the rules set down by Israel, lest the union collapse.
They're everywhere you look. You don't have to fall for Hasbara or Unit 8200 propaganda about how this totally means you're an irredeemable monster, they are the ones who are pushing this.
I didn't fall for anything, I simply have two working eyes and the capacity to connect facts together.
Look at your own link. Feel free to go through my comment history. White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so! I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
But that doesn't mean I'm blind, or that I'm willing to ignore the truth that is staring me right in the face. Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel. There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
I will not willingly ignore the fact that I'm considered nothing more than cattle fit for slaughter to the chosen ones, nor to everything that they have done with their power in my country.
Even if it puts me at odds with my ideological cohort, I only hope that they are able to fully open their eyes too, soon.
> White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so!
There are many beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy, obviously not all of those may by applicable to you.
> I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
Antisemitism often exists in both left wing and right wing extremists groups, the international Jewish conspiracy beliefs likewise do as well.
> Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel.
It seems the opposite is true overall.[0]
> There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
There are deep divisions within factions in Israel, to claim otherwise is to ignore reality.
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
> The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
Have you heard of survival? Personal, cultural, geographic. People will do anything if you push them hard enough or deprive them of alternatives.
"October 7th" disproves every single one of your claim. Unless you think that was unprovoked of course, and not the result of years of oppression. If you do, then there really is nothing left to argue here.
And here you're saying that October 7th happened because Palestinians were not oppressed enough so I'm going to just disagree with you and wish you a good day.
Fascinating idea. On individual level I wouldn't agree, because whenever you take a strong stance about something you also tend to create enemies. Same for small groups of people. On state level however, it does sound more reasonable and should be the overall principle at least. Scale matters.
You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.
There've been many holocausts throughout history - after the WW2 one, people started studying them more closely and came up with the more scientific term "genocide", which means the same thing. Nothing in the definition says that one couldn't be perpetuated by a group that happens to be Jewish.
There's no high ground here. There were riots in Israel after the slightest bit of pushback against torturing prisoners via sexual assault.
Decades prior to Oct 7th, the IDF was shooting children through fences and ethnically cleansing villages.
Israel has been doing a similar thing to "1st amendment auditors", the people who harass random people and police in order to get a reaction and sue. They got the reaction, now Israel is attempting to play the victim. You cannot put people in fences, force them through militarized checkpoints, and allow settlers to harass and assault people in their homes with military backing and even begin to pretend to be the victim.
Yes, it turns out Hamas didn't commit mass rape on Oct 7. The NY Times, who made up the lie, eventually admitted it was a lie and published an article about how they lied about it.
What Israel has done in Gaza is absolutely not justice, but if you categorize killing babies as evil, then you should remember that the Bibas kids were also babies.
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
Any rocket or bullet turned against Israel for the past 20 years has its roots in Iran. Iran controlled Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Iraq through its militias.
If you knew anything about how Iran is doing this, you'd know they are happy to throw money or materiel at anyone who can put together a force against Israel, or even Serbia during the Bosnian war. They hardly direct or control anything afield, other than being mostly ideologically aligned. They don't need to pull puppet strings like you say. They happily work with resistance forces regardless of sect.
Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
"The sad thing" is that 100k+ humans were brutally killed and the lives of 2 million others were destroyed. The second sad thing is that Germany will never learn. Also, I'd suggest you look up the definition of the word "terrorist".
Hamas's Health Ministry was destroyed in April 2024 and the official numbers stopped increasing at that time because the people who published the numbers were dead, but we continue citing then because they are the lowest numbers that it's possible to justify and of course we want Israel to look as good as possible. If you would extrapolate that rate of killing through to the present, it's about 500,000 deaths.
You are quoting Wikipedia which quotes an article by the Guardian that the IDF had identified ~9000 Hamas/PIJ casualties by name. It is a logical fallacy to then assume the remainder are not part of Hamas/PIJ. Further, identifying adversary combatant deaths by name is an extraordinary high standard for warfare and is applied to no other conflict on earth.
Oh boy, more disinformation and "we do this better than any other military" bullshit.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong, like saying indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined mostly by lehalmimmgirwnts, built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy, in South Africa.
South Africa is a meme analogy which doesn’t fit the history. If you’d like a better analogy (though there are no good ones) I’d look at India and Pakistan in the 1940s.
I also happen to know the history of my own country, Australia, and when I try to draw parallels between Australian history and Israeli history, I see that the excuses we give for continuing our presence here are weaker in every way. So it would be hypocritical for me to holier-than-thou the decision of Jews to declare a homeland where a non-trivial portion of their global population have always lived.
Society grants you the right to enforce what we call intellectual property. Enforcing that concept is rather new, and some of humanities biggest cultural works predate it.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
> The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
One of the weirdest things I noticed when people around me started having kids was how immediately they picked up on their parents obsession with their phones, and would instinctively try to interact with them.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.
I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.
Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.
Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.
Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?
A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.
Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:
"
On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration.
"
1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected
For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.
There was not only massive amounts of ecological damage due to russian destruction of the Kakhovka Dam (which was a war crime), but also at least 59 people died. This would be impossible at Chornobyl because nobody lives around it.
In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers
Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.
Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.
So you see that avg opex price is cheap, thanks for acknowledging. That was the statement, not that in new plants power is more expensive because they need to repay loan (which is balooned due to delays)
We need firm power. This isn't outdated. That's also why Germany approved subsidies for new gas plants, which were recommended even by Fraunhofer ISE
Basically either you build a mix like france/nordics and get very low emissions or you are stuck with vre+bess+gas combo like Germany.
Or, if you are convinced VRE are enough, provide an estimation/simulation for German grid based on existing data of last decade (capacity factors/demand)- how much vre+bess is needed to ditch firm fossils fully
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?
Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.
In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
Which is an economic argument, too. It's merely not been priced in yet.
Yup. I guess we still disagree if nuclear is needed long term for Dunkelflaute, and for countries with darker winters.
It's one thing to use storage for overnight. Another if it's for a couple of weeks. And yet another for 6 months.
And take Sweden: Lots of hydro power yes, but where it can feasibly & economically be built, it already has. You can't expand it. And that's not even mentioning that all you need is a drought in winter, and you can no longer rely on it. Currently Sweden is backed by coal plants in Germany. But we need to plan for it being Dunkelflaute in Germany and Italy, at least enough to not have surplus for the nordics.
As for "it's always sunny somewhere", sure, but you need to get it there, somehow. Transmission is why electricity prices in Sweden can be "more than infinity percent" more expensive in south of Sweden compared to north. (electricity prices in the north has gone as far as negative), and is why data centers are built near power plants, or at least it's part of DC location planning.
If transmission costs were negligible then we wouldn't need to take power into account for DC placement. I have some rants about this related to how some DCs are away from population centers to save money on power, noticeably sacrificing latency to the actual end users.
The zonal pricing differences in Sweden are mostly a mathematical mirage. The cheap zones 1 and 2 are combined together only a third of the demand of zone 3.
If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).
So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.
The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.
For China, coal power generation is the bedrock of electric production. They have plenty of coal reserves and are building a plenty of new coal power plants.
But there is one positive change. 2025 was the first year in history of China when solar energy production increased more then increase in coal, gas or oil energy production.
From google translate
"""
Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion.
"""
No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.
Nothing like the 2k loc people tend to commit with LLMs.
One can work with commits and MRs like that.
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