The port is great.

Device manufacturers putting said port deep in the bowels of Erebus where no mortal man could hope to actuate the locking mechanism is less great.

The US is the largest producer of oil in the world, and there is a very strong lobby for keeping that production up.

The US accounts for about 20% of total oil consumption, 2/3rds of that is transportation. If transportation were to be heavily electrified, it would be a meaningful drop in global oil consumption and cause prices to fall. Falling prices hurt US producers more than many overseas producers, as fracking is an expensive extraction method and most US production is from fracked wells.

I have KDE + Wayland on Arch using an Nvidia GPU and I have tons of nagging issues that seemingly cannot be resolved with current drivers.

More power to you if it all just works, but that isn’t universal

Not necessarily a shitty dealership, just one with low margins.

Cars are generally sold by sellers with incredibly low margins (talking like a few hundred dollars, max). They make their money through the financing. They probably didn’t want to sell the car in cash, because some other chud will come along and buy it on credit and get them a higher margin.

Pro tip - always get your own financing when purchasing a car, don’t get it through the dealer. But don’t let them know that, look over their finance package when signing the paperwork, try to negotiate out any origination charges, etc. then simply pay the loan off immediately with your private financing.

In the article, the kid himself explains that he is doing all this because he wants to create support humans who are biologically immortal

Lutris downloads files from GoG using their API, which has heavily throttled download speeds. It was going to take 19 hours for CP2077 to download using Lutris.

Downloading the 50 pieces individually from GoG through the browser took under and hour, but was quite annoying.

If you don’t play any large games, you might not have noticed, but Lutris and GoG do not work very well together.

I love having to individually download all 50 parts to a game and write my own install script (the GOG experience on Linux).

They said they would wait until there was a meaningful increase in the power or efficiency they could get out of the form-factor.

The OG deck launched 3.5 years ago, and since then not much has changed. The steam deck GPU has 1.6 TFlop of FP32 compute at 15W. AMD’s newest low-power APUs have 2.3 TFlop of FP32 at 28W - nearly double the power for a <50% theoretical performance gain.

A semi-custom APU (that removes the useless AI engine) would compare more favorably, but we are still talking about maybe 20% more performance, not exactly game changing for the cost.

Note: N^2 and NlogN scaling refer to runtime when considering values of N approaching infinity.

For finite N, it is entirely possible for algorithms with worse scaling behavior to complete faster.

I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.

Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.

Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren’t the smartest person in the room and you shouldn’t begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.

When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.

Just some advice for you as you grow up.

Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.

I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been ‘unlimited free energy’, but that isn’t quite accurate.

Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be ‘unlimited’ in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.

However that ‘free’ part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly ‘innefficient’, most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the ‘unlimited’ value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.

Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let’s call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let’s call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let’s call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let’s call that E.

For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:

(E-O)*L - C > 0.

In other words, it isn’t sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it ‘pays’ for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn’t actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.

This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.

Completely correct. There is also a (much rather in the US) ScD degree - Doctor of science.

In the US, it is often identical to a PhD. If your institution offers it, you just check a box at the end of your program on whether you want a PhD or ScD. In Europe, an ScD is a higher degree than a PhD and requires some extra work to obtain.

There were plenty of problems with the concrete policies on offer.

‘most lethal military’, tough on crime, secure the border… it was ridiculous to see how far right the supposed left went in search of votes. Harris’s platform looked more like Trump’s from 2016 than it did Hilary’s.

The conspiratorial thinking isn’t helping your argument.

It’s quite clear you haven’t engaged with this topic outside of internet arguments. I sincerely hope you do some reading and learn more here - you clearly have the passion.

Until then, find someone else to harass.

You clearly didn’t comprehend what I wrote. Educate yourself on this topic - not from forum arguments, but from TEA and policy papers.

For one, I said ‘base load’ generation isn’t needed. Your thinking that is is means your thinking on the matter is 10 years out of date. If you insist base load is needed, then gas plants and carbon capture systems are far cheaper and faster to build.

You don’t care, though, as you aren’t seriously involved in the policy and just want to live in a world where you are right 🤷.

Base load is an outdated concept. It is cheaper, by an order of magnitude, to install surplus generation capacity using renewables and build storage to cover periods of reduced production.

Nuclear reactors actually make terrible ‘base load’ generation anyway, as large swings in output induce thermal cycling stress in their metal components AND the economics of these multi-billion dollar investments depend on running near max output at all times - otherwise the payback time from selling power will extend beyond the useful life of the plant.

The policy wonks shilling for nuclear are not being honest. The economics for these plants are terrible, they are especially terrible if The Plan ™ is to use nuclear as a transition fuel to be replaced by renewables - as then they won’t even reach break even. To say nothing of the fact that a solar installation in the US takes 6 months, while there have been two reactors under construction in Georgia for a decade…

50 years ago, nuclear was a great option. Today, it is too expensive, too slow to build, and simply unnecessary with existing storage technologies.

If y’all were really worried about base load power, you’d be shilling for natural gas peaker plants + carbon capture which has much better economics.

The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.

Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.

You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.

It depends on the type of fusion.

The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.

Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.

There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.

But if you could see them, they could see you …