Thanks. Damn autocorrect.

Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.

Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.

Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it’s right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you’ll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.

Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY

You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.

Could someone eli5 to me old fart why it’s a good idea to restrict content to a certain time? Increase engagement, OK, but why so much effort to create content that disappears after two weeks?

I’m out of the loop since I’ve been using a self hosted Miniflux, but Raven certainly is an alternative.

Actually, there is a company that makes resin printed children’s glasses for about €200 a pop. My son tried them at the opticians and I was impressed by the finish and flexibility. Just to say that 3d printed glasses are really commercially viable.

I had to check Wikipedia to be sure. OK, the S got updated motors or restyled taillights, but they’re all externally indistinguishable for the non Tesla nerd. Look at how the Corvette and Mustang changed over the years, or the F-Series trucks. They went with the zeitgeist, and the S is still visually stuck in 2012.

What I don’t get about Tesla is: when will they ever update their existing vehicles, like every other car company does? The Model S has been around for over ten years. Aren’t they planning an S2? Or this all the RnD they have?

The Internet Archive is being DDOSed for the lulz.

https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/113279179271574005

I’m worried that the boat is full of water.

Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.

Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.

The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.

So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?

Because they don’t give a shit what their people think. Yes, they are still building new coal and nuclear power plants, but it’s being outpaced by renewables.

Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?

Didn’t say that. But I also don’t think that it magically appears in the plant.

While coal powerplants don’t spew out radioactive coal ash??

Please stop this whataboutism.

Nobody cares to recycle concrete.

Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that’s a different topic.

I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive.

Convenient. Then I will because I’m not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don’t want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.

And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that’s far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.

Solar panels are mostly aluminum and glass and about 90% recyclable. More importantly, they are inert and not radioactive.

You can’t seriously compare nuclear waste to solar panels.

Uranium is a heavy metal and of course its poisonous. Just like lead, but radioactive. Why aren’t we using uranium glassware or uranium paint anymore if it’s supposedly not poisonous?

When was the last time a solar farm or a wind park had a catastrophic accident leading to large parts of land being uninhabitable for decades, even centuries?

Of course they are explodey. It’s a fission reaction that has to be constantly modulated and cooled to not go critical.

The other argument is the cost of properly storing waste and decommissioning the plant, which is often conviently ignored. Not much of a NPP can be recycled, unlike solar.

“The people” don’t build NPPs, risk-adverse utility companies do. And while public opinion might matter in some countries, nuclear power is just 5% in China, compared to renewables at around 30%.

Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.

Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on these investments are not guaranteed. Generally, GenAI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.

This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.

Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.

In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it’s so abundant.

Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12 billion euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmental risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?