ilinamorato @ ilinamorato @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

"Okay. Just so I understand it, in your wildest fantasy, you are in Hell, and you are co-running a bed-and-breakfast with the Devil."

cheaper,

Once commercial fusion comes out, it's likely to be about half the cost of wind.

[more] reliable

There's absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.

and safer alternatives

Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the "nuclear waste" that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that's not nothing, but it is almost nothing.

As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that's almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we're manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there's a literal sun's worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It's hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that's why stories like this are news: because it's a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.

It's always thirty years away because every time it gets close to 15 years away they cut the funding in half. Zeno's Dichotomy in action.

I'm doubtful about that, to be honest. He's only ever played the world like a game on easy mode, and the money he has is what allows him to do that, so he has to maintain the flow of that money. For most rich people, that's the reason they want more money: because it's the key to influence and power, and that has worked well for rich people for ages.

That's why, even if (as is not impossible) this president is the last democratically-elected president in history, he has to continue to get money: so that he can continue to wield his level of access and control and influence. Trump doesn't care about anything other than his bank account and his personal image among a certain crowd, so once Musk is no longer an asset to one or both of those things, he'll drop Musk.

I don't think Elon loves anyone or hates anyone or cares about the existence of anyone who isn't in his immediate circle. Those are the only real people for him. Everyone outside of that is just game mechanics, and he'll burn through as many as he can to get to the top of the leaderboard. Unfortunately, he has enough money and influence that now he can force other people to play his game, too. Including, currently, the President of the United States.

So, in my opinion, eventually he'll push back on Trump about the tariffs. It may not work (though it probably will), but he's not going to stay silent about that forever. He already got Hegseth to buy a bazillion cybertrucks for the DOD so that he could get them off of his lot. He'll probably start pressuring Duffy to start the money flowing to Tesla to build more Superchargers soon, too.

It reduces his bottom line, particularly when a trade war makes Tesla exports less profitable. Yeah, he'll survive, but his profits will suffer.

Anything can cause people to step up. Hatred, spite, murderous intent. That doesn't make it a virtue.

We don't really have a good UI solution to that anywhere, though.

The closest I've seen is with longform video apps, where scrubbing along the progress bar pops up a little video preview, but it's not consistently available, it's a half-baked idea, and if I had a dollar for every time the preview didn't match up to what you actually got when you hit play, I'd probably have enough to hire someone to fix it.

In podcasts, I think chapters is the best idea going, but it's not well-implemented either.

I think scrubbing along the progress bar is just a bad visual metaphor. I don't know what's better, but I just don't think it's great.

The "deadly sin" of pride is arrogance, haughtiness, thinking of yourself as more important than others. It's not, like, being satisfied in your identity or accomplishments; that's contentment and it's definitely a virtue.

1,600 years of translation and linguistic drift (and probably not a little bit of puritanical nonsense) crossed some wires.

Also all of the "deadly sins" are made up bullcrap. Some of them are in the Bible, but some of them are just, like....some guy's opinion. Seriously, sadness was one at one point, so clearly he had never read the book of Lamentations.

I actually think that podcasts are a success story in that respect. 2015-2020 saw a lot of money getting thrown into the podcast space, and despite billions of dollars going into it and a bunch of exclusivity deals, nobody was actually able to take any real market dominance.

Now, that might've been because podcasts are kind of tied to platforms inherently (and without deciding the iPhone vs Android debate you can't decide the Apple Podcasts vs YouTube debate), but that's buoyed by the fact that the platform is essentially nothing more than the protocol, and it was given a solid decade to become what it is today without a ton of meddling.

So, yeah. Billions of dollars went in, everyone decided they couldn't make any real money there, and so the big companies left the market. The fact that Rogan isn't exclusive to Spotify anymore is just the latest example. Corporations lost. Podcasting won.

I'm not entirely sure that counts. Last I heard, their "top x" lists were just aggregates of other storefronts' "top x" lists.

Industry publications regularly have access to metrics that storefronts don't display, though. I'm willing to believe that they have data supporting this, but it's weird that it's not being shown anywhere.

Mm, fair point. I was also grandfathered in. But if I recall correctly, the free stuff is still pretty great.

In fairness, while most undocumented immigrants aren't parasitic, he happens to be talking about the one that is.

"aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law."

From a Supreme Court decision in 1952: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep345/usrep345206/usrep345206.pdf

It had long precedent and has been upheld since: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8-7-2/ALDE_00001262/

Now, the question about whether or not they're constituents could probably be debated, since they can't vote. But if a person who didn't vote for an official is still a constituent, then a person who couldn't vote for an official is as well.

Indeed. YouTube and Apple are far more dominant than Spotify.

Apple and YouTube are way more dominant in the podcast market than Spotify is, though neither of them show Meidas above Rogan either, so I don't know where these numbers are coming from.

Pocket Casts is my favorite, but AP is a great option that I used for quite a while.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I've been in that position a few times, actually; though usually it's after I put it on a todo list. I was planning to switch to Linux, then Microsoft made Windows intolerable to use. I was wanting to buy a new laptop, then Tr*mp started a trade war. I had "back up my Amazon ebooks" on a todo for several months, and then this news comes out.

It's like all of these companies and groups have decided to push me into doing stuff I wanted to do anyway.

Calibre is open-source: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre

So if it had telemetry, we would have heard about it.

That's what I'm looking into, too. I'm finding info about a Branch Delay, a WinterBreak, and a LanguageBreak. I don't know which one to try.