jokteur

Yes, but Spotify increasly does nothing against AI generated music that gets inserted into playlists, auto recommendation feature, ...

So now, artists are competing against AI generated music, that is often manipulated to take listening spots away from actual artists.

Many of the dams in Switzerland have been built before the fifties and sixties, when environmental concerns were much lower. While most of the dams have been built high up in the mountains, a few villages have been buried by the dams.

Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.

We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.

We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.

Funny thing you mention that.

We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).

French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.

But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.

The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.

Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.

We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.

High speed travel in Europe is quite affordable. A 3h train trip (~360 miles, like the distance between Toronto and Montreal) costs about 40€ in Italy or in France if you buy in advance.

Yes, a 1MW solar plant point has about half the radius as a 1000MW hydroelectric plant point.

I would love to be able to use Rust in my professional project. Unfortunately, I am doing high performance scientific computing. Rust doesn't even come close to offer any good alternative to cross-plateform, cross-device (CPU/GPU) libraries such as OpenMP Target, Kokkos, SYCL, ... I believe we need Nvidia/AMD to take Rust seriously (I'm not sure it is even possible without unsafe everywhere) to be able to offer good libraries.

In my world, using C++ is the modern language, because most project are stuck with Fortran.

I'm getting symmetric 10 Gbps for 49CHF (~54$) per month in Switzerland, and this is one of the most expensive countries in the world.

Mathematica is still unparalleled in computer algebra. Yes, you can do computer algebra with Matlab or sympy, but I know a few theoreticians who use Mathematica to derive complicated equations.

I agree with you.

The thing is, compared to some of the scientific codes out there, GPU are quite recent. Sometimes, slapping OpenMP pragma on the code is not sufficient to take advantage of accelerators, and thus you would need a significant rewrite.

But rewriting a scientific code is a daunting task. Often you have a code where there have been two decades of PhD and Postdocs fine tuning the scientific code, and the numerical schemes in the code do not correspond to the original article anymore. Nobody knows anymore exactly how the code works, and rewriting the code would require that the rewrite matches all the features of the original code (and reproduces the same results). It is basically an impossible task, especially when the labs don't have the resources to hire software engineers.

In practice, nobody wants to rewrite scientific codes for GPU (and sometimes, the problem is fundamentally incompatible with GPU architecture). So as a compensation, they slap some OpenMP pragmas on some parts of the code, hope for the best, and anyways Nvidia clusters are more common than AMD (at least in the scientific world), so OpenMP barely compiling for AMD is not a problem.

This means that legacy scientific codes are pretty much stuck with the CPUs. And in the scientific world, Fortran for HPC CPUs is still the language of choice.

It's because all these jobs using Fortran are scientific research projects. It is not explicitly asked, but if you are doing high performance computing, chances are you will be using Fortran. Scientific codes live for decades.

For example, I'm using a code that has been started in 1981. It is still very relevant and performant. Of course I wish I could use C++ or even Rust, but the fact is that (high performance) numerical computing is first class citizen in Fortran, which is not the case in C++ or Rust. I wish however that the tooling around Fortran wasn't stuck in the nineties.

I was curious about `soup`, clicking on it, the author states:

soup is a programming language I've been working on for a few years that is designed to make it easier for the programmer to write fast, robust programs with no bugs. Availability I'm sorry to say soup is not yet available for general use.

Now I am curious what this is.

In the french dub, they say jigowatt.

Sorry but you misread the report. They are saying that typical eco-calculator usually do not take into account the emissions from construction and maintenance. You can see on the document that on table 2, emissions of construction is taken into account. It is the point of the report. So my point about carbon emission stands. You can build miles of high-speed rail and offset the emissions caused by construction compared to the same route in airplane in a few months.

Also, the California is the most expensive high speed rail project in the world. The US simply does not have the expertise anymore to build effienctly big infrastructure project. In comparison, Spain is building highspeed rail for 17.7m€ per km (also Spain has a lot of mountains), while the rest of European countries build at 45.5m€ per km. This makes this 700km line more like 12.4 billions € to 31.9 billions €. So 50 to 89 years worth of plane tickets.

I agree, still expensive, but then by the same logic you should stop investing in highway expansion, because they are super expensive and always prove ineffective at reducing congestion. The US has proven in the past they are able to make big projects. Why admit defeat and try to keep the status quo?

Exactly the same thing with trains. I live in Switzerland, and they are adapting the capacity of the trains route by route, and to the time of the day.

The train I take every day to work has 12 cars in rush hour, and 4 cars off-peak, sometime 6 cars in the middle of the day, or 10 cars just after rush hour. They put extra trains in rush hour, have trains in standby is case of a breakdown of other trains, and they even introduce special trains dedicated for events (football games, big concerts, sports event). How is this "not flexible" ?

The only valid point is that the US forgot how to efficiently build huge infrastructure projects. But it is not an impossible thing to solve. Sent some experts to France, Spain and ask them how to manage high-speed project within reasonable costs. France is building the Grand Paris Express (a lot of tunneling, more than 200km of tracks) for a reasonable cost, and is now reusing tunnel boring machines to build another project in Toulouse.

This study [1] cites a 80 to 280 tCO2 per km of new high speed track laid (it includes bridges, tunnels, ...). Lets lay 700km of new high speed tracks (Orlando to Atlanta). So 700km of high speed track is 56'000 tCO2 to 196'000 tCO2.

Orlando to Atlanta will have sold more than airplane 310'000 seats in December 2023. At 250g per km per passenger, we get to 54'250 tCO2 emitted on this route alone in December. You can see that laying 700km of high-speed tracks that will last more than 30 years before renovation will emit as much as one to four months of flight emissions on the busiest US airplane route.

You can argue about the specifics of this back of the envelope calculation, but flying emit orders of magnitude more tCO2 than any form of transport (on short haul) that even building a whole new high-speed rail route is worth it after a few years of exploitation. Obviously you are not going to convert 100% of passengers to rail, especially in the beginning with spotty transport coverage, but focusing on busy airplane routes (< 1000km) and building high-speed rail is worth it in the medium-long term.

[1] https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/carbon_footprint_of_railway_infrastr...

I'm sorry, but rail is the lowest form carbon footprint you can find, if you exclude biking and walking.

Also, boarding a train is so much more comfortable and convenient than boarding a plane (no security check, at least in Europe, wide seats, no emergency tutorial, ...). Also the train drops me right in the city center.

I would argue that up to 500 km of distance, high speed train is the best option, then it becomes debatable.

I love these maps. Here is one from Switzerland: https://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/, just a tad bit busier than the US

Because banks have financial incentives in keeping your transactions secure, and even then errors happen all the freaking time.

Government do not have this incentive, and how do you recover from errors once malicious actors have gained power ?

I recently broke the screen of my fairphone. I went to the official website, ordered a genuine screen for 70$, it came by mail two days later. They sent me an email showing how to do the repair, it took me about 10 minutes to replace it with only a screwdriver. Note: the phone is water resistant.

My point is, repairable phones are totally feasible, if fairphone can deliver this service, why couldn't Apple ? (I know, because of profits). This fairphone may not be as sexy as an iPhone Pro, but it is still a very capable device. With the amount of R&D cash that Apple has, they could make a sexy repairable high end phone, but it is not in their interest.

You are underestimating how much trains and public transportation can do. Public transportation is abyssimal in the US, so I get why you think that it may not solve many problems.

If you take a look at Switzerland which did public transportation right, you will see that even in low densities areas, it is very much possible to get around by public transport. The canton of Graubünden (area: 7105.44 km2, density: 28/km2) has more train lines and bus lines than the city of Atlanta (area: 353.04 km2, density: 771.3/km2). Switzerland has a lot of tiny villages, evenly spread around. We don't have crazy dense cities, and certainly not large cities.

While public transport does not solve every trip and every commute, it is a solution for a significant percentage of the population. You can get to remote areas for hiking, leisure, ... You can find bus lines that connect one village of 30 people to another village of 100 people. They may not be frequent (4x a day), but they allow for tourist to go hike to remote areas, visit nice places, ... Also, public transit is clean here and very safe.

For some numbers: a decent amount of people commute by public transport (up to 50% in certain areas), and an even larger percentage of people use public transport for leisure activities (>70%).

In an ideal world, you would have decent public transit inside cities and around, pedestrian friendly cities, bike sharing, and fery vew (robo)taxis in dense areas. This makes the cities confortable to live in (less noise and polution). Also, intercity transit is very important (by train, highspeed train or plane). Then, in rural areas you would have robotaxis that can get you anywhere you want. The remaining vehicles on the road should be work related vehicles.

I like the idea of Rust, the tooling, the package manager (far more better that what you can find in C++).

What you are saying is true: I've been writing high performance scientific code and desktop gui apps. I would love to use Rust for my projects, but it just doesn't cut it. The libraries I am using are very mature in C++, but the libraries in Rust to accomplish the same thing are still too immature to consider in my projects.

It's 3860chf in Switzerland, valid for any public transport, even boats. However, they are talking raising the price once again, and Switzerland is not interested in making this cheaper.

But this is becaude ASIOF was in the training dataset. Chatgpt wouldn't be able to say anything about this book if it wasn't in his dataset, and you wouldn't be able to have enough tokens to present the whole book to chatgpt.

Given the type of trains that are passing (it seems no IC/IR), along with their precise timing and direction, I'm sure it is easy to figure out where exactly you are living.

And of course, taking it to the extreme, people simply will stop creating works. Or, some folks may not be able to afford to create works.

Being broke has never prevented artists from making great art. In fact, historically and today, the majority of artists have never been fairly compensated for their work, even with insane copyright laws. I do believe that artists should be correctly compensated for their work if they wish it, like any other work, but copyright laws (even if introduced as a way to protect artists) have been transformed into something that doesn't protect the artists, but the copyright holders (which are most of the time record labels and big companies).

Here is the point of view from musical artists:

You have two major scenarios: - you are a musician which does not produce original music. Then you make your money with gig playing mostly (weddings, venues, orchestras, ...). Copyright law is not siding with these musicians, and these musicians don't care about piracy. - you are a composer which produces original music. Here again, copyright law doesn't help, artists are trapped to distribute their music through either record labels or popular streaming services which don't care about their artists (spotify will pay artists 0.004$ per stream).

Often, musicians will be doing both (composing and playing at gigs). But most of the money to be made is in gigs, and maybe a fan base that will buy your CDs and come to your concerts. Distributing your music on popular streaming services is just a way to grow your own fan base, not to make money. So piracy can even help here by making the music even more accessible.

What I want to say is that from the point of view of musicians, copyright law doesn't help. Sometimes it even works against you: if you are a classical musician and putting some public domain music (that you played yourself) on youtube, you will be inevitably copystriked by some random record label that doesn't give a shit about you and there is nothing you can do. Copyright law also prevents musicians to rearrange popular music, to make transformative art unless you pay some fees. You can't play music from somebody even if the author has been dead for 50 years. And these fees won't probably go to the other musician you are arranging from, but to the copyright holder (which will be a record label or big company).

I've seen also people arguing that we should never ever build nuclear fission again because it is "bad".

What I want to say is that bad faith arguments will always exist, and calling this a breakthrough won't significantly increase the number of people using bad faith arguments, because they would just find another excuse instead of the fusion one.

I see people reacting left and right saying "yeah, but the lasers used 300MJ" like a gotcha.

At the press conference, they were pretty clear about what they achieved. They stated multiple times that it was the laser energy in, and not the wall plug energy. Also they also said that the lasers weren't designed to be efficient in the first place, because they want to maximize scientific output. And they were pretty clear that there are many many steps required until we have fusion energy.

It is a significant milestone, and people are trying to downplay that by stating fusion will never be feasible anyways, and this is why we shouldn't be excited.