ttfkam

I think you might have skipped over the 10,000+ years of strict feudalism, a shrouded theocracy pushing their century-spanning agendas, aristocracy through landed gentry, and a drug-addled transportation cartel, all overseen by a massive, monopolistic megacorporation that controls all trade, economic affairs, and commerce throughout the universe. And everyone's a drug addict if they can afford it.

But sure, at least they didn't have AI! lol!

In other words, Warhammer 40K but without any aliens to trigger a massive xenophobic response that removed all warlike guardrails.

Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system.

Visually impaired people use smartphones too. If the app isn't supporting the accessibility features of the platform, it should still be held liable under the ADA.

(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)

But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.

If the Executive Branch doesn't care about the Constitution and inconvenient laws when directing the law enforcement agencies under its control, Congress doesn't hold the executive to account by either withholding funds or threatening impeachment, and the SCOTUS majority doesn't try to rein in these acts while seeming to lack the ability to enforce its own decisions, the words printed on the Constitution are just useless ink.

Elections have consequences, and we're all paying them. Some paying a lot more than others.

Day by day it feels less and less like regular data modeling and more like a debate with Jordan Peterson where you argue for ten hours what a "name" is.

Eventually you end up having to make choices and deal with the consequences. Otherwise Jordan Peterson would have you chasing your tail for days about what a "choice" is, and nothing would ever get done.

tl;dr: just make your best guess and always include an extra "notes" column where things can get leaky.

You've certainly demonstrated something, though likely not what you intended.

Excluding conversations about MongoDB compatibility, PG16 added bidirectional replication for multiple writers and there are Postgres-compatible options out there for a distributed database including Citus, EDB Postgres Distributed, Yugabyte, CockroachDB, Aurora Limitless, etc.

The choices require some nuance to figure out a best fit, but then again so does any MongoDB installation (despite the marketing hype to the contrary as there are no free lunches).

You might be surprised how far most folks can typically scale with just read replica(s) on a reasonably sized writer. Add in bidirectional replication for multiple writers, and you can go even further. Beyond that, even vanilla Postgres can do it, but you'll need to do some combinations of partitioning and foreign tables.

Yes, of course, nothing is 100%. But vaccines reduce both the severity and duration of illness, thereby reducing the risk and severity of brain damage.

And don't get me started on measles.

Exactly, as seen with Threlte as a counterpoint.

https://threlte.xyz/

And JSX is not needed either, as seen with Threlte.

https://threlte.xyz/

When all you know is React, everything gets viewed through that limited lens.

His supporters wouldn't accept the results even if that came to pass. Remember, these are folks who honestly believe to this day that US tariffs are paid by other countries.

You cannot convince someone of anything if their identity is defined by it being wrong.

Schrödinger's antivaxer:

Did mass brain damage lead to avoiding vaccines or did avoiding vaccines lead to the mass brain damage?

I don't see how one can possibly do that analysis.

Classic argument from ignorance fallacy. Because YOU cannot see how it could be done, no one has ever figured out how it could be done.

Not only was a design ready to be built, it was built. Went online 39 years ago. Produced 1.2GWe at peak. Not only produced power on its own but reprocessed spent fuel from other nuclear reactors.

Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.

It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

Okay, I stand corrected. Now my question to you is how are you generating all these terabytes over the internet? And would data transfer costs really be a significant portion of your bill at that scale regardless of cloud provider? Not video transcoding resources, AI capacity, GPU capacity, etc.?

You're talking about the equivalent of completely saturating a gigabit Internet connection for over two hours per terabyte. A high def video stream from Netflix is only about 5 megabits/sec. 4K is 15 megabits.

67+ simultaneous 4K streams for two hours. Or 200+ simultaneous high def streams. Or a metric fuck-ton of web resources.

And you think you're going to find a provider that will allow you to send those kinds of volumes for $10/TB or less AND have relatively few outages AND stick around because their business model is sound?

By all means, point out who these unicorns are. Sign me up!

Defined good code TO YOU. You've failed to recognize there is no objective and universally recognized metric for good code within our industry. The closest thing we have to it is number of defects per line of code and how severe those defects are through CVEs. That's it.

You've mistaken your personal preferences and aesthetic sense for absolute truth.

The arrogance is astounding.

Nice straw man you've constructed and burnt down.

Those are NOT the safety arguments used within the industry. For example in a molten salt reactor, the fuel is already melted! If it gets too hot, thermal expansion moves the radioactive isotopes further away from one another, reducing reactivity. If heat increases past a certain point, plugs at the bottom of the tanks will melt, allowing gravity to dump the fuel into multiple separated storage vessels sized to prevent further activity.

You do not know what you're talking about. You've read a bunch of fear mongering, and bought it. Do you really believe the entire industry of nuclear engineers and support staff are just blindly YOLOing their way through their jobs, damn the consequences?

I swear, you sound like the power production equivalent of antivaxers convinced the medical industry is trying to poison all of us.

"Passive safety" doesn't mean "stuff shouldn't go wrong."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

It means "we're actively exploring everything that could go wrong and having the worst case scenarios fail to a safe state without requiring human intervention."

Those two positions couldn't be further apart.

And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.

It took a massive earthquake and tsunami to cause this, and the number of deaths/injuries due to the power plant is a rounding error compared to the earthquake and tsunami. Fukushima actually did most things right with the notable exception of not putting the backup generators on the roof. Had they put the generators on the roof, neither of us would have ever known the name "Fukushima".

When evaluating the Fukushima exclusion zone, compare it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. In that case, we still haven't cleaned up all the oil, and up to 450 miles from the initial spill. By comparison you want to transition to ammonia as a fuel source, which you correctly note is easier to store long term than molecular hydrogen and far more energy dense. Sounds like a good deal since molecular nitrogen is incredibly abundant as well.

Now I want you to imagine there's an ammonia spill in the magnitude of Exxon Valdez. Long term, the ammonia would almost certainly dissipate faster than crude oil, but the immediate acute toxicity would be far worse. You're killing basically all sea life in the area, the fumes would take out most birds and even quite a few people. If the spill were on land, it could severely compromise the ability to grow crops in the region for a long time. And that's not in the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami, but inattentiveness on the part of a single ship's crew.

The point being that large scale energy production and storage will NEVER be fuzzy and completely safe. The most common metric is deaths per unit of electricity. If a power source is small, even one death can be unforgivable. For massive amounts of power, statistics matter.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Note that the nuclear stats include both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This is notable since Chernobyl was a worst case scenario with a flawed design that has never existed in Western commercial reactors precisely because it was so unacceptably dangerous: no containment vessel, graphite moderation, graphite fuel rod tips, lack of education for its staff, a culture of secrecy, etc.

In the meantime, nuclear has provided obscenely large amounts of electricity since its inception. I'm all for expanding solar and wind, but folks really need to understand the real enemy is fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc. The single largest threat to our survival as a species isn't a multi-kilometer exclusion zone but a CO2-laden atmosphere that makes the entire equatorial zone uninhabitable, and that's precisely what we're looking at within a century.

The faster we can move off carbon-based fuels by any means necessary, the better. That includes nuclear. Excluding nuclear from the conversation out of hand is lunacy.

You still haven't cited where you got $90/TB from.

Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".

Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.

Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.

And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.

A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.

Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.

Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.

I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.

That's an indictment of ORMs more than an evaluation of database options.

When I say "it doesn't work" I mean that it doesn't allow you to write good code

But you skipped over how you are defining, "good code"? Without that part, "doesn't allow" cannot be evaluated in the context of Java or C++ or Python or Go or Rust.

Logic.

Georgism https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE

Why should I defend Rust? You haven't even defined "good code", which has eluded the best minds in the field for as long as the field has existed.

You are not a serious person.

"Functionally an atomic bomb"?

Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little about? Where did you get this nonsense?

Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.

Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get enough U-235 to clump together to do that without cancelling known basic laws of physics.

To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to spontaneously explode.

The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.

Because of nuclear.

By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.

Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.

Because of nuclear.

I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison.

Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

"…by being cleverer."

Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).

All of that when the author could have just said, "Georgism and a land value tax." At best this seems like a macroeconomic unit test for Georgism—which could be a good thing.