phtrivier

The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news".

With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...

This weirdly feels a lot like my own "subscription" tab.

It almost seems like we need a system where people you trust recommend interesting content, as opposed to algos thzt shove content which will produced anger / engagement / more ads revenue.

Who would have though ?

In the XXIst century in France, it sure does at the moment. We'll see.

Yes, that's how it works in science fiction show for teenagers from the 60s.

It's painfully hard to compare that to the real world.

But at least, sci fi viewers can graduate to more serious shows with increasingly complex narratives (B5, bsg, I hear good things about the expense, etc...) then discover the really dystopian shit when they realize they live in it - or decide to become tech entrepreneur to get rich building the dystopia themselves.

But you can't blame the storytellers from trying to tell a better story than the news...

May the kid inside you, who once believed in the "good folks", rear up his metaphorical heads once in a while.

Is there a single company that "owns" that ?

Obligatory "WiP" article : https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

In short, yes, France was able to build a lot of nuclear in the 80s, but the plans were made in the 70s and, to some extend, reused design and research from the 60s.

Mostly, they benefited from pre-Tchernobyl regulations, and a standardized design that would not be accepted anywhere in the world today if you started from scratch.

After a long hiatus, we sort of managed to build an over engineered post-Fukushima reactor (EPR) in about 20 years, and hopefully learnt lessons so that the next version of the new thing (EPR2) is less of a disaster - but still, you're talking about a decade and a half from presidential ink on paper to electron in the grid if everything goes well - and nuclear is one of those industries where things never go well. Mesmer plan is the exception, not the rule (except if you're Chinese, of course...)

Two observation:

1. This must be a nightmare to plan the maintenance of a nuclear-heavy grid (as we have in France.) Any nuclear project must be planned 20 years, including just "keeping" what you built 50 years ago. So, assuming they're not stupid and are reading the changes in batteries and PV, anyone working on that knows that, potentially, during the 8th year of a 10-year construction plan, your all plan will have become obsolete.

But, if, for some reason, the evolution is not skyrocketing, and if you _don't_ plan on maintaining / replacing your plans (assuming that "batteries and EV will just solve it"), then you take the risk of, well... not having enough electricity.

So I suppose it's a trade-off between "the risk of have too expensive nuclear capacity", "the risk of loosing face and shutting down a plant construction because it's useless", and "the risk of not having electricity".

I suppose the calculation is that, if you do the first one (as we're doing, as far as I can tell), you end up with sunk cost, but your reactors are there, and you can always find something to do with it...

2. Is there an "Ormouz of solar" scenario ? What would be a SPOF in the solar + battery rollout that could bring the solarpunk world to a halt ? Obviously it's less at risk because, once the PVs and batteries are out of chinese factories, they will produce electricity no matter who rules in Beijing ; but, appart from Xi (who already controls pretty much everything we consume, at this point), is any particular country / corporation gaining leverage if the whole world goes full PV+B ?

Yes. But I'm slightly less worried about deliberate mishaps (which tends to leave trace or organisation) than pure mistakes (which go unnoticed, except for malicious actors who are better at hiding their trace.)

Hanlon's razor, etc...

But then, let's deal with the elephant in the thread : are Estonians trusting their infrastructure enough to be sure that élections won't be tampered by a particular neighboring country with well-known skills in cyber security ?

I've been an overseer at election booths several times. I kept a good look at the transparent ballot box, along with complete strangers. In the end, once, I may even have inadvertently recognized my envelope and bulletin during the opening and counting - because we where very very few people to choose that candidate in my polling station :D And I was lucky enough to follow the president of the polling station to the town hall where armies of public servant where doing the addition, and I checked the CSV on next Monday, etc, etc...

Nope. Vote tallying is public with random overseers, in transparent boxes watched by a room of people from diverse opinions, with random inspections - precisely because we DO NOT trust the system or the people who count the vote.

Which has always been my biggest beef about digital vote. I'm all trusting the people writing voting software to do their best, actually. Being a Software engineer myself, I'm more concerned about bugs and hacks than deliberate tampering by the government. Especially in an age where AI agents can access pretty much anything ever connected to an electric plug...

So there is a tool that remembers who you voted for. That's great to convince your bully that you actually did what they told you.

However, how do you know you're one of the X votes displayed in the final tally ?

Exactly, it means someone you could prove to someone else how you voted, which is the sine qua non condition for creating a vote economy. That's actually the main reason behind trying to keep the vote secret, much more than threats of intimidation for opposing parties voters, etc...

I know the answer is "you don't", but suppose I vote vote electronically for candidate A. In the end, the candidate loses with 764 votes. How do I convince myself that my vote was counted in the 764 votes, and that it was not a randomly chosen number (with a RNG skewed around "plausible" scores) ?

A though for the people doing the "boring" engineering at Tesla (like, you know, enhancing the range of the vehicles, improving security, making FSD closer to reality, etc...), who used to get some light (remember "battery day" ?), and are now on the backbench while the sycophants gets the budget for vanity projects like this. At least, at Tesla, the sycophants are _smart_ and pull out cool demos. Not the case in every "new clothes" kingdom.

At this point, a status bar color when gh is down would be enough.

Ok, I have to ask : is there a way to get a "cartridge" to insert into the theranos machine ?

I would love to have the machine "function" up to a point (except, actually doing the analysis results in a "NotImplementedException" of some kind.à

Also, it leads to significant lower purchase power, which may indirectly decrease profits, at some point ? ("Firing your customers" works up to a point)

Out of curiosity, what was the timeline ? Cause I'm afraid that, when you mentioned "I don't know what the other farriers" did, the answer may be "they were sent to the front and died by the 1000s".

Which starts to be my fear for the real "solution" to job displacement by AIs : people will just be sent to some far away conflict where they will transition to a career in "daffodil fertilization" :/

I meant this one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26446278/

Going through "Here comes the sun" by Bill McKibben - slightly disappointed / surprised, as the book is very much a pamphlet / manifesto in favor of a single idea (that I could paraphrase as "solar is good, solar is _now_ cheap, it's so cheap that it's very cheap, and so good that's it's very good, and we should build more cause it's cheap and good, and if you disagree you're a fossil fuel shill astroturfer and all the land and materials problems are not really problems, and oh, did I mentionned it's cheap and good ?") To which I'll say, _fair enough_, but I was hoping for a slightly more nuanced view of the topic.

Also started "Sutskever's list" by Richard Heimann, which goes into the history of the current AI paradigm "one paper at a time". It's written for a curious audience : people who can vaguely understand the concepts, but not go into details. That means that I kinda "get" some chapters because I already read about the topics, and I'm completely stumped by some. But the "insider baseball" history is illuminating sometimes.

Just out of curiousity : the recent movie adaptation had a huuuge success in France two years ago (deservedly so, in my opinion), did that cross the Atlantic ?

Meta: As plenty of commenters have pointed out, this kind of statements (and similar ones like "PV electricity is the cheapest one", etc...) are entirely true _with some attached caveats_.

For example, an EV is both undoubtably cheaper to operate than a gas powered car ; and infinitely more expensive to operate if you can't afford to buy one in the first place.

Similarly, the price of kWh of PV-generated electricity is both lower than pretty much everything else as this point ; and, basically infinite when the sun is down and your 4h battery has run out.

Is there a proper math concept to fairly express those things ? "Mean", "Average" or "Median" fall short. Mean with very very large error bars ? "Average with substitution" ?

In the end, I can't wait for all those circumvoltions to be irrelevant (when EVs are just cheap to buy too, and electricity has enough storage to bake it into the price, etc...)

There's a lot of room between "no consequence for anyone" and "Trump gets to the Hague because of that".

If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.

Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.

From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)

The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.

I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.

It's a known problem, for which we've also had a pretty robust workaround since Montesquieu : distribute separate part of power to _many_ craving people who disagree and can lock each other's.

I'm all for adding a branch that would be primarily picked at random (and I'm all for having a branch that is only recruited among peers of expertise, with fréquent rotation as a way to limit the risk of connivence, etc...)

Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?

I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power".

I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.

How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?)

Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D

In case the author reads this : I suspect I agree with some of the ideas (or at least they're though provoking), but the writing does not help.

The comma count is a hint ;)

(I had to parse a few paragraphs several times to get the idea.)