turdas
@turdas@suppo.fi
- Comment on Truth is way more fucked up than fiction 2 days ago:
Clicked on link expecting a Tom Clancy book. Was severely disappointed.
- Comment on Perfection 5 days ago:
This could literally be a Dwarf Fortress randomly generated inscription.
- Comment on Where do I even start? 5 days ago:
Thank you Mr ChatGPT
- Comment on How Old We're You when You Learned the Word, "Fascist"? 5 days ago:
The fact that there’s textbook fascists in the US government and many people I know seem to still be in denial. Mostly non-US people, in case that changes the equation.
- Comment on How Old We're You when You Learned the Word, "Fascist"? 6 days ago:
Maybe like 13. However it wasn’t until my twenties until I learnt what it actually means, and I’m convinced most of the general populace never learn that.
- Comment on Breakthrough gel can regenerate tooth enamel within weeks 1 week ago:
The teeth regrowth thing was only two years ago.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
Without the Steam Deck there’d be 27% fewer Linux users. So while that would indeed mean Linux wouldn’t yet be 3% of the total Steam userbase, I think you will find that 27% is not the majority.
GamingOnLinux aggregates this data in a nicer way and as you can see there, the total Linux market share has gone from <1% five years ago to the 3% it is now. If that increase was mainly thanks to the Steam Deck, it would have to make up more like 75% of the Linux userbase rather than only 27%.
Instead, as others have pointed out, SteamOS’s share has actually gone down rather than up, which is a natural consequence of the Steam Deck being relatively old now so fewer are being sold.
- Comment on [UnReal World] has been in continual development for 33 years, and its creator doesn't think he'll ever stop updating it: 'When I accomplish one feature, I always have two more waiting' 1 week ago:
I think I first played this in like 2005 or something. I was underage and didn’t have banking credentials yet, so I bought the licence by mailing a letter full of coins to the author. Back then a lifetime licence was a few dozen euros, but I bought the major version licence for like 15€. That version received updates for a couple of years, from what I remember. I never bought the lifetime licence, but re-bought a major version licence twice and then bought the game again when it launched on Steam. In the end buying the lifetime licence would’ve been cheaper, heh, but I don’t mind supporting the developers.
I still keep coming back to it every few years. There are other games in the same genre or very adjacent to it that are better as games – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the first to come to mind – but there are some things about URW that no other game really does, notably the whole realistic iron age survival thing (it’s a different genre altogether with less nuanced survival gameplay, but another iron age favourite of mine is Vintage Story, which is basically a Minecraft mod spun off into its own game).
The animal AI in particular is really good. The way you hunt in this game is a pretty good representation of cursorial hunting, which is basically just running after the animals until they tire – something humans are good at thanks to bipedalism. You only rarely manage to take down larger animal like elks (moose in American; the game calls them by their European name) in one strike, which means that you have to wound them and then jog after them until they collapse from exhaustion and blood loss. Or you can dig trap pits in chokepoints and corral them into them, another real hunting strategy used in iron age Finland. The tracking in the game is also very involved, as the animals will try to lose you by moving erratically.
Damn, now I kind of want to go back and play the game again.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
“Freedesktop SDK” means the user is running Steam via Flatpak. They could be on any distro.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
“SteamOS Holo” 64 bit is the Steam Deck.
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 1 week ago:
Most solar installations, like the one in the picture, don’t rotate or only rotate on one axis.
There’s some actual research into how different crops react when grow between rows of solar panels. Vertically mounted solar panels are especially suited to this because you can drive between them on a harvesting machine easily. Sadly I don’t have any links to give off the top of my head.
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 1 week ago:
Some plants actually grow better in the shade under solar panels than in direct sunlight. Of course it will depend on local climate too.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
That’s not true. You can see on Steam Hardware Survey what OS people are running, and SteamOS only makes up 27% of Linux users on Steam, so the vast majority are on regular PCs.
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 weeks ago:
One is that nuclear plants are, among other stuff, massive heat engines. Because all the steel, tubes and whatever expands when it is heated up, switching it on and off stresses the material. This can be improved on by design but such design has extra costs and has its limits.
Yeah, and this is something that has been improved on for modern reactor designs precisely so that they can operate in load-following mode. There’s essentially no impact on operational lifespan (typically 60 years for modern reactors), because the impact has already been factored into the operational lifespan.
The second is that when you turn down your plant to half the output, you spend essentially the same money to get half the result. Which means you have just doubled the cost per kilowatt hour. And this with the background that nuclear is not any more cost-competitive to begin with.
This is mostly an opportunity cost thing. The actual running costs, e.g. the fuel, make up a negligible part of the €/MWh of nuclear. Most of the cost comes from the construction of the plant, which should be publicly subsidized the same as other clean energy is. Lack of subsidies and other public support is one of the main reasons nuclear is relatively expensive, though it is still the cheapest ecological method for meeting base load that we have.
In the result, a fleet of wind power plants plus battery or hydro storage is cheaper than such a nuclear plant.
The thing about battery storage is that it doesn’t exist yet and may never exist in an economical way. Hydro power and storage, on the other hand, is absolutely devastating for ecosystems, clean though it may be in terms of carbon emissions. It would be preferable if hydro dams did not exist. Now of course you could build a hydro storage system in a completely artificial pair of reservoirs, but that will be incredibly expensive compared to natural reservoirs (read: flooded valleys) so I am skeptical that it would be feasible at scale.
- Comment on Big Nuclear’s Big Mistake - Linear No-Threshold 2 weeks ago:
No one is suggesting to get sloppy with nuclear material or advocating for some bizarre Fallout-style radium cola society. What I am advocating for is a world where people know that getting a chest X-ray or eating a mushroom in Eastern Europe does not increase their risk of cancer from radiation exposure.
For example, maybe you’ve forgotten, but the radiation psychosis when Fukushima happened was insane. We had loads of people in Europe, which is just about as far away from Fukushima as you can get, poring over those ocean radiation heatmaps for years – when in reality Fukushima released so little radiation that not even the people in Fukushima were at any real risk. This is a direct consequence of unscientific, alarmist policies and messaging poisoning public perception.
People should not be made afraid of radiation, because them “respecting it” gives them absolutely no benefit. There isn’t really nothing anyone can do in their daily lives to meaningfully avoid it regardless of how aware they are of it.
This is why it is an organizational responsibility of society to create an environment where people can live their lives without ever thinking about radiation hazards – which is what we have successfully done. Scaremongering contributes nothing to that except give people mental health issues and cause them to vote for insane policies that shut down clean, carbon-free nuclear plants in order to replace them with coal and LNG (which, ironically, contribute more to radiation hazards than nuclear does).
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 weeks ago:
In comparison, nuclear has quite constant generation, but demand varies more strongly compared to it. This is why in reality it needs coal in addition, to adjust for deman
In theory, one could adjust a nuclear power plant by switching it on and off once in the morning and once in the evening, and sometimes in winter. But that “filling up of the mix” with nuclear would just not be economical - nuclear is already by far the most expensive energy source and one can better spend the money by installing battery storage and improving the grid.
“Modern” (newer than the 90s) nuclear plants can do much more granular load following than that, and it’s what they already do in France and Germany: oecd-nea.org/…/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf (see figure 2 for an example from Germany). Or it’s what they would be doing in Germany if they hadn’t been shut down, heh.
- Comment on Big Nuclear’s Big Mistake - Linear No-Threshold 2 weeks ago:
That’s not the message here at all. The message is that this overly cautious policy contributes to the public’s poor understanding of the risks of radiation, which in turn causes harm e.g. in the form of overreactions when things go wrong (see the section from 20:50 onwards). For example, with the benefit of hindsight, evacuating Fukushima likely did much more harm than good, and the actual health effects of Chernobyl are to this date widely grossly overestimated.
Honestly OP this is such a weird message to be pushing. Are you heavily invested in nuclear or something?
What is so weird about pro-nuclear messaging on a green energy forum? Dispelling myths about nuclear is just as important as dispelling myths about renewables. And while I am not monetarily invested in nuclear, I policy-wise I am heavily invested – like anyone who cares about sustainability should be.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 7 comments
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. The 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions
No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account decommissioning of a nuclear plant. See table 1 on page 3.
The links I added above about France tell another story.
The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.
On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
That’s what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste – 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is… well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 weeks ago:
I mean, the number of logical qubits has gone from basically zero not too long ago to what it is now. The whole error correction thing has really only taken off in the past ~5 years. That Microsoft computer you mentioned that got 4 logical qubits out of 30 physical qubits represents a 3-fold increase over the apparently previous best of 12 logical qubits to 288 physical ones (published earlier the same year), which undoubtedly was a big improvement over whatever they had before.
And then the question is FOR WHAT? Dead people cant make use of quantum computers and dead people is what we will be if we dont figure out solutions to some much more imminent, catastrophic problems in the next 10 years.
Strange thing to say. There’s enough people on the planet to work on more than one problem at a time. Useful quantum computing will probably help solve many problems in the future too.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 weeks ago:
Even if it’s 8 physical qubits to 1 logical qubit, 6100 qubits would get you 762 logical cubits.
All I’m saying is that the technology seems to be on a trajectory of the number of qubits improving by an order of magnitude every few years, and as such it’s plausible that in another 5-10 years it could have the necessary thousands of logical qubits to start doing useful computations. Mere 5 years ago the most physical qubits in a quantum computer was still measured in the tens rather than the hundreds, and 10 years ago I’m pretty sure they hadn’t even broken ten.
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
Nuclear’s stagnation has more to do with short-sighted financial incentives and public backlash from people acting as either useful idiots or paid shills of the fossil fuel lobby than anything else.
Thankfully the world is gradually realizing this mistake and investment in nuclear is improving again.
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
Nuclear is statistically either the cheapest or the second-cheapest form of production in my home country of Finland, and yes that statistic does take into account the construction costs of our massive 1.6 GW reactor that was finished 13 years behind schedule and ran several billion euros over budget becoming the 8th largest construction project ever.
In terms of cleanness it is also incredibly clean. Even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima (the latter of which leaked barely anything anyway), nuclear has emitted orders of magnitude less radiation than coal. Indeed even thinking that radiation has anything to do with nuclear’s emissions betrays your lack of understanding of the topic – the main emissions concern are the construction and fuel extraction emissions, not because they’re radiological hazards but because they’re not free in terms of carbon emissions. Accounting for those it’s still pretty much the cleanest energy we have though.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 weeks ago:
We can only hope that Bitcoin gets pwned by quantum computers. It would be absolutely glorious.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 weeks ago:
There was a paper recently about a stable 6100-qubit system, so the trajectory is plausible. If 1399 qubits is needed for 2048-bit Shor’s, this would already meet that by a wide margin – though obviously this is a research system that AFAIK cannot do actual computations.
- Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power 2 weeks ago:
Yeah who the fuck cares about limitless free clean power.
- Comment on Fictional 2 weeks ago:
Nature doesn’t care about anything. It is not a conscious thing. The size of the Earth, however, is a natural phenomenon, just like the speed of light. It just isn’t a universal constant, relatively unchanging though it may be.
A multiplier is obviously going to be necessary whatever the base measure, because there’s no universal constant that happens to be of a useful, human scale. Or I guess you could use something like the wavelength of the hydrogen line – about 21.1 cm, a fairly useful length – but that isn’t really inherently a special wavelength, it just happens to be useful in radio astronomy.
- Comment on Fictional 2 weeks ago:
True, but it was the 18th century. They could measure earthly things well enough, not so much photons.
It’s a bit of a shame it wasn’t redefined as 1/300,000,000th of the distance light travels in a second when it was redefined, but the redefinition was about 50 years too late for that to happen. A difference of 0.07% in the base unit of measurement used by all science would’ve been far too much for 2019, given all the precision measurements we do these days.