When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
I guess most users of Microsoft products are not the buyers of said products.
When these tools are getting forced upon you in the workplace, there's often not so much you can do. I can raise the quality issues in the 1-to-1 with my manager, but it won't have any effect.
"at all" is probably a stretch, but agreed that the number one factor for a mile is cost. users will accept a surprising level of trash, if the price is cheap.
engineers tend to think as engineers do, solving all problems with features, quality improvements, etc. but those all drive costs up, and don't always provide the return we think they will.
They have to destroy the copy either way for it to be fair use (according to Bartz v Anthropic). Cutting the bindings off is already the faster method to scan, and once you're required to pulp the original anyway, it becomes a no-brainer.
The relevant part of the ruling starts on page 27.
For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.
The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.
Fair use favors the destruction to avoid accidental surplus copying of the source material. It doesn't require it. If Anthropic put everything in a warehouse, they could keep it in the warehouse... but they couldn't do anything with them afterwards. They couldn't sell them as books or donate them as that would mean that it wasn't fair use and copyright infringement would have taken place once that additional copy was distributed again. At that point, fair use and economics both favor destroying the original.
If I make a DVD copy of an old VHS tape that I own, that's fair use format shifting. I can keep the VHS tape without issue. I cannot donate it to the library or put it out in a garage sale. When I got rid of my VHS player, I threw out VHS tapes too since they were of no use and only cluttered my shelf.
The judge ruled that format shifting was fair use. The fair use argument was enhanced because the original was destroyed. Hypothetically, one could do only the format shifting and keep the original - but the original could not be sold or donated or otherwise given away because then the format shifted copy would not be fair use.
I can burn DVD copies of my old VHS tapes. I cannot then give away the old VHS tapes or sell them at a garage sale. If I keep them, they're cluttering the shelf... so the VHS tape gets thrown away afterwards.
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one.
Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before
If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.
And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).
Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.
My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.
I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.
Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming
Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.
Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA
If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany
Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?
Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.
There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.
"Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.
Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.
This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.
OP (ViewTrick) is very well known in the online nuclear energy community. He is the moderator of the NuclearEnergy subreddit where he regularly bans people for saying positive things about nuclear energy.
I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.
I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers.
And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.
I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.
Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him.
He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.
I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.
I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage on top.
Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts. And nuclear power plant economics have profited in the past from making larger, more powerful reactor units.
But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.
And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.
Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.
If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars.
But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW.
With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things.
I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
Okay yeah as expected some people seem to be too fucking dumb, so I’ll expand a bit, in case someone bothers to read this later.
There are several different concepts being collapsed together here.
“Baseload is a myth” is mostly a semantic dodge. Base load is simply the minimum demand on the system. You do not need a special category of plant called a “baseload generator,” but you absolutely need enough firm capacity and energy to meet demand continuously, including when wind and solar are producing very little.
“The grid can handle peak load, therefore it can handle base load” confuses transmission capacity with generation availability. A grid capable of carrying 50 GW does not produce 50 GW. The engineering problem is having enough generation available at the exact hours when it is required.
And batteries do not make that problem disappear. They are excellent for frequency response, peak shaving and moving solar production from noon into the evening. But a battery is an energy buffer, not an energy source. During a prolonged shortage it can discharge only what was previously stored, and then it must recharge. Once the problem lasts several days rather than several hours, the amount of stored energy required becomes enormous.
Germany provides a very useful real-world example.
Germany began its nuclear phase-out under the 2000/2002 agreement, briefly extended reactor lifetimes in 2010, then accelerated the shutdown after Fukushima in 2011. The final three reactors closed in April 2023.
In 2008 German nuclear plants produced roughly 149 TWh of electricity. Germany subsequently built huge amounts of wind and solar, and those renewables have unquestionably displaced a great deal of fossil generation. But Germany eliminated its existing firm, low-carbon nuclear fleet while it was still burning very large quantities of coal and gas.
And then there is the problem Germans have an excellent word for: Dunkelflaute.
This is not some hypothetical edge case invented by nuclear advocates. Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur defines a Dunkelflaute as a period of at least 48 hours during which combined wind and PV generation remains below 15% of installed capacity. Low-wind periods are recurrent; analysis of four decades of German weather data found roughly a five-day period with average wind output below a 10% capacity factor in a typical year, with substantially longer events occurring less frequently.
Germany got a particularly good demonstration in November and December 2024. During two Dunkelflaute episodes, renewable production collapsed while demand remained high. Germany’s own Bundesnetzagentur says that almost the entire controllable power-plant fleet was brought into operation and that substantial electricity imports from neighbouring countries were required. The regulator concluded that Germany urgently needs additional controllable generation capacity for future Dunkelflauten.
That is basically the entire argument in one empirical example. When there is plenty of wind and sun, Germany can have extremely cheap electricity and sometimes negative wholesale prices. When the weather changes, the system suddenly needs the plants that supposedly became obsolete.
And the price swings are spectacular. Germany’s average day-ahead wholesale price in 2024 was about €79/MWh. During the November and December Dunkelflauten it exceeded €300/MWh for dozens of hours and reached approximately €936/MWh at the peak. The Bundesnetzagentur investigated whether those prices resulted from market manipulation and found no such explanation; the underlying condition was very low renewable production, high demand, extensive use of controllable thermal generation and limited remaining dispatchable capacity.
At the retail level Germany also remains one of Europe’s most expensive electricity markets. In the second half of 2025 a typical German household consuming 2,500–5,000 kWh paid €0.3869/kWh, compared with an EU average of €0.2896/kWh—about 34% more. Germany had the second-highest household electricity price in the EU after Ireland.
Those retail prices cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the nuclear phase-out or to renewables: taxes, levies, network costs, fuel prices and the consequences of the European gas crisis all matter. But neither can anyone point to Germany as evidence that a wind-and-solar-heavy system has somehow made firm generation economically irrelevant. Its own regulator is saying the opposite: when Dunkelflaute hits, Germany needs controllable generation and imports, and it says additional controllable capacity is urgently required.
What supplies that capacity today? Coal and gas remain substantial. Germany has zero domestic nuclear generation, yet it still burns coal and natural gas and participates in a European interconnected system containing large quantities of French and other nuclear generation.
So the actual German experiment is considerably less impressive than the slogan. Germany spent decades building an enormous renewable fleet while simultaneously destroying an existing fleet of firm low-carbon reactors. It succeeded in greatly increasing renewable generation and reducing coal use over the long run, but it did not abolish the requirement for firm generation. When wind and solar disappear together, Germany burns dispatchable fuels, imports electricity, draws on reserves and watches wholesale prices rise.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Once you accept that an electrical system requires firm energy during prolonged periods of inadequate intermittent generation, the menu becomes fairly obvious. Hydro and geothermal are excellent where geography permits them. Storage, transmission, demand response and renewable overbuilding all help. Countries fortunate enough to possess enormous reservoirs, geothermal resources or exceptionally strong interconnections can lean heavily on those advantages.
Those countries are not a universally reproducible model. A solution intended to work in most industrial countries has to survive winter demand, multi-day wind lulls, minimal solar production, droughts, transmission constraints and simultaneous weather patterns across neighbouring regions.
Under those conditions, you need some combination of renewables and firm generation. At present, for most countries without exceptional hydro or geothermal resources, large-scale firm generation means principally nuclear or combustion, with storage and interconnection reducing how much of it must run.
So yes: build wind and solar. Build batteries where they make economic sense. Build transmission. Use demand response. Exploit hydro and geothermal wherever available.
But after all of that, somebody still has to answer the boring engineering question: what produces electricity on the fifth cold, dark, windless day after the batteries have discharged?
“Baseload is a myth” does not answer it. “Batteries” does not answer it unless you specify the required energy capacity and how it is recharged. And Germany, of all countries, does not answer it: every serious Dunkelflaute demonstrates why it still maintains dispatchable fossil generation and depends on the wider European grid.
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
"France's largest electricity producer said the move was required to comply with environmental regulations."
This is a policy decision, not a technical limitation. Palo Verde has been operating in the Arizona heat for forty years: nuclear can handle situations of low/high-temp water.
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
Could also be YYMMDD
In most of Europe it would be DDMMYY - but seeing how the English still measure stuff in feet and inches I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some illogical way of structuring the dates as well
YYMMDD is standard(ish) ISO 8601 - the new versions of the spec require a 4 digit year but older ones allowed it, and ISO 8601 is also commonly used in manufacturing.
Where do you get that from? Is this a confusion with dates spoken or written out in full as "March the 9th, 2023"? We're talking numeric form here, "090323" in the specific example, and I don't think the UK has ever used MDY for numeric forms.
MDY makes some sense when you pronounce it September 24th, 2026, but yes, it's very confusing for everyone else.
I guess the confusing part is mostly because of an international audience. If everyone used MDY it would feel less weird. Still sorts completely wrong.
To be able to play retro games on current hardware/OS?
Why does it always need to be so complicated - I have zero interest in learning about these legacy platforms but I definitely want to play some nostalgic games.
Mindboggling that you see this as a negative and even want to kick out people to “protect” the community
Also to fix bugs. Someone recently ran Shadowrun (Genesis) disassembly through chatgpt and discovered that weapon upgrades were completely broken (using the wrong value as an index and ending up reading character stats as upgrade flags), defensive spells actually buffed your enemies, not you, etc. and released a romhack to fix things.
Lately I've seen this statement that I agree with: for some people, a hobby is a means to an end (which means using AI to achieve the goal is a heresy), for others, it is the end in itself (which it isn't).
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
reply