I’m surprised to learn that the CEO is not Moxie Marlinspike, my understanding is that he created the signal protocol. Perhaps he has nothing to do with the apps that implement signal?

Marlinspike is a well known name in the cryptography community, the guy knows his stuff.

Ok, noted. Troll identified and blocked.

Man, that headline is… forced.

Copper? Is there really a copper shortage?

I mean, the supply is pretty large for that. You’d think that electrical grid rollout in developing nations would have a higher impact than all the ram in the world.

I have to agree. I mean come on, cpu coolers? There’s nothing proprietary about them, nothing particularly high tech or difficult to produce, it’s a heat sink and a fan… Fancy ones may have a coolant loop, but still… I just can’t see any reason that prices would go up noticeably for such easy to manufacturer, commodity parts.

I’m just saying, it seems a little early to start screaming “the sky is falling”.

I don’t know, it sounds like a pretty convincing argument to me.

It’s a strange take to say “you’re wasting your time trying to get legislation passed” I mean, that’s one of the primary ways you change anything in a country…

And it’s plain stupid to say the only solution to a problem is the “complete abolition of capitalism” and then the next moment, suggest someone else is asking the impossible by trying to get some minor policy changed… That’s just bonkers. I mean, that simply destroys your credibility for the rest of the conversation, it’s gone.

You could say that of any infrastructure. Bridges are expenses, ongoing maintenance for them is a burden our children will have to bear. But I expect they’ll be willing to do it.

The fact is, most of what we do affects the next generation, we just don’t think about it, or can’t quantify it. The only difference with nuclear is that we can quantify it.

This is true, the waste issue is different with these two technologies, but I don’t think it’s all that significant in either case.

Fission produces some awful waste, but what I like to point out is just how little it produces. My favorite example is nuclear submarines. Nuke subs have to come to port every so often for food, equipment, supplies, etc, but not because they’re low on fuel. They don’t carry a lot, about 500kg (half ton) and that lasts them a very long time. So how often do they need to be refueled? Once, most subs are refueled just once in their ~30 year lifetime. Some subs will be decommissioned before ever refuelling, using just one set of uranium fuel rods for their whole life.

Edit: I wanted to visualize how much 500kg is, and I know uranium is heavy but I really didn’t have any idea what a half ton would look like. Turns out, it’s about 26 liters, 1 cubic foot. (Though, ideally your uranium wouldn’t be measured in either of those units, you really don’t want liters of liquid uranium, and that’s exactly where a solid cube is headed too…)

Given the tiny volume of waste produced over such a long time… We can figure out the storage. Even if the solution is costly, there’s really not much to store, this is very manageable.

So yeah, I’m not saying waste isn’t an issue for nuclear power, it is. But I think it’s not the biggest drawback, it seems like the overall cost is still the bigger problem in operating a plant.

I gotta be honest, as amazing as the promise of limitless fusion energy is, I’m really not optimistic that it’ll be a major or even an important technology for the energy sector, at least for the next 200 or so years.

The thing is, we already have fission power and we’re struggling to use it right now. The biggest hurdle for fission is the upfront costs of building a plant, the time needed to build a plant (construction can take up to a decade), and ongoing costs. While nuclear power is probably one of man’s greatest achievements, it’s also generally pretty expensive. And fusion has almost all the same strengths and drawbacks, but bigger. I do believe we will achieve sustainable fusion, probably soon. But I’m certain that while it will “work”, it will also prove to be the most expensive form of power generation with the largest upfront costs that the world has ever seen. And I don’t expect those prices to come down for a very long time.

Personally, I think anyone who expects fusion to be some kind of miracle technology is kidding themselves. And if people really want a miracle technology in the energy sector, keep your eyes geothermal, that’s the only tech I see that has any potential to become cheap, limitless, and constant.

I do think fusion will have good applications, but it will likely remain niche for a while. I definitely look forward to seeing spacecraft propelled by ion drives and powered by fusion, it would be amazing to be able to get to Jupiter and back on one tank of (xenon) gas.

Ok, that paper is pretty fabulous. That does make for a good sanity check for quantum computing feasibility.

That said, don’t be surprised when these things catch up quickly!

No no, quantum computing is more about using the quantum properties of particles to do computing in ways that you simply can’t with traditional computers. If you write your program to accommodate this kind of computing, you can essentially design programs to test all possible outputs simultaneously - a pretty neat trick.

Right now we’re talking about photonic computing, simply using photons as the circuitry within a processor rather than electronic circuits using elections.

Though I’m not an expert on either, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask for more information on the subject.

Likewise, my father in law loves Libre now.

You don’t think Linux is a disenshittification solution for PCs?

Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. You want to run a custom android os, perhaps security and encryption oriented, or perhaps drm defeating is your goal. That all becomes possible if it’s simply legal to do whatever you want with your devices and your software.

Disenshittification isn’t something you wait for companies to do, it’s something you take for yourself! And it’s a whole lot easier to organize and do that if it’s officially legal.