All they have to do is convince some of the scientists to peer review each other’s work for free and theres no longer any significant difference between their scam and the OG journal scam.

Soon: “Open source software or pirated copies of photoshop only”

Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.

They don’t have to be any good, they just have to be significantly better than humans. Right now they’re… probably about average, there’s plenty of drunk or stupid humans bringing the average down.

It’s true that isn’t good enough, unlike humans, self driving cars are will be judged together, so people will focus on their dumbest antics, but once their average is significantly better than human average, that will start to overrule the individual examples.

I’m curious how you’d phrase it, there is a law in Ukraine and it is widely reported to apply to “men aged 18 to 60”. What phrasing would more accurately depict the current situation without having the problems you list? If you meant instead that the law itself is problematic, then I can understand that, it’s received some criticism for that side of things.

Militaries are typically tasked with protecting more than themselves. If someone invaded Britain then the military wouldn’t have to wait until the invaders had shot a soldier to start defending the country.

A better question is whether they are attacking US and UK citizens/ equipment.

Or maybe etymology is strongly discouraged amongst wizards, because spells work on the belief of the caster and any etymological knowledge could ruin a perfectly good spell. Every now and again a good spell-caster’s career is ruined because they sat near the wrong nerd at a bar and now can’t forget that in the original Morrispanian the word all their fire spells start with meant “tepid”.

Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.

Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.

The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.

It’s a weird situation.

Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.

I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.

Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.

Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.

I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).

The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).

Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.

Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?

Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.

If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.

Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.

It’s a fair cop

You typed that into social media and posted it, just fyi.

If they can predict earthquakes and eruptions more accurately, as suggested in the article, then yes for all the people who don’t die.

Watch the music video “Let’s go” by stuck in the sound for another take on exactly this scenario.

https://youtu.be/52Gg9CqhbP8?si=fKzjWGeAXE1S7D2f

The answer is dependent on context I think.

In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.

The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.

In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.

Actual actual answer: WFH

If it’s a hit maybe they’ll come out with a very slightly fancier model with oled later, just like the current switch