alexey-salmin

What's the stunt? France built reactors for modest cost and phased out coal.

Germany wasted enormous amounts of money on green energy and made very little progress.

Which country is more "green"? Which technology is more "green"?

The total cost of the French nuclear program since the beginning was estimated at 228 billion euros at 2012 prices, including both research and construction costs.

By that time Germany cumulatively poured around a trilling euros into the green energy and still had coal power plants and 2x the CO2 per capita compared to France.

As of 2026, in Germany 22.5% of electricity still comes from coal and CO2 per capita is still 1.7x of France.

The hard numbers so far are extremely favorable towards nuclear. Roughly speaking you get 1.7x better results at a 1/4 of the cost.

The title is misleading. $135 is not "money saved", it's "money not spent on fossil fuels" (even for that I couldn't find how it was calculated by solarpowereurope, but the number seems plausible).

To the discussion of whether $50B/y is a big figure or not. EU has around 400GW of PV installed. Cost to install per 1kW ranged between $600 and up to $4000 because a big chunk of that capacity was built when prices were much higher. If we consider average price at $1000 this means $400B on capex alone + yearly operational expenses. It can still be profitable (assuming current PV prices can be sustained + installed capacity doesn't grow faster than storage) but it's going to be many years until the investment is recouped and it starts to actually "save money for Europeans".

In any case, of course it's still nice to depend less on imported oil, even if not for money savings.

> The issue with outdated grids is that it relies on technology (spinning mass) that's at this point a century old. Which makes it brittle against outages like you describe. The solution is not more spinning mass but batteries and renewables to take the place of that spinning mass. A battery can respond to oscillations in milliseconds. If you then add flexible load that can spin up/down based on the amount of available power, you gain a lot of stability.

Why the spinning mass technology being "century old" (more like "millennia old" but anyways) is a problem somehow? The Newton's First Law didn't change much in the time that has passed.

Anyone who tried to "respond to oscillations in milliseconds" knows how hard that problem is because the force you apply is integrated twice before it takes effect. Try stabilizing a swing by pushing it's forward when it's behind the equilibrium point and pushing it backward when it's ahead of it. Now imagine a grid of swings connected by rubber bands and a distributed system of independent actors responding to oscillations. There are much more ways in which this system can diverge rather then converge.

Time may prove me wrong, but the arguments like "spinning mass is old therefore should be replaced" certainly won't.

> Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?

The elderly can't eat that directly unless they're in a good health and can be put to work on a farm.

> Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.

In the end nothing is produced by "assets", things are always produced by people with various degrees of automation. This makes the balance between the number of people who are working and the number of people who aren't the key factor.

> Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.

Contributions to the economy of the past give them some moral grounds to claim the share of the economy today. But the reality is, an old man today is someone who consumes but doesn't produce. Society feeds them and gets nothing in return. Except for old people who meaningfully help to raise grandchildren or find other ways to be useful.

> The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.

There are many ways of how a percentage of GDP can be diverted to the elderly: all kinds of taxes including taxes on salary and assets, stocks and bonds, stashes of cash under the mattress etc.

I'm making a more high-level point: regardless of the mechanism, the more the elderly, the more GDP you need to divert to them. Which means the rest of the population gets less and also less gets invested into the future growth. It's a fundamental problem, which doesn't depend on which exact tax you plan to apply.

You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free.

No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.

> A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth

Not really, just a stable ratio of workers/retirees is enough for this system to work. But what we're seeing is a rapid shift in that ratio, with both less workers and more retirees.

> If your 2d array sits on the stack, then inferring memory layout is pretty easy. If you are dealing with pointer that was passed to a function, then you can't assume anything about data size or limits, which is why many functions that take pointers take a size parameter as well.

Right, but 2d arrays come into this picture with their own quirks again. You're not just passing the size as the parameter, you can pass it as a "special" parameter that influences how the compiler will interpret other parameters. E.g. in C99 you can do this:

    void do(size_t x, size_t y, int a[][y]);

Here "y" plays the critical role because it will be used to compute offsets in the a[i][j] expression. For 1d arrays this doesn't happen.

Of course it's still generalizable as "all but the outermost dimensions should be known" and for 1d array the outermost dimension is the only dimension. Still, this whole thing always felt a bit odd to me.

People who do HPC in C actually wish C had proper arrays like Fortran. If your function takes two pointers as inputs instead of two arrays they can alias the same memory and in fact they may alias any other pointer of the same type. Writing into one of them invalidates all the values you have in registers so you have to load them again.

The "restrict" keyword was invented to solve this but it still has weaker semantics than original Fortran arrays. It can still solve a big share of problems, but it never got proper adoption and never even made it into C++.

Interestingly the article doesn't mention two-dimensional arrays and they're curios because they bring a certain asymmetry with them. It always tripped me over the most in C because I otherwise find the language very "symmetrical". It often feels like in design of this language the beauty of expressing certain things took priority over readability or safety which I admire in a way. But somehow not in the case of the two-dimensional arrays.

If you see a[i][j] it could mean two completely different things:

1) "a" is a continuous chunk of memory of N*M bytes, so it behaves as char*; a[i][j] == *(a + i*M + j)

2) "a" is an array of char* pointers that point to N completely distinct memory chunks of size M, so it behaves as char**; a[i][j] == *(*(a + i) + j)

With flat arrays the difference between an array as a variable and a pointer to the first element is literally negligible because you won't even see the difference in the assembly. This is why the automatic decay-to-pointer makes a lot of sense.

But that breaks completely with multiple dimensions. You definitely see the difference in the assembly because the memory layout is so different.

> According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem.

I really don't see how Amazon is to blame for this problem, they weren't the ones who picked the license.

> Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?

They both sell it for profit, let the most profitable one win.

I can't? I mean, if Amazon does commercial version of Elastic better than Elastic themselves then so be it. I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not.

I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.

I think think fertility rates will rebound once the current culture of self-destruction gets, well, self-destructed. But incidentally this means that people who value sustainable water sources over having kids won't be there anymore.

So it's kind of pointless in my opinion, to maintain a strategy that can't achieve its stated goals because all it can do long-term is to give way to other strategies with other goals.

What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?

I do 6-10 espresso cups per day, so 3-5 does sound very moderate.

In my view it would be extremely strange if it was any other way round. Anthropic is the US based company. There are no "citizens of world" at that scale, or at almost any other scale for that matter.

I think Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6 is already at the level of paradigm shift and can change the entire tech industry.

If you're paranoid it doesn't mean you're not being followed. If something is overhyped it doesn't mean it's not game-changing.

Not until these robots learn to self-assemble from a bag of rice like humans do

I hope for the same, but it's based on the assumption that space exploration will be human-driven. Unfortunately it's possible that it will be robot-driven instead and museums will stay on earth.

Yes, IF we know the numbers, that's the whole problem. Unprompted full-body MRI scans turn up a completely new probability distribution. We CAN'T know the numbers as of today, it takes decades of controlled studies to get them. (Which is exactly what doctors advocate for)

Even for something as studied as colon cancer it's still controversial whether mass colonoscopies are better than occult blood tests. US sticks to the former, Europe to latter. US have higher rates of polyp removal, higher rates of cancer detection, higher rates of surgeries and ... higher mortality rates than EU. Why this happens is being studied today, there are some early results. What is absolutely clear though is that higher detection rates don't automatically lead to better outcomes, it can easily be the opposite.

Or take something as simple as sunscreen. It's well-known that sun exposure for light-skinned people can cause cancer and sunscreen is advised. A few multi-decade studies have shown that while it indeed eradicates the skin cancer it also shortens the life expectancy by a few years.

Primum non nocere, doctors and scientists are unsure whether sunscreen should be applied at scale and you effectively call for mass biopsies and surgeries.

Whether treatment is net harmful or not depends on the level of the risk with no treatment. If you apply treatment with 15% chance of severe side effects to a tumor that will kill the patient with 50% chance in the next five years, of course it's net positive. If you apply it to a first-stage cancer that has 10% chance of progressing to the second stage, the very same treatment will be net harmful.

So no, most cancer treatments aren't net harmful now, but they likely will be in a world where your programme is implemented. Even something as "simple" as biopsy has mortality rates far from zero. Applying it at scale may not have the effect you expect. And surgeries and chemo are much worse.

No, the detector doesn't fix that, that problem is not treating people without cancer. The problem is treating people with cancer that won't kill or harm them during their lifetime. In this case even a low risk treatment becomes harmful, let alone cancer treatments.

> With my change: 95% of people who are shown scans have cancer and are treated earlier. 5% of people do not have cancer and get CT scans. 0.5% of people get useless biopsies Without my change: many of those 95% die, the 0.5% do not get useless biopsies

You assume that treating cancer automatically improves the outcome. Treating cancer often kills you, so treating a non-fatal tumor can easily be a bad decision. And a lot of the tumors found by agressive scans are like that, but we don't know yet how much exactly and how to tell one from the other. It's a new question that requires decades-long observations to answer.

> This is wrong. If you had a 100% accurate cancer detector, fewer people would die of cancer with no downside

You're saying it as if detection somehow cures cancer, it doesn't.

There's a theory that the first-stage cancer is way more common than we think, it's just doesn't develop further most of the time, cause no symptoms and remains undiagnosed throughout the lifetime.

There's some support for this view because agressive screening for thyroid and prostate cancers increases the number of surgeries a lot but doesn't seem affect the mortality rates.

Risks from a surgery are non-negligible, if you perform it to treat a low-risk condition it may be a net loss in the end.

So you're technically right about the "early-detecting" part, but the "much easier to treat" step is problematic because it's unclear what a net-positive treatment looks like for low-risk cases. Probably it comes down to yearly monitoring of whatever was detected, not the actual treatment.

Not op, but the number of cards doesn't matter. Only one shuffle can exist at a time, the "number of shuffles" is not a number of natural objects but rather a cardinality of a set. And as we know sets and cardinalities open the gates of hell.

This doesn't mean it's not a "relevant thing to talk about". It just means that these mathematical constructs while useful don't maintain a direct connection to reality, kind of like complex numbers.

Natural numbers are "natural" enough but N as the "set of all natural numbers" not so much. It only takes N to build the Hilbert's hotel. Uncountable set of all subsets of N is probably even worse.

All that, of course, doesn't make N bad or useless. It just shows that mathematical objects don't have to follow the laws or intuition of the real world to be useful in the real world.

Idk, to me it feels much much better than just picking one root when defining the inverse function.

This desire to absolutely pick one when from the purely mathematical perspective they're all equal is both ugly and harmful (as in complicates things down the line).

The good news is that Q is not really entitled to a closure either.

There are ways to build C that result in:

1) Exactly one C

2) Exactly two isomorphic Cs

3) Infinitely many isomorphic Cs

It's not really the question of whether i and -i are the same or not. It's the question of whether this question arises at all and in which form.

I have MS in math and came to a conclusion that C is not any more "imaginary" than R. Both are convenient abstractions, neither is particularly "natural".