fizigura

Not sure where you're being asked to believe that beyond a single thread contribution. I've argued your point earlier in this thread and agree that they are "widely accepted", so you may be barking up the wrong tree.

Nevertheless, some people prefer not to accept them while not being entirely anti-tech either. You may not be agreeing with choices other people make, but it goes a little far to call them "absurd on its face", don't you think?

Maybe, maybe not. But it describes an answer to your "why on earth" question.

People may have different preferences from yours.

Security-concious people like to keep the complexity low of things that are involved in their day-to-day activities. Having your car mingle with your phone is kinda the opposite of this.

Hm, you are obviously not following what's going on in the fusion space currently. They are continuously churning forward towards a viable design.

What "renewables" (with which I suppose you mean solar, hydro and wind) have going against them is their environmental impact. Sure it's not as bad as fossil fuels, far from it, don't get me wrong. But the area and materials needed for solar, the animals getting disturbed by wind turbines (birds killed, wales confused, ...) and the ecosystems that get flodded by dams are not nothing. Especially in the light that the energy demands of 8bn+ people are continuing to grow, and those 8bn will soon be 9bn and 10bn.

The promise of fusion tech is that you get much more bang for the buck, and with "buck" I mean resource use. That's not going to happen soon though, so until they we'll be stuck with solar+wind+hydro, but those are not really sustainable solutions in the long run (i.e. 100s/1000s of years ahead).

Of course, if you see fusion just as some crazy idea and know nothing else about it, then I can see how your "prior" makes sense. But once you know the details, it's quite different, since fusion is also continuing to progress down its experience curve. Tokamaks and stellerators in particular.

"connected" vs "compatible with"

Tbf. 25% connected is huge. If you just jump into your car to quickly do groceries or pick up your kids, you may not be interested in connecting your phone to your car, even if you really like that feature. So there could be a natural ceiling for the "connected" number and 25% feels getting close to that ceiling actually.

> There hasn't been any revolutionary new features in android since shortly after launch really.

Not visibly. But the tech stack has changed substantially.

I'd find it quite an achievement if the UX has largely stayed the same while things under the hood got modernized over and over again and went with the times, subtly bringing innovations to the UX as well without people realizing. It's a feature that things don't look substantially different every two years.

> Apple has undergone a similar ossification.

> I think it's just something that happens to companies that get a certain size. The Process becomes more important than the Product.

Why change it if it's working well? Keep doing what you are good at, keep being the best in the world/market at this, and the customers will reward you.

I seriously don't understand the common theme here in these threads saying that Google is basically stagnating. Why do they need to churn out a major new product every other year to stay relevant? They continuously re-vamp their entire stack, their data centers, their networks. Nothing ever stays as it is. As a user I actually find that things change too much. (But I'm not what counts, it's ad revenue that counts..)

If you compare the Android from 2008 and the Android from 2023 then you'd soon agree that within these 15 years, the whole thing was re-invented multiple times.

And I'm not talking the UX, which has already changed substantially, but I mean the underpinnings.

The basics of human history show that these kinds of predictions are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and being too sure about them is usually the wrong way to do about things. We'd all still live in caves with that attitude.

That's how research works. The first fission experiments couldn't power half a small country either.

When you listen to the guys from this original article then you'd know that for 10-20bn USD you could likely build a real power plant with this tech within 5 years. It's obviously not without risk, which is why nobody is doing it. But the technical feasibility is there.

They also point out that once the first-of-a-kind installation exists, subsequent models will be way cheaper and way better since you'd have learned a lot and streamlined the process.

But we choose to use public money for fossil subsidies instead, cause jobs, or something.

Farmland is literally converting solar energy into sugars. It's natures solar plants. Sure, you can get a bit of shade for your cattle. But the hundreds of millions of acres used for crops are directly competing for sunlight with your solar cells.

Well, most land is either farmland, forest or desert. Forest is out of the question for any solar installations unless you want to cut down the trees. Desert is not easily accessible for most parts of the world and provides terrible conditions for solar cells that have sharply declining efficiency with heat and don't like dust.

Leaves farmland, if you want to do this kind of thing at any sort of required scale. (Sure you can put solar cells on barn roofs, but the premise was scale magnitudes beyond that.)

We know the equations for flight. Why didn't they just build a 787 in the 40s already?

Oh, is it because the technology didn't exist and first had to be developed, in incremental refinements? Initial airplanes didn't even fly and half the people trying them died? Oh...

Solar farms on farmland? That won't scale to the energy needs of 8bn+ people if we still want to keep feeding them. Especially a non-vegetarian diet.

The same was said 20 years ago about solar power.

Then some countries stepped up the subsidies game and booom, prices fell dramatically since suddenly everybody wanted a piece of the cake. And competition drove this all down.

All you need is for somebody to start. Or we just keep telling ourselves that it's too expensive, shrug, and move on.

Also note how the goal posts changed. Until recently, everybody made fun of fusion by basically saying it's too hard, it's too far in the future. Now it's not too hard anymore, it's just too expensive. What's next? Too loud? Too big? Induces headaches with the esoterically minded?

For a few billion USD you could build a real power plant of this type. Sounds expensive, but consider how much money nuclear fission did cost initially, and how much money we burn on other stuff, then it's not unthinkable to have somebody rich chip in and make it happen. (Germany just gave $10bn subsidies for a domestic Intel factory.)

They currently run a bad-ass heatsink (which is one of the main challenges of this project, i.e., how to cool it), but eventually you will use that heat to convert it into electricity, yes.

For the German-speaking crowd here, the Alternativlos podcast guys were there twice and had lengtly conversations with the researchers there. Like, between nerds. Really cool, if you understand the language.

https://alternativlos.org/36/ (from 2016)

https://alternativlos.org/51/ (most recent, from may 2023)