haweemwho

Modern crisis research [1] shows that a sudden loss of just 10% of a population (that is, essentially over night) would have devastating consequences. Basically, breakdown of society as we know it.

Now combine that with nuclear winter and resulting consequences for crops and lifestock. We don't all need to die directly from bombs. Just a minor disruption in stability and hunger and civil unrest do the rest.

[1] It's pretty fascinating how vulnerable our societies are. Other results are things like .. 3 days power outage and you'd also be on the verge of civil war if government doesn't immediately pour in enormous resources in crisis management.

I appreciate that you elaborated your thoughts. That makes for a much nicer discussion!

I'd turn your argument around. We seem to not care about any of the N-1 species. Why treat the remaining one specially? Because we belong to it? I don't find that convincing. Maybe we're focusing too much on individual freedom that suddenly caring about the species as a whole seems is odd. The population around me, as a whole, is giving pretty few f*ks about me. I basically just return that attitude.

Or, to formulate it differently, I'd get on board caring about not just the survival but flourishing of our species, if we'd extend that courtesy to all the other species around us.

That academia job is less stable. Bring in grants or go home. Compete with others to climb a pyramid that gets more and more narrow at the top.

Even if you are laid off at Google or Facebook, with those on your resume, anybody will take you, unless you are some weird incompetent fluke. If you didn't get a new grant, you'll have a hard time in academia. Good luck switching institutions once you are unsuccessful in the grant game.

> IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

This.

Even with tenure in place, I'd never go to academia. So much politics, worry about grants, immobility in what to do research in, low compensation compared to industry jobs, so much frustration, frustrated and bitter colleagues... It's terrible. I love working with colleagues that all have the best interest of the workplace in mind. I find that in industry a lot. In academia it's really rare.

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

> but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.

> I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet project they’re on about.

Sounds like reflection to me, if anything.

Again measuring with different standards. Depending on the design of a typical wind turbine, you can recycle 90-95% of those as well. And that's without a prime design criterion of maximizing recyclability, which could be mandated by law and then you'd achieve close to 100%.

The sentence is just as disingenuous as the initial sentence that I criticized.

Isn't Siemens in the wind power business as well?

> At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk. The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?

Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody got warned and could take precautions.

> a FUD spreader like you

Eh, what? That's not a very nice thing to say.

> So tell me

No, I don't need to. I refuted a claim. You can move the goal posts, but I won't participate in that game.

Obviously a coal plant emits more CO2 than a nuclear fission plant. But the criticized sentence contained the words "carbon free". Which is just not true. I don't see how pointing that out is FUD.

Geez, I'm really worried about discussion styles here.

Nobody claimed that other species do. That has little to do with the question of why I should care about our's surviving.

> The truth is that the once the power plant is built it generates clean power for decades.

That is not the truth. The typical fuel cycle in fission plants is 3-6 years.

"X is the only foo that doesn't suffer from Y!"

"But it does!"

"Well so does every other foo!"

You see that this is not a good argument, don't you?

So, AI prompt is the new language/stack/API that you refuse to learn?

Would you like to elaborate your reasons?

> what to do about it?

Celebrate.

No? How many ovens, washing machines and dryers usually run at 2am when it's dark?

Sure people don't charge their Tesla at noon when solar production peaks, but saving that until the evening when the 15 miles use of the car battery need to refill is not a significant engineering challenge. Running a nuclear power plant is magnitudes harder.

Good example with Ukraines power station that's actively targeted. What type is that one? It's a nuclear plant as I'm sure you know. Which basically the whole country depends on. I think if anything then that's a counter argument. The more centralized your infra is, the more vulnerable it is. Nuclear is the most centralized of all power sources.

Even if that's true, it's hard to criticize while doing the same thing.

I did address your first remark in the end of my comment:

> All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.

I did not talk about how much energy is provided or what to do about freight haulers.

Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere discussion style.

> If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival

FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And later generations will need to live with the consequences as well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen north pole, it will not be odd to them.

Even if it was an existential threat to human survival, I wouldn't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...). Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.

If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, you can't bomb all of them.

I mean, you can try, but then energy shortage is not on top of the list of problems that the population has.

> Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.

Ramping up from 40% to 100% increases land use by orders of magnitude? Did I miss something?

Storage can provide base load and for anything non-critical you have flexible pricing that automatically lets people stop doing things that can be done later the week, like charging your Tesla. Markets work. Use them.

It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time. You just need some ways to transport energy as well as supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of this.

If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge then let's not even start to talk about the engineering challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today. That's a whole different ballpark.

> Only nuclear power is carbon-free [...]

You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though propaganda.

The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and maintaining storage facilities does.

All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.

Thanks for your perspective.

I'm wondering how this squares with the tendency of formal language theory folks to push for functional languages. It's clearly a preferred approach if rigorous correctness is your main goal, but don't functional languages like Haskell suffer from the fundamental issue that reasoning about runtime performance is really hard?

Probably just a coincidence that he publicly asked for competitors to suspend working on their products for 6 months.

The original article from back then: https://gcn.com/cloud-infrastructure/2021/02/hacker-tried-to...

Something does not add up here. The original article claimed that an employee saw the mouse pointer move and do things, like a ghost, or a hacker who had taken over the machine remotely. Now they say the employee made a mistake and alerted a superior. And was not fired for it, cause if people make mistakes, they should speak out, and punishing them would set precedent and next time somebody would keep quiet and not point out the error.

All fine, but these two stories don't match. Did the mouse pointer move without the employee doing this or not? It's one thing to click incorrectly, but did they actually say that the mouse pointer moved? If so, that's a blatant lie and they should obviously be fired for it. If not, then whoever made up that story should be fired for it. Somebody didn't tell the truth here, and there should be consequences for it. Honest mistakes can be forgiven. Making up things can't.