23 karma · joined June 24, 2022
> I wish we could get a JPEG XL based Video codec. Well i'm curious about that but FLIF, the predecessor (and maybe XL too) is based on MANIAC which is a variation of H264 encoding.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Image_Format#:~:...
Tangent if they really cared about user experience and Ecology they would implement h265 and h266 support in chromium (aka a mere function call to the embedded ffmpeg). H266 is revolutionary but it's adoption is of zero because of AV1 lobbyists a bit like so called environmentalists once launched a RPG rocket on the superphenix thorium mankind saving reactor.
I agree python dependencies are a worldwide shame and eval() is very niche (but again should not be universality banned assuming good developers, maybe though one could conditionally ban it aka it would trigger a lint during code review that would need explicit validation.
As for the topic at hands, google style bans are insane e.g. No Exceptions lol
Given that llvm receive more human resources than gcc by far, I once expected it to outperform gcc generally (e.g support for polyhedral optimizations, BOLT, etc) Unfortunately weirdly it seems llvm performance is mostly stagnant. I personally suspect we are reaching increasingly diminishing returns with AOT and that the performance graal would be a hybrid that also does JIT at runtime (beyond PGO therefore) and more interpretable than BOLT
Boom can increase fuel efficiency via the airplane architecture with e.g. composites. The near commercialisation new civil aircraft from china achieved a 10% reduction doing so. The same can be said for noise reduction. Hence what Boom should do is simply to order Rolls royce to produce the same engines again. However one should know that R&D for the successor of the concorde engine has already been spent and such engine has been designed. Unfortunately the U.S imperialist oppressive bans killed the concorde economics before the production of said engine, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593....
Now about the noise levels let's adress the fact that it is a non-issue. 1) If you look at the empirical scientific comparisons, the mean noise of the concorde is significantly lower than many civil airplanes, especially the ones with 4 engines. 2) The boom while intense, is very transient. It is not heard from people inside the airplane. It is a non-problem for the obvious reason that your jet does not need to be supersonic for 100% of the trajectory, therefore a plane can and should go to very high altitude (already a supersonic requirement) and/or above low density population (rural, ocean) and only then bypass the speed of sound, making the noise boom a moot problem. While this solution is trivial, political bans and people hysteria isn't.
What is at stakes? A lot of things, supersonics isn't just cool, it is a life saving technology that can allow the transfer of key people in records time (expert surgeon in niche disease emergency for example) which can have very high utilitaristic value. It can also make it much more pratical for key people to meet physically (e.g. key academicians for a symposium about advancing the state of the art in a topic) which is high impact considering cognitive biases regarding human agency.
Note however there are other supersonic engine makers than rolls royce, for example any country that makes supersonic military jets can obtain such engines. It is easy to forget that the first commercial supersonic engine was not the concorde but a russian tupolev. While the tupolev has reliability issue, few know they had an alternative engine (likely more reliable). In addition to the tupolev engines, I would look into the state of the art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 Regarding SOTA civilian turbofan there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 in development, although it can power an antonov (!) and seems very versatile I wonder if (not a turbojet) it can perform supersonicity without afterburners.
regarding those options however, russia bad, china bad.
I don't know for sure what is the SOTA efficiency nowadays but IIRC last generations engines are ~10% more fuel efficient than the ones from the 80s, which where at the time behing the Rolls-royce engine hence I even doubt modern engine have better thermal efficiency than aforementioned 43%. Regarding the topic of thermal efficiency, engines are not supposed to reach 43% without being supercritical, did Rolls-royce bypass physics laws? There must be something I ignore here. Anyway even if (?) we could design supercritical jet engines the best possible thermal efficiency would be 46-7% AKA a minor improvement.
Boom can increase fuel efficiency via the airplane architecture with e.g. composites. The near commercialisation new civil aircraft from china achieved a 10% reduction doing so. The same can be said for noise reduction. Hence what Boom should do is simply to order Rolls royce to produce the same engines again. However one should know that R&D for the successor of the concorde engine has already been spent and such engine has been designed. Unfortunately the U.S imperialist oppressive bans killed the concorde economics before the production of said engine, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593....
Now about the noise levels let's adress the fact that it is a non-issue. 1) If you look at the empirical scientific comparisons, the mean noise of the concorde is significantly lower than many civil airplanes, especially the ones with 4 engines. 2) The boom while intense, is very transient. It is not heard from people inside the airplane. It is a non-problem for the obvious reason that your jet does not need to be supersonic for 100% of the trajectory, therefore a plane can and should go to very high altitude (already a supersonic requirement) and/or above low density population (rural, ocean) and only then bypass the speed of sound, making the noise boom a moot problem. While this solution is trivial, political bans and people hysteria isn't.
What is at stakes? A lot of things, supersonics isn't just cool, it is a life saving technology that can allow the transfer of key people in records time (expert surgeon in niche disease emergency for example) which can have very high utilitaristic value. It can also make it much more pratical for key people to meet physically (e.g. key academicians for a symposium about advancing the state of the art in a topic) which is high impact considering cognitive biases regarding human agency.
Note however there are other supersonic engine makers than rolls royce, for example any country that makes supersonic military jets can obtain such engines. It is easy to forget that the first commercial supersonic engine was not the concorde but a russian tupolev. While the tupolev has reliability issue, few know they had an alternative engine (likely more reliable). In addition to the tupolev engines, I would look into the state of the art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 Regarding SOTA civilian turbofan there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 in development, although it can power an antonov (!) and seems very versatile I wonder if (not a turbojet) it can perform supersonicity without afterburners.
regarding those options however, russia bad, china bad.
As a complementary, I would take glycine 3gramm 5 night per week, which has very low tolerance building and if you watch the studies is extremely potent at increasing sleep efficiency. I would also consider Agomelatine. Also I would take potent antioxidants with long half life in order to reduce sleep deprivation toxicity (e.g. ALCAR 2g) and NAC. Note that alcar can compensate many neuroreceptors downregulations. Although antioxidants unlike above recommandations are for chronic health and won't likely help your perceived acute sleep. Finally I would take a potent synaptotrophic in order to reverse large amounts of past neurotoxicity. Taking magnesium l threonate reverse IQ-age by 9.6 years.
BTW is baclofen as effective as GHB? If so then do it as GHB is neurotoxic through paradoxal excitotoxicity, a byproduct of agonizing GHB receptors. Although it's possible that this toxicity can be reduced by taking glutamate antagonists such as memantine
Oh and since you say you have too much REM sleep.. You have to understand that this excess relative to most humans might be needed for you as a way to compensate for other biological deficits, although maybe not. If you wanna try an original approach, there are drugs that specifically decrease REM, for example IIRC the benign antidepressant moclobemide reduce REM sleep by 1 hour. Although it improve other patterns of sleep (such as probability to wake up) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2148341/
Oh and now that I think about it, you mention highly vivid dreams: Highly vivid dreams can be caused notably by two things: 1) a too high amount of choline. It is well known (and every lucid dreamer try it) that taking e.g. Huperzine A, which increase choline levels by decreasing its catabolism, induce vivid dreams. It's possible that your metabolism produce too much choline or catabolise it too slowly. However be very careful experimenting with choline blockers/catabolisers as choline is necessary for cognition (a nootropic) and is a very important neuroprotectant especially for myelin. Therefore ideally try to measure your choline levels (via urine tests?) Choline antagonists exists but dose can easily become toxic, as usual everything is poison, nothing is poison, it's the dose imbalance that makes the poison.
The second main cause of vivid dreams is: Special sleep phases (called ~hypnoagogic) there is one when we enter sleep and one when we exit sleep. At those transitory levels can be experienced extremely vivid dreams because the brain is in too high wake up state. I have personally experienced 3 times those special dreams while waking up, I was mind blown by the realism of the hallucination.
Note a lower priority atypical sleep promoter is oleamide.
Essentially though I would consider taking eugeroics during the day such as armodafinil or Vyvanse.
Note: everytime you try polypharmacy (combining multiple drugs) titrate doses very slowly, especially the ones that have similar action mechanisms, e.g glycine is a downer like ghb hence slow titration is very important.
BTW I'm sure you did it but diagnose for sleep apnea.
1) extraordinary claim 2) completely miss the point that the 10000 bureaucratic safety rules could be trimed by half while actually improving security and reducing costs. 3) completely miss the point that current models from Russia and China are cost effective and comply with aforementioned unoptimized rules.
> remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore
most of the reactors from the 70s and 80s are still in use. they have much less safeguards and are still safe enough as in you'd better invest the saved money in saving lifes/medecine research than in those hypothethical safety gains that only drive marketing and hypocrisy.
> Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics. completely miss the point that nuclear plants can contrary to renewable decrease their output in a very fine grained way. Why is that interesting? The plant cost almost the same, but does not add a significant cost by overproducing electricity. When renewable overproduce electricity (which happens all the time given enough share) the excess electricity will break the electric grid and cause a nationwide shutdown. To prevent that, the Grid operator has to sell electricity at a loss (AKA pay people to consume the electricity). Given some level this startegy won't even work and will need a special costly infrastructure optimized for burning (throwing away) excess electricity.
> But we know it's way longer than that
who is we? Where is the evidence? Also newer reactors have a lifespan extendable to 100 years hence you need to triple or quadruple the price. And wind, which is generally much more prevalent than solar last in most cases 20 years. In 2016 they have started (in germany) installing twice as big turbines which are likely to have shorter lifespans.
> The only solution here is storage. > Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
nuclear doesn't need energy storage.
> Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
please source, enligthen me, I am unable to find reliable information supporting this.
> Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap
Please let's not be a joke, the discussion is about a long term fossil-free future. Not a thesis that only works until it doesn't.
> grid storage to use lithium at all
wtf, energy storage without batteries is niche. What are you refering to? Water, hydrogen? The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium. This should be obvious.
> renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way
Renewable needs pilotable energies. Solar in january and december is almost non existent. How much is an empirical and country dependent question but bewteen 20-30% average share of fossil energy needed seems probable. Meanwhile 100% nuclear is perfectly doable. 70% renewable 30% nuclear is also doable but would be economically inefficient.
> both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs
Wrong assumption, solar and wind in germany are extensively subsidized.
Anyway the most salient point about this discussion is the storage energy cost and feasability, of which you provide zero data.
regarding lithium availability: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q78xv... Enough to build 8 billions cars and then zero cars for the next generation LOL. Now add that in addition of one car per habitant we need a similar or even bigger battery for his regular electricity uses, including house heating.
Doing policies that last for just the current generation and not the next centuries is madness. Yes we've all heard there are HUGE reserves in the oceans. Which pointless to say. There are a looot of gold in the oceans too. The density and extractability of it is the key question. The fact this is not currently used means it cost more than current methods. How much more? x10 ? x100? x10000? Who knows? Sharing technical evidence about this issues would improve the depth of the discussion but until then we are manipulating a huge existential risk.
about uranium reserves: right, the current estimate of reserves is of a 230 year supply at current consumption. The needed consumption for 100% would be at least a x10 so let's say we ran out of uranium in 23 years if massively adopted. 1) A major point is that contrary to lithium, the mining industry of uranium is much smaller and therefore if it received mass funding, the reserves might significantly increase. 2) like lithium there are huge oceanic reserves and like lithium, this is not a solution until proven otherwise. 3) reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption. Note that lithium can be recycled too but setting a global systematic recycling industry is yet to be done. 4) Indeed thorium reactors (not uranium) are the ideal solution since we have thorium for the next millenium. Thoriums reactors are not just a theoretical concepts, some have been made so it is feasable. It has not been developed because the energy efficiency/economics are inferior (how much ?) although since most of the cost is on the time to build the plant anyway, this should still be a viable solution although not necessarily as cost effective as renewable here (but with an expensive energy storage grid and pragmatic designs (like russian/chinese ones) and taking into account lifespan, and renewable need for fossil fuels/gaz, it very well could be) As for the ocean argument it seems easier to solve for uranium though which is needed in much less quantity (because of its ernergy density) and hence needs less regional density. Note however that water filtration methods for lithium are often similar to existing desalinisation plants. Which ironically are a great specialization for nuclear power plants.
Anyway let's address the comment:
> all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables
Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak. For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity. Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is:
1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on.
4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety.
> where to get and reprocess fuel rods
this is not an issue
> What about operational safety
well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear.
> where to dump the radiactive waste
You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents.
In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited. Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.