rgmerk

Hugely unlikely.

Even if the power is free you still need a grid connection to move it to where you need it, and, guess what, the US grid is bursting at the seams. This is not just due to data center demand; it was struggling to cope with the transition away from coal well before that point.

You also can’t buy a gas turbine for love nor money at the moment, and they’re not ever going to be free.

If you plonked massive amounts of solar panels and batteries in the Nevada desert, that’s becoming cheap but it ain’t free, particularly as you’ll still need gas backup for a string of cloudy days.

If you think SMRs are going to be cheap I have a bridge to sell you, you’re also not going to build them right next to your data centre because the NRC won’t let you.

So that leaves fusion or geothermal. Geothermal is not presently “very cheap” and fusion power has not been demonstrated to work at any price.

Seriously?

I know Silicon Valley runs on out there ideas and outright BS because 0.1% of the ideas pan out and pay for the other 99.9%, but this is just laughable for the reasons pointed out in the article.

Is there a way I can take bets on this not happening? Because I’d sure like to.

For some applications.

Photography didn’t make artists obsolete.

For that matter, the car didn’t make horse riding completely obsolete either.

For artists, the question is whether generative AI is like photography or the car. My guess, at this stage, is photography.

For what it’s worth I think the proponents of generative AI are grossly overestimating the utility and economic value of meh-OK images that approximate the thing you’ve asked for.

100% of the population will die of something.

If I die at 90 of a heart attack havjng maintained the ability to live independently up until then, I’d take that as a massive win compared to my relatives suffering through a decade of me with worsening dementia.

It means you're likely to survive in a crash.

The Cerice is lovely but if you have a high-speed crash with another car in it you're in big trouble.

They’re a Dutch company.

You can drive from just about any point in the Netherlands to any other in less than 300km.

For a weekend toy in the densely populated parts of Europe the range is fine.

Privacy nightmare undoubtedly, but if you want affordable EVs BYD has you covered. A fully-functional, crash-worthy and apparently quite decent EV for around 16,000 USD (in Australia).

If you can't buy one, blame your government:

https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-reviews/2026-byd-atto-1-rev...

Reliable gas cars still require a lot more maintenance than an EV does.

Oil and oil filter changes. Fuel filters. Air cleaners. Brake pads (that mostly goes away with hybrids too).

There’s clearly a demand for self-driving privately owned vehicles as well, but think of it this way - why own a self-driving Chevy when you could hire a self-driving Cadillac when you need to go somewhere?

Statistically, and from a global perspective, the apartment-dwelling car owner (most likely with a lower income than yours) is a heck of a lot more common than living in American-style suburbia or a small town.

Windows on the desktop. Android phone.

Apple gets this better than any other company IMO.

You literally pay a premium to be bothered less than the alternatives.

Um…is this satire?

You can't build permanent software in a world where a) everything is connected to everything else, and b) hackers will exploit anything and everything they can get their hands on.

That’s impressive but it hardly sounds like a comfortable experience for passengers, and while I get the whole argument that overregulation has made light aircraft less safe, i wouldn’t get in that plane thanks.

Ignoring EVs for a moment, a Toyota Camry hybrid, which can carry five people in more comfort and carrying more luggage than a light aircraft, gets 50mpg on the highway.

22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup trucks, whose load-carrying capabilities can only be matched by far larger aircraft with far higher fuel usage.

Furthermore, aircraft that cruise at 250 knots are not going to get anywhere near 22mpg. A Lancair Evolution, a reasonably modern four-seater turboprop that cruises at around that speed gets something approximating 7 mpg.

Hmmm.

I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating.

For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport or airliners. Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car. I’d also note that the flight controls don’t do the maintenance that is required to keep a light aircraft safe. Yes, the more libertarian amongst you won’t have a problem with this, but I’d also observe that the proposal is to make these regulations applicable to four-seater aircraft, so plenty of spouses and especially kids will be affected by this risk.

Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.

Firstly, most EVs that have strong regenerative braking ("one-pedal") setups allow you to adjust the strength or turn it off. Tesla, as usual, is the outlier in this respect.

Secondly, I rented an EV for a week and by the end of it actually preferred the strong regen setting. It was convenient in stop-start traffic, and on a twisty road, you could use it to tighten the nose as you entered the corner.

The ACS is about as scary as a limp lettuce leaf, so don't expect the CBA, or any other Australian company that wants to outsource IT operations and retrench existing staff, to be in any way deterred.

It seems that no one is prepared to point out the obvious - devaluation of the dollar is a cut in American living standards.

My thought is if the plant was on track to success but was killed by corporate politics somebody else would have tried again. The demand for carbon-neutral liquid fuels isn’t going away; long-range shipping and aviation aren’t going to run on batteries.

There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.

Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.

They also have a much broader range of vehicles than Tesla. Even if they could, they’d never sell a BYD Seagull in the USA, but small cheap cars are still a huge market in Asia and Europe.

It's a while since I had to deal with this kind of thing, but my memory was that as soon as you go beyond the flags that the upstream developers use (just to be clear, I mean the upstream developers, not the distro packagers) you're buying yourself weird bugs and a whole lot of indifference if they occur.

I haven't used a non-libc malloc before but I suspect the same applies.

Each to their own but there are plenty of Beatles songs that stand the test of time IMO.

Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out", or "Yesterday"? Superb.

The book series will never be completed, and wouldn't be if Knuth lives to 120.

And that's perfectly fine.

Yep, and Japan, South Korea, Australia etc may take the same view. Heck, Canada might given they're getting treated like some kind of hostile state at the moment.

I'm not sure I'm seeing the relevance here. Incremental advances in battery tech (or even futuristic step-change prospects like lithium-air batteries) won't solve intercontinental shipping.

Hi guys.

I don't claim to understand any of the physics and engineering challenges of fusion, but from all the general-interest material published, and the long history of fusion research, it seems that the capital cost of a fusion propulsion system is going to be far in excess of a conventional marine engine. I guess the hope is that the very cheap fuel might reduce the operational expenses such that it can compete economically.

However, if you've got a fusion power plant that a) has essentially free and practically-massless fuel, and b) the relationship between rated power output and capital cost is less than linear (again, not an expert on the physics but true of pretty much all such systems), I wonder whether the way to make a fusion ship economically competitive against conventional shipping is to max out the power and build a ship capable of much faster speeds than conventional ships.

I mean, we used to operate passenger liners back in the 1950s that averaged about 35 knots across the Atlantic, so presumably we could do considerably better than that.