rgmerk

To be ever so slightly sympathetic to American cops, unlike just about anywhere else in the developed world, it is plausible that the person behind the door is armed with anything up to an automatic rifle, and any random person they stop may be carrying a concealed firearm.

Given that, if I was busting down doors in the US, I’d want to be armed to the teeth, equipped with the best body armour money can buy, and wouldn’t waste a lot of time on niceties until I was sure that nobody was going to attempt to kill me.

Blame the Second Amendment as currently interpreted.

Hmmm. Very cool project…

But the last thing I want for my kid is for them to learn that active trading is fun, lest they try doing it with real money.

The company I work for runs a wrap platform [1]. Not one developer in the company has ever mentioned that they find the area intrinsically exciting to work on.

There is a sense of collective responsibility that we are the custodian for the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of people, so you do not want to screw that up. There is also satisfaction in that our efforts as developers mean that our platform is consistently rated the best on the market.

But nobody, least of all management, is kidding themselves that people are working for the company because of the problem domain - they’re working for the company because of the pay, conditions, and company culture. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

[1] https://www.finance-monthly.com/2020/03/the-benefits-of-wrap... (NB: not the company mentioned in the article).

Put it this way - a Toyota Camry, which these days is a big sedan with heaps of legroom in the back - is 4885mm in length.

So the length difference between the Corolla and Camry is less than the difference between the Seagull and Camry.

Kei cars are smaller again, with a maximum length of 3.4 metres.

And despite the handwringing, air source heat pumps can work fine in pretty cold places (eg Norway).

You can, right now, buy air source heat pumps rated to -28C (-14F). While not enough for record lows in, say, Chicago or Toronto, it's plenty for places like New York, Seattle, and Vancouver.

Sure, but your cascade of turbines isn't free.

The capital cost of just the turbines is enough to make it hard to compete with solar and batteries in many situations.

Turbines are indeed very well understood and mature technology, and even where the fuel is almost free and the reactor (a coal burner) is cheap, steam turbines are too expensive to compete with solar electricity in most places now.

Without getting too far into the weeds the current top-selling vehicles (Ranger, Hilux, Amarok etc) in Australia, though usually referred to as "utes" here in Australia, are very similar in design (though smaller) to F150s, Silverados, RAM Trucks etc.

Live rear axles, body on frame construction, four wheel drive, and actually more capable off road in a lot of situations than full size American pickups because they're smaller.

Sorry, I was trying to make it easier for Americans to understand (there are a lot more Americans than Aussies here, obviously).

As for the sales charts, the top four selling vehicles on the list are utes/pickups:

https://www.racv.com.au/royalauto/transport/cars/australian-...

The other thing to understand is that the Golf (which is a surprisingly large car these days), Corolla, Accent, Polo, and even the Yaris are a class or two bigger than the Seagull. They're roughly comparable to the BYD Dolphin in size.

The Seagull is very cool, and I'm sure they'll sell plenty in Asia (and Europe if they get the chance).

But very few people buy cars of this size in Australia. Kia is about the only manufacturer left offering them, and it's very much a niche car despite being the cheapest on the market.

The new car market is dominated by pickups, just like the USA (though they're not quite as big as F150s).

Sure. But, globally, you're the exception, not the rule.

Yep, sure. And that's great.

Indeed, though in colder climates you do have the problem that peak electricity demand is precisely when you get minimum solar production.

But in sunnier, warmer parts of the world (which notably includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Mexico, and Brazil, amongst others), over the next few decades it's hard to see anything much competing against solar and batteries for the bulk of energy usage.

Cool.

But even if you have a working stellarator that's a very long way from an economically viable energy source. You've still got to a) figure out how to cheaply convert the released energy into electricity (and the baseline way of doing that in D-T fusion is...a steam turbine), and b) figure out materials that can survive the radiation bombardment for a sufficiently long time.

In sunny places (and I fully acknowledge that's not all of the world) it's still going to be hard to beat sticking bits of special glass out in a field and connecting wires to it.

But we should sure as heck keep tinkering away at it!

Because mutation testing (should) generate a lot of mutants, which you then need to run your unit tests against.

Depends on your definition of “serious”.

You see a lot of “just take the train” in centrist and left-leaning British media (example provided below).

Easy to imagine in the UK. Not so easy from, say, Perth, Western Australia.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...

New York to San Francisco is roughly 3000 miles (4800 km). At 250km/h, that’s a 19 hour trip.

A 19 hour plane trip from New York gets you to Singapore.

Fast trains are great for journeys up to about 600km. For crossing continents, planes win, whether rail enthusiasts like it or not, and a future of transport that involves “just don’t fly” as the only solution to climate change is an absolute nonstarter in most of the world.

LLMs are not suitable for mutation testing. Mutation testing needs to be fast to be useful (because you need to generate and test a lot of mutated versions); an LLM-based mutator would be extremely slow as well as error-prone.

We spent a total of 262 days (by an NYT estimate, though the rules varied throughout that period) in lockdown throughout the pandemic. Did it suck mightily? Yes. Did we get through it? Yes.

(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.

Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).

Of all the stupid and obsolete things in standards we use to interoperate, CRLF is one of the least consequential.

Because small, cheap drones can’t fly at supersonic speeds at long enough range to matter.

Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.

Enforcing laws on farms is challenging, often to the point of futility, and particularly when you’re talking about large-scale ranches.

Precisely, and a substantial fraction of farmers wouldn’t bother.

Good luck with trying to persuade farmers to apply that additive.

Unkess there’s something in it for them that they can’t get by just claiming they’re applying the additive, farmers won’t do it.

There is no industry in the world more allergic to regulation than farming, despite the fact that most of themp farmers in the developed world (and much of the developing world) are heavily subsidised by the city dwellers they complain about.

If we're going to have this argument, are we allowed to read/write to external storage? That would seem to me to circumvent the bounds of pointer address space.

The interface to the external storage only needs bidirectional sequential access rather than random access, so we don't even have to worry about the disk addresses becoming too large for the addressable internal memory.

This is a recommissioning of a 50 year old plant that’s been sitting idle for five years from an era when nuclear plants were all bespoke.

Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?

The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN.

The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.

Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.

Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.

And this particular refurbishment is in one of the countries with serious cost and schedule overruns for its nuclear build, and a country and specifically a region that is bad at physical infrastructure.

Presumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract.

A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.

Hmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate.

Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?