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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can’t have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.


  • They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.

    I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

    I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

    You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.


  • It doesn’t really make much sense to go faster than silicon node changes unless there is a lot of optimisation on architecture that needs doing. Historically all these refreshes between nodes were largely pointless with small benefits and preparing them took development effort away from the big changes. It’s progress in silicon that matters and brings the performance improvements and moving to a faster cadence hasn’t historically worked out well.






  • For many people they actually represent a better experience. If you mostly use the car below the range of the battery in your local area and can charge at home then you mostly eliminate the need to travel to fill up stations. Its kind of nice to not have to put petrol into the vehicle every week and have to deal with it being near empty and being forced to refill. It just gets charged cheaply overnight on greener power.

    The modern EVs get a lot of range in a 15-30 minute charge too. The reality is a 250 mile EV requires one stop to drive for 8-10 hours. Most people aren’t going to do that without a break in the middle. Even if you were going to go non-stop compared to an ICE its only another 30 minutes of journey time extra and it will cost you less to do it. So long as there are enough charge points, and these days their typically are in a lot of countries, then its not really a massive problem.

    In many ways they are more convenient on most peoples average usage and the range anxiety goes away when you realise what we are really talking about in terms of long journeys and how long charging in practice will add.



  • Army painter or games workshop are very much trusted in the miniature painting scene. They have undercoat spray cans (which as the adult you might need to do yourself) and then the paint sets themselves have all been around a long time with good safety profiles. I haven’t had any issues with this process over pla other than the layer lines being tricky to paint and work with but paint adherence has worked fine.


  • I tend to go off the https://grid.iamkate.com/ website which is a good day by day look at power generation and summarises the year. Renewables have so far surpassed fossil fuels 10.7GW compared to 10.3GW with other sources taking 5.9GW of which biomass is 1.52GW. I don’t personally think biomass is renewable because its burning old forests and at a rate far faster than the wood is replanted and we know that old forests store much more CO2 than new ones. With hydro and Nuclear its a pretty close run thing if we consider them green renewables are the majority of power production.

    Still a way to go, obviously more capacity is required and more storage and this will inevitably lead to excess power in the summer which is how renewables will work and hopefully we will find a good use for free power capturing CO2. A lot of projects are held up by the grid in the UK, more than enough to complete this transition, companies want to install the production its just the grid holding everything up with plans out to 2035.


  • I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.

    In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.

    Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.

    Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.



  • Even if its not so direct there is a still a problem. Intel is giving each of the employees one after the other $5000 worth of whatever upgrade they want to their gaming gear. Almost everyone there is reaching the benefits of this Intel sponsorship personally. Sure looks like a bribe. If you start doing such a sponsorship deal the only way to remove the conflict of the interest and ethical problems is to never review anything involving Intel, because the entire staff is receiving significant bribes from that company.

    It doesn’t have to be as direct as getting paid for a sponsored video to bias a review more positively, they are so unethical in the deals they make they will happily maintain the appearance of taking bribes and review products from that company. Its by no means the only example of this given the amount of free tech that has gone into Linus’ personal house that received a nice thumbs up only to be replaced 6 months later often on the quiet. Its everywhere in everything they are doing, companies are throwing goods and money at them and they are all taking it home and then the next week doing a review on products from that company.



  • That was their early model. They took money for a product and produced a positive video on it. That was the channel its how it got started and grew. They always used weasel words (still do) like a company “hooked them up” which meant they received a free product and payment to produce this video. They were actually caught properly on this on a series of AMD sponsored videos which were so incredibly positive and glossing over the issues and AMD explained the videos had been paid for. It turned out that was how the channel worked, they got paid for positive reviews.

    Nowadays sponsorship is better declared (because the ASA required that of them) but conflicts of interests aren’t. There is also the appearance of a lot of fraud too where free products are being placed into their homes. The Intel extreme series is a prime example of something that looks super dodgy and maybe a tax dodge. Right now its hard to prove something criminal is happening, based on their history however its not unreasonable to suspect it is.


  • This has been coming for a long time. I have had issues with Linus and his channel for a long time including making a complaint about breach of advertising standards in Canada (which resulted in a change forced by the ASA). They have become the model of how to make money on Youtube but they do so in such an unethical way where they make or invest in competing products that they also review. They have never had any appearance of journalistic standards or integrity, they don’t publish errata or corrections and they make a lot of mistakes and the abusive reviews have been going on for a long time.

    I am not surprised to find sexual harassment as well as undue pressure being applied in the workplace. It all centres and comes from the Narcissist at the centre of it who has built a media group off the back of civil law breaches repeatedly and continues to push the limits.

    Labs was a terrible idea mostly because Linus and his media group will corrupt the results for his personal profit and he and Yvonne are the only ones making big bucks in all this. This has been building for a very long time, the lack of basic morality has been on display since the beginning.