But the mining, milling, and production of nuclear fuel, as well as the construction and decommissioning of nuclear plants, emit greenhouse gases at levels ranging from 10 to 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of power — lower than fossil fuels but higher than wind and hydroelectricity (and roughly on par with solar).

That’s interesting. The article they link gives a bit more detail:

These energy intensities translate into greenhouse gas intensities for LWR and HWR of between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g CO2-e/kWhel.

While these greenhouse gases are expectedly lower than those of fossil technologies (typically 600–1200 g CO2-e/kWhel), they are higher than reported figures for wind turbines and hydroelectricity (around 15–25 g CO2-e/kWhel) and in the order of, or slightly lower than, solar photovoltaic or solar thermal power (around 90 g CO2-e/kWhel).

The wide range for nuclear apparently comes from difficulties in estimating the carbon footprint of mining/processing the uranium, but that nuclear is sort of in the middle of the pack in carbon footprint relative to renewables in spite of the fueling costs is good to know.

I suppose these sort of numbers may change dramatically in years to come. Take solar. A lot of focus seems to be on the efficiency of panels, which would almost certainly lower the carbon cost per unit of energy as it improves, but a breakthrough in panel longevity would also do that in an amortized emissions sort of way.

A ok. Thanks for the clarification.

I had to look up who was mayor during the pandemic. Bill de Blasio. I just remember seeing an overhead view on CNN and thinking “Is that an honest to god mass grave in NYC?!?” That’s a hell of a legacy.

That’s very interesting. Thanks for the write-up. Reminds me a bit of the premier of Ontario where I am. Started life as a petty drug dealer before getting into right-wing politics, and quickly fell out of popularity cutting services and tearing down wind turbines across the province. But with his career on the rocks, the pandemic suddenly hit. That was basically his 9/11 and people rallied behind him. Never mind that his previous cuts to healthcare had exacerbated the crisis. But he’s back to his douchebag ways now.

Any New Yorkers here? I’m interested in your perspective on Giuliani. I only have a cursory knowledge of him. He first came to my attention when he made headlines busting some crime family as a DA way back when. Then he was in the news a lot as the mayor of NYC during 9/11. He seemed pretty respected at the time? I dunno. And next thing you know, he resurfaces as an enforcer for the Trump administration, winding up getting disbarred and generally shunned by society. I guess I’m curious as to whether he was always a scumbag or grew into the role?

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.

Cool! I can see how optical media could, in theory, be very long-lasting as long as you don’t use materials that oxidize or otherwise degrade over time.

Well I guess I’m picturing DNA encoding like a RAID billion in terms of redundancy, so with some checksumming, you ought be able to sort out any mutations? But I’m no geneticist.

That’s why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you’d want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?

You know, I’m not actually quite sure what I’m doing, but I can tell you I am not looking at the keyboard. I suppose it’s similar to how I play violin? I don’t look at where my hand is but it shifts to different positions depending on what makes the most sense for the pattern I’m trying to play, and yes, a different position does imply a different fingering to reach the same notes.

When learning to program, I initially tried to follow the touch typing guidelines, but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them. And just as with music, there are patterns. In programming, you may frequently need to type {}, :=, or even something like \{\}, and flailing around with the pinky is a good way to give yourself carpal tunnel. So your right hand learns to shift to hit those keys using a combination of fingers.

As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.

One thing that’s really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Take solar, for example. On the one hand, you could argue that if your primary goal is to generate heat, you might as well use a solar thermal plant with lots of focusing mirrors over photovoltaics. The conversion to electricity first would inevitably be far less efficient.

On the other hand, if you’ve got your PV plants for electricity already but they are overproducing at times, there is the question of what to do with the excess power, and using it to run heat pumps may actually be a pretty efficient application at the point?

I paid a visit to Green Bank WV once out of an interest in astronomy. The giant radio telescopes are truly a sight to behold!

Less impressive were the people camped out nearby who saw the place as the promised land where they could cast off their tinfoil hats in the cellular-banned zone surrounding the complex.

I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.

You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.

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Anyways, did I miss anything?

I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.

Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?

You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.