sushibowl

joined 2 years ago
[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 28 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

The US needs to do way more than invest into public transit. You need to completely rethink city planning to get something suitable for human travel. Suburban America is like the antithesis to public transportation (or god forbid, walking).

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 76 points 2 days ago (10 children)

No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

The biggest reason we haven't had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won't have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 17 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Sort of, browsers can run rust code through webassembly. But i dont think this is a full replacement for JavaScript as of yet.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 31 points 6 days ago (2 children)

This is "the gadget," an implosion type nuclear bomb detonated in the trinity test, the first nuclear bomb test on earth (that we know of, heh).

It's shown partially assembled inside the 100-foot test tower where it would eventually be detonated.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 25 points 2 weeks ago

So the right is against self-service now? wtf

You may want to look into Grover Norquist and his organisation Americans for Tax Reform. It is one of the most influential political lobbying groups in the United States, and it has the support of essentially the entire republican party. They essentially consider tax to be evil on principle and ask every politician to sign a pledge opposing any tax hike.

ATR is strongly against automatic filing, as they want to keep taxes difficult and complicated to stoke anti-tax sentiment. That is to say, they fear that if filing tax is easier, citizens would be less likely to fight taxes in the way that the ATR wants (mostly they like a low flat tax, because it's simple and good for rich people).

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 2 points 2 weeks ago

Technically just a little bit different from fracking as used in the oil/gas industry, since it doesn't create new fractures in the rock, it only expands existing ones. However it carries basically the same risks with at most a difference in magnitude.

There's an interesting case in Switzerland where they tried to drill one over an historically active fault line, without first doing a seismic risk assessment.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 23 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of "CO2 emission credits" from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don't emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn't need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 9 points 3 weeks ago

The CEO said on twitter that even their $200/month pro plan was losing money on every customer: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/

I don't see how they would become profitable any time soon if their costs are that high. Maybe if they adapt the innovations of deepseek to their own model.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Most likely there is a separate censor LLM watching the model output. When it detects something that needs to be censored it will zap the output away and stop further processing. So at first you can actually see the answer because the censor model is still "thinking."

When you download the model and run it locally it has no such censorship.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 4 points 3 weeks ago

Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don't depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there's a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

I think the developers didn't like the "surprise" extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I was curious what the official supposed purpose of these tokens was, since i have a hard time believing anyone would seriously see themselves buying anything with these at any point. The official website is hilarious. They're not claiming any purpose at all, you're just buying an "official meme":

Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol "$TRUMP" and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency. See Terms & Conditions Here, See Card Allocation Here

The grift is fully out in the open I guess.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn't really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

"Saving Europe from Hitler" paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.

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