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locallost commented on Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC   eesc.europa.eu/en/news-me... · Posted by u/mpweiher
Archelaos · 3 days ago
Why is HN so full of nuclear energy trolls?
locallost · 2 days ago
Because it's technical and an advanced form of technology which appeals to tech people and where normal people have an "irrational" fear of it. And also IT and conversely HN is full of people who have trouble fitting in and pride themselves on being rational, and have made it a career and lifestyle of going the other way as everyone else.

Which is fine, except putting hopes into a technology that has failed repeatedly for 60 years is in itself irrational.

HN would do itself a favor if it learned the lessons of "worse is better" and applied it to, well, almost anything. In this case, a moonshot to advance nuclear globally might bring realistic results in 10-15 years. By that time the world will already be decarbonized by renewables as it's already happening. At best nuclear might be that last missing piece to get to 100%, but even this I would no longer bet on. There is already insane growth in undeveloped countries which will push demand even further. Renewables are ridiculously cheap.

locallost commented on Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC   eesc.europa.eu/en/news-me... · Posted by u/mpweiher
laurencerowe · 2 days ago
Energy consumption does not equal useful work though. Much of that non-electrical energy consumption is wasted, e.g. car engines are only about 30% efficient and heat pumps can provide 3-5x the amount of warmth compared to the electrical input required to run. So we’re probably looking at around a 2x increase in electricity consumption rather than 5x.
locallost · 2 days ago
Add to it the fact that things get more and more efficient, it's questionable if even a 2x increase is in the cards. The EU has added 10 million EVs in the last decade and total electricity consumption hasn't gone up at all. Norway's car sales are majority EV since around five years and over 90% now, and total consumption of electricity went up around 10%.

It could be, for the EU not Norway at least, that there was a consumption uptick but it's hidden because people charge their cars with their own solar panels. But even this is indicative of how the grid will work in the future.

locallost commented on Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC   eesc.europa.eu/en/news-me... · Posted by u/mpweiher
sailingparrot · 3 days ago
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.

This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?

locallost · 3 days ago
If you had followed the crisis from 2022 when a quarter of the reactors were out of service, you wouldn't ask that question. They had to fly in welders from the US because they were not able to fix the problem... Also, every new nuclear project done by the French in this century has been a complete disaster. Flamanville, Olkiluoto and now Hinkley Point C.
locallost commented on Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components   react.dev/blog/2025/12/11... · Posted by u/sangeeth96
dizlexic · 3 days ago
I'm not going to let go my argument with Dan Abramov on x 3 years ago where he held up rsc as an amazing feature and i told him over and over he was making a foot gun. tahdah!

I'm a nobody PHP dev. He's a brilliant developer. I can't understand why he couldn't see this coming.

locallost · 3 days ago
I'm not defending React and this feature, and I also don't use it, but when making a statement like that the odds are stacked in your favor. It's much more likely that something's a bad idea than a good idea, just as a baseball player will at best fail just 65-70% of the time at the plate. Saying for every little thing that it's a bad idea will make you right most of the time.

But sometimes, occasionally, a moonshot idea becomes a home run. That's why I dislike cynicism and grizzled veterans for whom nothing will ever work.

locallost commented on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI   mistral.ai/news/devstral-... · Posted by u/pember
lagniappe · 6 days ago
locallost · 5 days ago
> Ergo, models for the most part will only have a cursory knowledge of a spec that your browser will never be able to parse because that isn't the spec that won.

Browsers are able to parse a webpage from 1996. I don't know what the argument in the linked comment is about, but in this one, we discuss the relevance of creating a 1996 page vs a pelican on a a bicycle in SVG.

Here is Gemini when asked how to build a webpage from 1996. Seems pretty correct. In general I dislike grand statements that are difficult to back up. In your case, if models have only a cursory knowledge of something (what does this mean in the context of LLMs anyway), what exactly they were trained on etc.

The shortened Gemini answer, the detailed version you can ask for yourself:

Layout via Tables: Without modern CSS, layouts were created using complex, nested HTML tables and invisible "spacer GIFs" to control white space.

Framesets: Windows were often split into independent sections (like a static sidebar and a scrolling content window) using Frames.

Inline Styling: Formatting was not centralized; fonts and colors were hard-coded individually on every element using the <font> tag.

Low-Bandwidth Design: Visuals relied on tiny tiled background images, animated GIFs, and the limited "Web Safe" color palette.

CGI & Java: Backend processing was handled by Perl/CGI scripts, while advanced interactivity used slow-loading Java Applets.

locallost commented on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI   mistral.ai/news/devstral-... · Posted by u/pember
lagniappe · 6 days ago
SVG is a current standard. Do not be coy just to satisfy your urge to disagree.
locallost · 6 days ago
The point stands. Whether or not the standard is current has no relevance for the ability of the "AI" to produce the requested content. Either it can or can't.
locallost commented on Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better   frequal.com/java/AppletsG... · Posted by u/pjmlp
kstrauser · 7 days ago
> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes

That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users.

It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.

locallost · 7 days ago
Yeah, a totally mind boggling statement, almost completely void of reality. I wasn't even tired of the crashes, it was just a totally awful experience of using them in every way. They took forever to load, were clunky to use and even just downright ugly because the UI had nothing to do with what you usually got to use, and was a lot worse. The idea was good on paper, but the implementation sucked.

Everyone, well almost everyone apparently, was relieved we didn't have to deal with any of that anymore.

locallost commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off   businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9
snake_doc · 12 days ago
China added ~90GW of utility solar per year in last 2 years. There's ~400-500GW solar+wind under construction there.

It is possible, just may be not in the U.S.

Note: given renewables can't provide base load, capacity factor is 10-30% (lower for solar, higher for wind), so actual energy generation will vary...

locallost · 12 days ago
I am a huge proponent of renewables, but you cannot compare their capacity in GW with other energy sources because their output is variable and not always maximal. To realistically get 100GW in solar you would need at least 500GW of panels.

On the other hand, I think we will not actually need 100GW of new installations because capacity can be acquired by reducing current usage by making it more efficient. The term negawatt comes to mind. A lot of people are still in the stone age when it comes to this even though it was demonstrated quite effectively by reduced gas use in the US after the oil crisis in the 70s. Which basically recovered to the pre crisis levels only recently.

High gas prices caused people to use less and favor efficiency. The same thing will happen with electricity and we'll get more capacity. Let the market work.

locallost commented on Cherry gives up German production and wants to sell core division   heise.de/en/news/Cherry-g... · Posted by u/jsheard
constantcrying · 17 days ago
The Energiewende was a total failure and a complete disaster for Germany. People often make this discussions about renewables vs. fossil energy sources, but this is totally misleading.

The Energiewende was completely mismanaged and if you have any inclination towards renewables you should hate the German government for it. Here are the mistakes:

- The German government only subsidized renewable production, by guaranteeing a fixed price. This means that energy storage was completely neglected, leading to very high fluctuations in energy price. German industry had to adapt, by only operating under certain wind/sun conditions.

- They sold out their key renewable energy manufacturing to China. One would think that it would be prudent to keep solar panel production in Germany at all cost, when you are betting your future on it. But apparently nobody was concerned to sell it out to China. The same goes for letting Windturbine manufacturers go bankrupt.

- Prematurely shutting down nuclear. The loss of the nuclear plants meant that on-demand energy generation became more difficult. Further increasing problems with energy prices during periods of darkness and little sun.

I am not against Germany relying on renewables. To be honest I think it is a good thing for multiple reasons, among them is also the fact, that it gives Germany further autonomy from importing fossil fuels from either the US or Russia. But the way this transition was performed was a total failure. The people responsible either lacked basic understanding or willfully ignored them. Attributing recent economic hardship to the Energiewende is true to some part, but the real cause is a persistent failure of politics.

locallost · 16 days ago
The Energiewende is a total success on a global scale, a beacon of hope for the entire world, something Germans can be proud of. They did something, told the entire world "this is the way" and the entire world followed. Nuclear energy and whether it was retired prematurely or not is nothing more than a wet fart, a banal point of contention, a premature optimization and thus root of all evil. Big problems were solved, and in a few years nobody will remember minor decisions. Energy storage being neglected didn't change anything because as we see now it's now accelerating because there is so much free electricity. Solar panels can still be made outside of China, that they are being built there is a consequence of living in a market economy, and they are just better at it currently. I thought gaining these efficiencies was the point of a free market. But again, there is no real secret knowledge in making them, so if need be they can be made domestically. Whether by chance or planned, Germany hit the nail squarely on the head.
locallost commented on Cherry gives up German production and wants to sell core division   heise.de/en/news/Cherry-g... · Posted by u/jsheard
constantcrying · 18 days ago
I did not even mention energy prices in my post. But it is a basic truth that high energy prices reduce the competitiveness of industry.

>and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices

Any person who thinks that this is any more than a figleaf lacks basic economic understanding. Where does the German government get money? From German industry. The industry price is a tax break.

But you are also right, just continuously talking about the price of energy is another way to avoid talking about the structural issues. Lack of cost competitiveness does not just come from differences in the price of electricity.

The hard truth is that the Chinese are very good at manufacturing. Even for high quality products. For decades they have only gotten better and have taken over more and more industries, they did this by being cheaper and better, while also innovating. The future of the German industry depends on rising to that challenge and actually being able to stay better than the Chinese.

If you work somewhere in German industry, a phrase you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change, to try new things and to embrace new technologies. This protects German industry from fads, which quickly fade, but it also means that it is always at risk of drastically falling behind when it comes to genuinely superior ways of working.

locallost · 18 days ago
You didn't mention it, but it was mentioned somewhere else and is a typical response. My main point is that these things are complex and can't really be reduced to a simple sentence. As for the electricity itself, most countries have cheap electricity because of subsidies. The issue with German "high" electricity price was never that it was truly high, it was that the actual cost was on the actual bill. This is typically not true.

I don't work in the industry, but I agree with this assessment. I don't want to reduce all Germans to a stereotype, but I agree there is just a lot of inertia and being successful because it used to be successful. Like e.g. Intel, and it will eventually run out. The whole Europe reminds of the tired part in that wired vs tired meme. People live a good life, which is good, but it makes them want to strive to preserve that. So no wonder they trust their fortunes to someone like Friedrich Merz, a bean counter, whose biggest accomplishment in life was that he submitted a tax report on a "Bierdeckel". That's not the way to go forward.

One of the last worldwide relevant things coming out of Germany was the Energiewende, yet many people outright reject it because it interferes with their comfort and the way it used to be done. But in reality either by luck or genius, completely nailed it and was the first in creating a completely new world. But then nothing.

u/locallost

KarmaCake day3069May 3, 2019View Original