I wouldn't highly object to either but if I had to pick one I'd definitely clear the former.

The competition ended over a decade ago, and 15GB stayed 15GB even though the price of providing it dropped 5x.

Even though they're near the top, none of those companies are "competitive" in my book.

Nevertheless the joke is already dead. There's no reason not to explain.

You can do it with 0-3 digits of license cost too.

There's no sane way the business overhead more than doubles things.

So while I would say 15GB is pretty typical, I would not say it's competitive. I would say the competition died in 2013.

The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.

To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes, and you're talking about 2^64 blocks.

Edit: Though confusingly the second part talked about 2^128 blocks.

Also these days I'd assume 4KB blocks instead of 512 bytes.

If we instead consider a million 18TB hard drives, and estimate they each need 8 watts for 20 hours to fill up, 2^64 bytes take 160MWh to write on modern hardware. And they'll weigh 700 tons.

Edit: The quote is inconsistent about whether it wants to talk about bytes or blocks, so add or subtract a factor of about a thousand depending on what you want.

Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing.

This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?

Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.

> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?

You can avoid building adjacent to cities.

> would you live in Chernobyl city now?

Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?

Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.

> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.

Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!

> So it's not the standards that are the problem.

There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.

I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?

According to what?

We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.

> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.

I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.

They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.

Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.

> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.

And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.

> If your drive is over-provisioned (eg 960GB instead of 1024GB) then it's not needed.

I disagree. That much space isn't a ton when it comes to absorbing the wear of background writes. And normal use ends up with garbage sectors sprinkled around inflating your data size, which makes write amplification get really bad as you approach 100% utilization and have to GC more and more. 6% extra is in the range where more will meaningfully help.

> Leaving 100GB of 1TB drive is like buying a sneakers but not wearing them because they would wear.

50GB is like $4 of space the last time most people bought an SSD. Babying the drive with $4 is very far from refusing to use it at all. The same for 100GB on a 4TB drive.