CO2 is bad for us long term. But there are plenty of other nasty combustion products that are extremely bad for humans in the short term. Which is why we have pollution and air quality regulations.

Portable generators don’t meet any of the stronger requirements that utility scale systems have to meet, because it’s assumed they’re only operated in small numbers for short periods of time. They’re not designed to safe to operate in large numbers over long periods of time in the same place. For that you need proper pollution controls

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48043149

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# Comments: 1

During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:

> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.

So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.

[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...

They don’t want the App Store filled with app that can’t be used by the vast majority of people that might see and download it.

I’m sure Apple could do everything that box does and more. But why bother designing, building and manufacturing your own specialist device when someone else already sells a perfectly good tool that does the job.

Don’t forget this is for use in a retail store by people who will have been given 5mins training on how to use the device. You want something that just requires a person to plug two phones in and hit a big “go” button. And it needs to work 99% of the time with zero messing around.

But if you have strong end-to-end encryption for messages, then you don’t have to care about the transport anymore, you assume they’re all compromised. At that point you might as well use the push notification system as your transport, given both OSs allow applications to intercept the push notification locally and decrypt it before it’s displayed to the user.

Apple support applications sending encrypted notifications, where the OS launches the app the decrypt the notification body locally and pass it back to the OS for display.

As for L3 packets going into the void. Yeah they’re gonna get lost, can’t be helped. But the server also isn’t going to get any L4 acks for those packets. So when a new L3 connection is created, and the L4 session recovered, the lost packet just get replayed over the new L3 connection.

iOS vs Android isn’t relevant when discussing hardware. It’s Apple vs Samsung etc. iOS doesn’t need majority market ownership for Apple to completely dominate their hardware competitors in a market.

Surely that’s a lot less hassle for all involved than having to get your bank to issue chargebacks on subscription renewals you forgot about?

While gofmt is “just” a formatting tool. The interesting part is that go code that doesn’t follow the go formatting standard is rejected by the go compiler. So not only does gofmt not have knobs, you can’t even fork it to add knobs, because the rest of the go ecosystem will outright reject code formatted in any other way.

It’s a rather extreme approach to opinionated tooling. But you can’t argue with the results, nobody writing go on any project ever worries about code formatting.

Moving tonnes of gold doesn’t look like huge pallets of gold with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a handful of supply crates.

I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular basis. Pretty normal for Navy’s to sail into the ports of allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold

The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.

I think this vastly underestimates how much of the build problem is actually a design problem.

If you want to build a bridge, the fact one already exists nearby covering a similar span is almost meaningless. Engineering is about designing things while using the minimal amount of raw resources possible (because cost of design is lower than the cost of materials). Which means that bridge in the other town is designed only within its local context. What are the properties of the ground it's built on? What local building materials exist? Where local can be as small as only a few miles, because moving vast quantities of material of long distances is really expensive. What specific traffic patterns and loadings it is built for? What time and access constraints existed when it was built?

If you just copied the design of a bridge from a different town, even one only a few miles up the road, you would more than likely end up with a design that either won't stand up in your local context, or simply can't be built. Maybe the other town had plenty of space next to the location of the bridge, making it trivial to bring in heavy equipment and use cranes to move huge pre-fabbed blocks of concrete, but your town doesn't. Or maybe the local ground conditions aren't as stable, and the other towns design has the wrong type of foundation resulting in your new bridge collapsing after a few years.

Engineering in other disciplines don't have the luxury of building for a very uniform, tightly controlled target environment where it's safe to make assumptions that common building blocks will "just work" without issue. As a result engineering is entirely a design problem, i.e. how do you design something that can actually be built? The building part is easy, there's a reason construction contractors get paid comparatively little compared to the engineers and architects that design what they're building.

Once-upon-a-time a "bright" bulb consumed 80W of power. Today we achieve the same light output with 8W of LEDs, and order of magnitude decrease in power consumption. Multiply that by every home, every street light, every office build, every airport, hospital and stadium. That kinda improvement in efficiency adds up very quickly.

Sure plenty of developed countries have deindustrialised, but most the heavy industry that been lost was lost before mass electrification. Arc furnaces, large scale aluminium production etc. These are all pretty modern technologies. If you look at the UK the only major steel foundry left is a gas fired blast furnace, we basically have zero arc furnaces, because we deindustrialised before the damn things we're being used for large scale steel production.

Electrification of heavy industry is a surprisingly recent trend, and is only really happening in countries that aren't deindustrialising, and view continual process improvement in heavy industry as an important long term activity.

So you have two opposed forces in action. Rapidly increasing demand for electricity consuming services, and rapidly increasing efficiency of those services. It also helps that a lot of that additional demand is only possible due to increased efficiency. Imagine if every phone was as power inefficient as an old Pentium 4. They would last about 30 mins and burn your hands in the process.

Even with datacentres and AI, there is huge economic pressure to increase the efficiency of the devices involved, and there’s been no slow down in year-on-year increases of compute/W, even if the total amount compute per chip isn’t as rapid as it used to be.

To quote the message from the universes creators to its creation “We apologise for the inconvenience”. Does seem to sum up Douglas Adam’s views on absurdity of life.

In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.

Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.

If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.

If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.