They had (still have I think) a rather nasty problem with storing lots of contaminated water in leaking containers on the Fukushima site. Storing nuclear waste might be 'easy' when stuff goes as planned. I still think it's completely unrealistic to think you can store something for thousands of years. I'm quite glad the ancient egyptians didn't stash caches of plutonium in various places, for example.

>Better reactors were already invented

Better reactors are invented. But as Belgium's crumbling reactors show (and Fukushima, obv.), people are hesitant to spend money on actually building those.

A theoretical better reactor is nice, but you can't just handwave reality away. And the reality is that there are lots of practical risks in the practical application of nuclear power. Mainly because of politics, maybe. But still that's reality.

We need nuclear, but we should strive to use something better in the end.

And ad hominem is when you dismiss his points because he might have done something immoral in a completely unrelated field.

As an aside: From a 'clickability' perspective the app menus in the top bar are nice of course and I theoretically agree that's the best place for an app menu. But in practice I really dislike macos' 'separated' app menus when a window is not maximized.

I know various people that to this day say that fish do not feel pain (because they want to catch them with a hook through their mouth without feeling guilty). That seems a ridiculous notion to me, as pain is extremely evolutionary useful and a fish displays all sorts of pain-like behaviour when hooked. But still, since we can't really look inside the fish' mind people can make themselves believe they don't feel pain.

If you ask the right AI if it's conscious, it's very well possible it will say yes. Because it was trained on the world literature maybe and behaves as learned. Is there a difference with us? I'm not so sure.

To me it's kinda weird the ethical implications for striving for AGI are so little talked about.

The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as higly correlated or even the same thing. But now we have need of a separation between the two.

If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well.

We're definitely not there yet, but at what point does turning off an AI become the same as killing a being? I think that's not being talked about enough. Sure LLMs are just prediction engines. But so are we. Our brains are prediction engines tuned by evolution to do the best possible prediction of the near future to maximize survival. We are definitely conscious. But a housefly, is that conscious? What makes the difference? it's hard to tell.

Otoh, an AI has no evolutionary reason to have the concept of fear/suffering so maybe it's more like the douglas adams creature that doesn't mind to be killed?

So imo not really a political problem.

> Nuclear waste is small and solid

As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.

I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.

I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.

On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.

All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.

Not ideal, but also: shit happens? It's always a balancing act choosing the lesser of multiple evils and most of the time it seems to work ok-ish, which is probably the best we can hope for ;-P

This trickery is called binfmt_misc , which is a linux kernel system to associate random binary files with custom userspace 'interpreters'

I have had it working in the past. And while it is kinda neat I prefer manually running 'wine program.exe' to have a bit more control.

I have seen reports that a binfmt_misc setup + wine is good enough to get infected by certain windows viruses ;-P

So while linguistically it's the same system as using 'Washington' or 'Moscow', Brussels is specifically in the bad spot where it gets blamed for impopular stuff but never praised for popular things.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." - Socrates

I think swearwords are very useful. Both when used of emphasis, comedy or (their original use) venting frustation or pain.

And they have secondary uses as well. When someone swears a lot in inappropriate situations you can tell they are generally inconsiderate persons. And when somebody gets very upset by swearwords you know they are probably overly religious. For both things it's nice the be forewarned ;-P

A license is what it says in the license, nothing extra. It's a legal document not a moral guideline.

I do think it's a very good idea to always use the GPL (even though commercially minded types always get their panties in a bunch about the GPL) for any user-facing software, to force everybody to 'play fair and share'. The only reason to use MIT imho is for a library implementing some sort of standard where you want that standard used by as many people as possible.

I don't understand people who use MIT for their project and then complain some commercial firm takes their contributions and runs with it. If that's not what you want don't use that license.

Apart from license terms and moral obligations being a bad mix, companies don't have morals. Don't get me wrong, I think they should have! But they don't.

People have morals. Groups of people (a company, a country , a mob) not so much. Sadly.

LCDs that were just constantly lit were so much easier on the eyes than a CRT where every bright pixel is flashing at 60Hz.

But one thing is true: a low res game designed to look good on a CRT looks much worse on a low res LCD. CRTs being a blurry mess gave you free 'antialiasing'.