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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • cheaper,

    Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.

    [more] reliable

    There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.

    and safer alternatives

    Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.

    As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.




  • The “deadly sin” of pride is arrogance, haughtiness, thinking of yourself as more important than others. It’s not, like, being satisfied in your identity or accomplishments; that’s contentment and it’s definitely a virtue.

    1,600 years of translation and linguistic drift (and probably not a little bit of puritanical nonsense) crossed some wires.

    Also all of the “deadly sins” are made up bullcrap. Some of them are in the Bible, but some of them are just, like…some guy’s opinion. Seriously, sadness was one at one point, so clearly he had never read the book of Lamentations.







  • It’s an illusion. Not that many people care (which was the problem in November), but the ones who do are loud about it.

    The issue is one of education. The Republicans have been spewing non-stop misinformation, and the populace is too uneducated to understand the difference. When people actually know what’s going on and understand it, they overwhelmingly oppose conservative policies. Which is why Project 2025 wants to take a sledgehammer to public education.

    If Democrats diverted all of their advertising budget toward remedial education of the electorate, I think they’d find themselves in a much better state in 2028.






  • I’m not saying it’s a matter of desire. It’s a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.

    Further, ux design is a less “atomic” process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.

    What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should donate to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.