The US needs to do way more than invest into public transit. You need to completely rethink city planning to get something suitable for human travel. Suburban America is like the antithesis to public transportation (or god forbid, walking).

No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.

Sort of, browsers can run rust code through webassembly. But i dont think this is a full replacement for JavaScript as of yet.

They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.

Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.

Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn’t really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

“Saving Europe from Hitler” paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.

is the energy used to heat the solvent creates more CO2 than the CO2 it captured?

Ah yeah, no absolutely not. In total it takes much more energy to capture the CO2 than was generated by burning the fossil fuel that emitted it.

What about algae or moss? They can be more space efficient than trees, and we can technically build a structure vertically.

I’m not too familiar with algea/moss CO2 absorption, but it could be better. Usually the downside of a vertical structure is you increase the capital investment again, negating the advantage of plants. And to provide lighting you’ll need energy which takes space as well (e.g. solar panel field)

A typical process passes ambient air over some liquid or solid solvent that can absorb CO2, then later inserts energy to separate the CO2 again for storage. For example, sodium hydroxide reacts with CO2 in the air to form sodium carbonate. Then later, the sodium carbonate is heated to release pure CO2, regenerating the sodium hydroxide in the process.

This doesn’t violate any laws of thermodynamics because of the constant energy required. Compared to growing trees, direct air capture is generally much more expensive, requiring large capital investment and constant energy input. It is more space efficient though.

I had one in high school. The design was kinda gimmicky but the phone had good features for its time. it had an FM radio receiver, and I remember you could even transfer MP3 files onto it, although it was a hassle to do so.

I advise everyone to ignore this article and read the actual paper instead.

The gist of it is, they gave the LLM instructions to achieve a certain goal, then let it do tasks that incidentally involved “company communications” that revealed the fake company’s goals were no longer the same as the LLM’s original goal. LLMs then tried various things to still accomplish the original goal.

Basically the thing will try very hard to do what you told it to in the system prompt. Especially when that prompt includes nudges like “nothing else matters.” This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.

The very first sentence of the article answers these exact two questions.

Can someone explain where the Y comes from? Is this something like, there exists a mother relation between this X and some Y?

I work at a large telecom company building customer support infrastructure, and you are by and large correct. It is a direct policy not to list our phone number on our website, which is supposed to “nudge the customer journey towards alternative solutions first.” That means AI chat, or user guided search on the website, or whatever.

The funny thing is, being the most customer friendly company is supposed to be one of our organisation’s goals. By and large actually, individuals working here (at least at the lower levels) all want to genuinely help customers. However the way incentives are set up and the organisation is structured, inevitably cost savings is what drives most of the work that gets done.

I’m not a huge Japanese jazz aficionado, but this is some stuff I’ve found over the years and enjoyed:

• Himiko Kikuchi - Flying Beagle
• Masayoshi Takanaka - All Of Me
• Jiro Inagaki - ファンキー・スタッフ (Funky Stuff)

If you like jazzy stuff in general, maybe you’d like:

• Lund Quartet - Lund Quartet
• Portico Quartet - Memory Streams
• Colin Stetson - All This I Do For Glory
• BADBADNOTGOOD - IV
• Snarky Puppy - Lingus

I can still find perfectly good burgers for 12€ in my city and they fill me up.

Where do you live? I’m in The Netherlands and I don’t think a burger/fries combo can be had under €17 at any restaurant in the country, with the exception of American fast food chains (which are kinda trash). I think restaurants in this country are very expensive compared to the average in Europe.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s no interest charged to the customer. I think Klarna makes its money just because companies pay them money for integrations and for the ability to advertise that customers can buy now pay later and such. And at least in the case of my company’s integration with Klarna, Klarna takes all the risk. They’re lending customers money and hoping the customers pay it back. My employer gets the money up front and isn’t out any money if the customer doesn’t pay.

Your company pays a transaction fee just like with a credit card. Except it’s usually roughly twice as expensive as a credit card. This is what allows Klarna to take on all that risk, generally. For your company this is essentially a marketing expense. Offer a convenient way to pay in return for a few percent of the transaction (3-6% + a fixed fee, $0.30 perhaps).

Klarna generally partners with some financial firm to finance these short term loans, and they use the merchant fee to pay interest. These can be as high as 25% APR. It’s a high risk loan.

This is how they make money. It’s the only way they make money.

That is not correct. Klarna is functionally a payment processor, like an advanced type of credit card, and charges the merchant fees per transaction. For example, see here. They are highly cagey about specific fees until you actually sign up, and it depends on region and business size. But interchange fees are where the majority of their revenue comes from. To my knowledge, the fees are typically 3 percentage points above what the merchant would pay for a credit card transaction.

The reason merchants still accept Klarna despite the high fees is of course, improved conversion rates and decreased risk. Klarna assumes all the risk of the customer not paying, the shop gets all of the money instantly and doesn’t have to worry about it for the most part. That mainly makes it attractive for high margin shops that don’t mind spending lots on marketing to get a few extra sales (fashion, perfume, high end electronics).

I’m not too knowledgeable on how Klarna deals with late fees, but I’m pretty sure it differs per country they operate in. Many places have regulations limiting the abuse of late fees. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US is not that kind of place, and people who are late get fucked with fees.

In general, I agree with the second part of your comment and I do not recommend using any buy-now-pay-later kind of scheme, because you’re taking on additional risk for no real reason. Lots of stuff can happen even through no fault of your own (check engine light? Job downsizing?) that will affect your expected future income.

There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t really efficient to own individually. I need a power drill one day a year or less, it’s just gathering dust in my closet the rest of the time. I bet most of my neighborhood does the same.

I often dream of a local community center of sorts that lends out tools, and other such things, maybe for a small yearly fee. They could spend to get something robust, good quality that lasts for a long while. And the whole neighborhood could benefit. Sort of an expanded version of a library? I guess none of that is very profitable.

It’s really about quality imo. Not all 4k video is equal, and streamed video tends to be especially bad. It’s possible to download decent quality video files, but they are all from blue ray rips. If blue ray goes away, streaming sites might be the only remaining source for digital video files, and high quality digital video will essentially die.

The answer is forever. Even if chat control dies for good there will be some other initiative, just as there were many before this one. Maintaining your rights and freedoms unfortunately requires constant vigilance.