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Cake day: July 5th, 2024

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  • skibidi@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldLinux is not ready
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    2 days ago

    Linux isn’t ready.

    While many things will work ‘out of the box’, many won’t. Hell, for like 3 months HDR was causing system-wide crashes on Plasma for Nvidia cards, so the devs just disabled the HDR options until there was an upstream fix.

    There are still a host of resume-from-sleep issues, Wayland support is still spotty, and most importantly - not every piece of software will run.

    Linux is my daily driver, I have learned to live and love the jank. My wife uses windows and does not want to be confronted with a debugging challenge 5% of the time when she turns on her computer, and I think that is fair.

    These kinds of posts paper over lots of real issues and can be counterproductive. If someone jumps into the ecosystem without understanding, these kinds of posts only set them up for frustration and disappointment.


  • Bro it isn’t worth it. I respect what you are trying to do, but Lemmy is an echo chamber on these things. You are completely right in what you are saying, but you’re wasting your time commenting here.

    Clearly, if Kamala had won she would have personally resurrected every dead Palestinian and single-handedly repaired all the infrastructure. Let’s conveniently ignore that she was Vice President in an administration that circumvented Congress multiple times to deliver arms with less oversight, that (almost) every US elected official has vocally supported Israel’s actions for 70+ years, and that Kamala herself committed to nothing of substance on the topic.






  • It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.

    Let’s say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?

    According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.

    So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the ‘vote blue no matter who’ dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.


  • The only way a political party changes is when they stop winning.

    If Democrats think they will win by being Republicans who hate the gays a little bit less, then that is what they’ll do. They were just shown that that isn’t a winning strategy, so we’ll see if the party changes tack or doubles down.

    “You monster, it is your fault you gave us Trump”

    I make my voting preferences known in every primary, state, and federal election. I actively volunteer for candidates I like. The party knows what will earn my vote, if they wanted it. If they make the strategic bet that getting my vote will cost them more from somewhere else, then that is on them.

    “That is so entitled, how could you”

    Have you ever considered that the reason both parties seem so out of touch with mainstream thought is because they have 10s of millions of people who will vote regardless of policy, thereby preventing the parties from understanding what is actually effective in getting them votes?

    Elections are an information gathering mechanism.


  • Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:

    If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn’t strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.

    The dollars follow from that physical reality.

    The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.

    The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).

    The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.

    The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we’d never build solar panels again.

    These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense… a fusion power plant the size of Earth’s moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.



  • Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.

    I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been ‘unlimited free energy’, but that isn’t quite accurate.

    Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be ‘unlimited’ in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.

    However that ‘free’ part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly ‘innefficient’, most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the ‘unlimited’ value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.

    Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let’s call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let’s call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let’s call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let’s call that E.

    For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:

    (E-O)*L - C > 0.

    In other words, it isn’t sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it ‘pays’ for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn’t actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.

    This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.


  • The biggest factor is diet - a large portion of ingested water comes from food.

    Someone who snacks on carrots is going to need to drink a very different amount of water to stay hydrated as someone who eats jerky and crackers.

    There’s also obviously differences in kidney function, salt retention, even just body size. Current medical advice is to just drink when you are thirsty, which works for just about everyone.


  • If they weren’t a fascist ethnostate led by a madman, they probably wouldn’t have launched the war in the first place. The utterly misguided belief in their superiority is what made them blind to the (rather obvious) conclusion that they didn’t have the resources to conquer Europe (mostly) single-handedly. Let alone take Italy along with them.

    Hell, the only reason it was even - somewhat - close at points was Hitler’s insistence on a blitz through the Ardennes to attack France. The generals thought it was a terrible plan (and it was, that’s a big reason why the French were unprepared and got essentially knocked out of the war in weeks).

    WW2 is interesting precisely because the big numbers only point one way - a complete defeat of Germany and Japan by much larger and better-supplied powers. But there were multiple points where tactical developments could have become strategic victories - which are rather rare occurrences in the study of war.

    E.g. the Nazis didn’t have the resources to conquer the Soviet Union, but if the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow had gone their way, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have maintained a functioning government. Likewise Japan was woefully under prepared to defeat the US in the Pacific, but if the US carriers had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, maybe the Japanese hedgehog strategy to fortify the Pacific islands works out.

    Of course, once the bomb was ready then nothing else matters.

    Ultimately, it was all massive tragedy the likes of which I hope we never see again. The counterfactuals are fun to play out, if you can abstract away the millions of deaths in all sides.


  • Thermo-electrochemical cycles.

    The idea is simple: the favorability of a chemical reaction is a function of temperature, some reactions are more favorable at high temperatures, some at lower. For electrochemical reactions (e.g. batteries) this means a change in voltage at different temperatures. Some reactions have higher voltages, some lower. By choosing a pair of redox reactions such that the direction of charge transfer can be reversed within a specified temperature envelope, one can create a thermal engine that directly converts heat to electrical energy without requiring a turbine.

    There’s lots of research on this, sometimes called the ‘omnivorous’ flow battery.


  • Completely correct. There is also a (much rather in the US) ScD degree - Doctor of science.

    In the US, it is often identical to a PhD. If your institution offers it, you just check a box at the end of your program on whether you want a PhD or ScD. In Europe, an ScD is a higher degree than a PhD and requires some extra work to obtain.



  • skibidi@lemmy.worldtounions@sh.itjust.worksHow was this a surprise?
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    2 months ago

    This particular deal is a good thing for the country. Metals production is incredibly capital intensive and margins on products are low (this is base production, not the high value-add specialty alloys). That means the business needs to spend billions to make millions in net profit.

    This is exactly the kind of business that the American investor class lost patience with in the era of globalization, and even further with the rise of big tech - where it becomes possible to bootstrap billion-dollar businesses with millions in starting capital. Capital flight from manufacturing, and businesses with similar capex/opex/margin profiles has gutted the US manufacturing base and only a dwindling number of legacy players even operate - new entrants can’t get investment and either set up overseas or just never advance past the planning stage.

    The end result for US Steel has been decades of mismanagement and cost-cutting that have left the US without competitive base metals production - funds that should have been spent on R&D instead went to shareholders. This mismanagement has caught up to the business and it is now producing products of inferior quality and at higher prices than overseas suppliers who haven’t spent the last 3 decades avoiding investment in their own business. The ‘Buy American’ provisions and metals tariffs are basically the only reason it hasn’t folded already.

    Enter Nippon Steel, a company very used to operating in an environment with expensive energy, labor, and inputs. It wants to buy the US Steel assets (read steel plants and workers) and operate them as an independent subsidiary in order to gain more of foothold in the American market and be eligible for US defense contracts. This capital infusion is desperately needed as the current owners of the business have underinvested since the 80s. Somehow, this story gets twisted into some nativist drivel, and now the US gov is set in blocking the deal to score political points with the uninformed. What this means is we’ll be giving US Steel a taxpayer bailout in a few years, or it will go bankrupt, or the ghouls in charge will change their entire outlook and begin to treat it like a business to be managed and not a money sponge to be squeezed…



  • I’d be very careful relying on that site… just flipped through some of the build and it was very strange.

    E.g. they were recommending a $500 or $900 CASE at the highest tiers - not even good cases, you can get something less than half the price with better performance. They recommended a single pcie 4.0 SSD and a SPINNING HARD DRIVE for a motherboard with pcie 5.0 m2 slots. Recommending CPU coolers that are far, far in excess of requirements (a 3x140mm radiator for a 100W chip? Nonsense). Memory recommendations for AMD builds are also sus - DDR5 6000 CL30 is what those cups do best with, they were recommending DDR5600 CL32 kits for no reason.

    Just strange… makes me question the rest of their recommendations.