Ah, yes, name calling. The sign that you’re winning a debate.

Can’t understand we’ve gotten this far and no one has mentioned Helium.

A 286 is enough horsepower to calculate changes in flight profile. Europe has launched independent missiles (France for SLBMs and Europe at large for rockets) that need exact calculations for splashdown since the 60s. And for a nuclear weapon you just up the tonnage if you’re not super precise. Anywhere within 1 km is fine and we’ve been doing this with slide rules.

I mean honestly, it’ll take you 2 minutes with an AI to realise I’m right. Try it out.

A gyroscope is not a computer chip, it’s a gyroscope.

Celestial navigation is based on cameras and processing that can be done by the kind of chip that sits on a bank card.

I think at this point nothing more is gained from this discussion. Have a good day.

I mean, what?! How do you think France built its SLBMs in 1972? With Nvidia chips? lol.

Its a ballistic missile - we’ve known ballistic trajectories calculations since artillery became common. Yeah, they get more precise with star navigation and gyroscopes but if you can launch a rocket, you have to know roughly where it lands. The rest is just mega tonnage.

With respect, humanity has been able to navigate ICBMs before Nvidia chips came along. Not saying you’re wrong about something being stolen, but the link to ICBM navigation seems rather teneous.

They’re working on it.

Yeah it is. Nuclear power and renewables should do this.

Not with that attitude, that’s for sure!

In Kramer voice: Oh, I backup.

On a RAID.

Backed up nightly to Backblaze in US and OVH in Germany. Recovery exercise once every year.

Backed up every 6 months to offline storage, for worm protection.

It takes an asteroid killer before I’m at risk.

I hope.

Self hosting email is horrid. Well self hosting email is not that hard now with Stalwart and other servers in a box exist. But getting your email accepted by any remote server require a fair amount of work.

The best alternative I have found to Gmail is Fastmail. They now offer EU hosting. Proton would have been an option too but they’re losing the plot.

Fastmail is genuinely the best web client I’ve come across. I have to use Gmail for work so I know it well and compared to Fastmail it’s basically Slowmail.

Long time PhotoPrism user here, really curious what you find slow or unclean about it? Maybe I should switch.

And that’s why we self host.

Subtitles or die, agree!!!

Surely the researchers noticed the skulls on their caps and asked themselves if they were the baddies?

It clearly is a bubble. But that doesn’t automatically mean AI is useless. The .com bubble was the biggest of them all, but lots of companies survived and business largely moved online. The data centres (which nobody likes but which is clearly providing some value to somebody, whether we like it or not) don’t disappear overnight if the bubble bursts.

Behave

Storage isn’t a technological problem anymore?!

Let’s take a country like the UK, which is well ahead in the renewable transition compared to most other countries. In the last 3 years we’ve had 619 periods where renewables covered less than than 50% of our mix, the longest lasting 19 days (October-November 2024), where the average cover was 16%. Let’s work out on the basis of just that single dunkelflaute as an instructive example.

To see us through that period Britain would have needed 12 TWh of storage. How much is that? Well, we have 0.04 TWh of total storage, across pumped storage and batteries (pumped storage almost double our grid batteries - and when I say grid batteries that counts for every single battery installation at home too, because they are tracked when they are installed in the G98/G99 application).

So you need to make our storage 300x larger just in Britain. And don’t say “we will just import electricity from other countries”, the dunkelflaute covered almost all of Europe.

How did we get through that one? Gas, gas, gas, burning all across Europe, plus a lot of coal in Eastern Europe.

Could we conceivably install 300x more storage in every country (bear in mind the situation is worse in most other countries, so adopting 300x across Europe is optimistic)?

Yes sure, everything is conceivable. You could dig out every mountain for water storage and strip mine the whole planet for the metals you need for batteries.

But if you add nuclear to the mix, prices fall dramatically, since nuclear adds baseload, meaning your dunkelflautes get much smaller and fewer. It’s a lot more conceivable with nuclear in the mix.

Look, I’m not one of those “nuclear will fix everything” people. Nuclear has downsides, but so does everything else. The key is to mix upside and downsides, not rely on one single thing out of philosophy (whether renewable or nuclear).

If you think “storage is solved” I urge you to speak to someone who works in grid management.

New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.

Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.

My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.