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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:

    That only covers around a third of Switzerland’s energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we’re talking about, if I’m not mistaken).

    France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:

    And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant’s owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a “deep” geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.

    I should mention that I’m not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.

    That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.

    Overall, I don’t trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now “unsafe to restart” because of the military activity in the region.

    The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.

    Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren’t found there either, but as least with “renewables” they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.

    I don’t know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.


  • Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.

    You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.

    Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even “official” ones.

    “Basic stuff” is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don’t have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.

    Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.

    Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.


  • For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

    I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.


  • Kinda disappointing.

    The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

    FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

    Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?


  • I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

    The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

    … unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?







  • Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I “fell” into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).

    So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.

    And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything “inside” the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can’t “see” more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.

    This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.

    Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I’m giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck “scale” for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don’t know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the “minimum size limit” beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.

    This is why I began this comment with “space and time might be continuous per se”; we just don’t conclusively know yet what “really” goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.


  • Yes, sway presents itself as a drop-in replacement for i3 (just built on top of wayland instead of xorg).

    I’ve used it on a Thinkpad laptop for close to 4 years, and on my desktop for the past 3.

    The only problems I’ve encountered are some apps not being Wayland-compatible; xwayland makes the rendering work for those but then things like sharing a window or the entire screen don’t always work. Notably, Discord’s sharing doesn’t work, but I can use OBS to record any entire screen since [the OBS devs] put in the work to properly support Wayland.


  • Behaving like a sexist pig != committing a robbery

    And frankly, as robberies are often a symptom of inequality, and historical racism has led members of certain “races” to have very few options for living a decent life, the “race” of a robber can be just as relevant as any other factor when discussing it.

    Especially if the discussion is about how to reduce the number of robberies occurring.