Thorium-232 has an extremely long half life (longer than the age of the universe) and it’s reasonably abundant. That’s the isotope useful for the thorium fuel cycle.

So it’s not quite that bad for threading this needle. The fuel cycle is a little more complicated than uranium–it’s not fertile as it is–and that could slow down R&D of a new nuclear program by getting stuck at some step.

Thanks. There’s way too many people who don’t see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.

They fight amongst themselves, too.

They’re all sociopaths. You can use that fact to predict how they function.

Yes, that’s probably correct. It’ll be late in the race, because both of them are pig headed and want the other one to do it. That will only drag down whomever does end up staying in. It’ll be a glorious game of political chicken. I’m ordering all the popcorn now.

The general election won’t have ranked choice. Adams and Cuomo may end up splitting the “willing to vote for corrupt dirtbag” ticket and let Mamdani cruise to victory.

We can dream.

My numbers were wrong:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is “soft costs”, and labor is included in it, but it’s a pretty small fraction of it. The “other” soft costs are the big thing–stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn’t even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.

At least it’s a testable hypothesis. That’s way farther than most pseudoscience does.

If HR people unionized, I might just toss them in the same category as police unions. They are mobilized against the working class, and we don’t need to show solidarity with them.

IIRC, this sort of thing has been floated before. The issue is that you can’t just focus that much light on the solar cell. It’ll burn out.

Honestly, we don’t need the technology to get any better than it is. It’s nice, but not necessary. Labor costs of deployment are the biggest limiting factor.

C started as B, which came from BCPL. The successor should be called “P”.

“USB P” would be easily confused with “USB PD”. The USB Implementers Forum would consider this a feature.

I think that’s what they mean, but it’s not a well written headline.

Whenever some fundie says something about sexual education, replace it with food in the argument.

Nutritional education should be a private matter between a parent and child.

Teaching about food in school encourages kids to eat more food.

We don’t make this sort of argument about literally any other subject. The very fact that they make these arguments shows they are putting sex in a special place, and will be completely incompetent at actually talking to their kids about sex.

People taking care of each other less is not a good sign.

We had a real union before. If there was a natural disaster in California or Texas or Florida or New York, we all pitched in to help. That’s what federal taxes that go to FEMA do.

That’s breaking down. No matter why it’s happened or who is responsible, this is a bad sign.

Do you leave auto formatting on and deal with Confluence making bad decisions, or leave it off and have to manually set all the formatting?

I go for the second option, but I’m not sure it’s less irritating or not.

GitHub tickets are fine.

Jira is complicated because PMs want it to do everything. It can, but there’s no good reason for it.

I get to say that I’ve truly made it as a programmer. The reason is that I wrote around 75 lines of Rust, came back a year later, and I could see exactly how it works.

In case you’re wondering, it’s a command line Slack client for sending notifications. Colored highlights and everything.

My company sends out emails like “vibe it up” with links to their vibe coding workshops.

I’m getting the impression that people need it explained that “vibe coding” is not supposed to be a complement.

Take Titanic, where the movie is a romance that happens to be set in a historical event.

Now imagine that instead of a director who really loves the ocean, it’s a director who really loves blowing shit up. That’s Pearl Harbor, and you would be correct for avoiding it with violence if necessary.