I used to enjoy using names from The Wheel of Time series, the forsaken especially. I’ll admit to spending a bit more time than was practical on the endeavor, but I think it sort of helped me “bond” and care more about them?
It’s a bit wearying to hear the old chestnuts trotted out here of all places. It seems like bad arguments and FUD never really change, they just finds new adherents.
Oh my god, popcorn lung is real! I thought that was a name for some fibrotic illness thst made your lungs look like popcorn, but it’s actually from popcorn.
This is a great example of what people here hate, while not hating the underlying technology. In the midst of a ludicrous series of ICO scams and proliferation of get-rich-quick coins, it’s very clearly false. For those of us who like our Libertarianism grounded in reality, the fantastical, counterfactual version peddled in cryptocurrency circles is almost offensive.
Or they recognize that for a human and generations of their descendants, 30,000 or 300 years doesn’t change anything for them. Either way it’s longer than the US has been a country for one metric. Both cases require similar solutions, long-term containment, and so both run into the same political inertia fielded by NIMBYism.
To claim otherwise is, as you would have it, lying.
More importantly, both are solved issues from a purely technical standpoint, it’s just that everyone wants someone else to deal with it. As a bonus, we can actually use fission to produce energy, right now. There’s no issue of, “it will be great when...” grid storage is solved along with intermittency for renewables. There’s no, “it will be great when...” fusion is producing energy rather than heavily parasitizing from the grid. There’s no waiting until we’re completely screwed by climate change effects.
It does look like a fun game, and I’d like to play it, but not with the obscene monetization strategy they employ. These modern freemium games are downright toxic, and the only winning move is not to play.
It’s probably unfair to compare one of many means of communication online with a singular activity burned into the fabric of our genetic ancestry for hundreds of millions of years. Or: it’s like saying you shouldn’t eat bacon, not that you shouldn’t eat at all.
And if we’re willing to deal with that waste, then we already have a viable source of atomic energy from fission! The future is whenever we decide to deal with the problem instead of leaving it pools or casks to solve itself.
@csallen: Be willing to actually dispose of it. We need to commit the money and political will to set up a single disposal site. Right now it’s a NIMBY nightmare so we get the worst outcome.
The numbers so far, including human intervention rates do not support the claim that autonomy beats humans. With a limited dataset, the suggestion is very much in the other direction. These vehicles may someday be better than us, but “someday” isn’t today. In particular I think Uber had a human intervention on avg every 13mi.
Edit: I’d love to hear a counterpoint, although of course I accept that’s not required. Like the discussion about fusion, people seem to argue from a point in the future when all of the problems and limitations of today are gone. Let’s try arguing from what’s possible now instead.
-Sputtering of shielding and every other part of the reactor from fast neutrons. If your reactor is becoming brittle as it’s in operation, and requires constant maintenance, it won’t be operating enough to be cost effective.
-Breeding blankets. If we’re not breeding tritium in the blanket (and no one has been able to sustain a reaction that way yet) then we’re just using fission a lot. Expense becomes an issue, as does radiological issues.
-The plasma diverter is very much an unsolved problem. I can get into more detail here, but in short this is the part of the reactor that “skims” some of the hot plasma off to do the work. The dynamics of very hot, magnetically constrained plasmas still escapes us, and when you throw a rock into that stream, the complexity increases. Current divertes wouldn’t last a day in an operating plant. Disassembling your whole plant every day and reassembling it is a non-starter.
-Containment of plasma at sufficient energies is still something measured in seconds, or fractions of seconds. The usual metaphor is trying to uniformly squeeze a balloon; it will just “squirt” out. For s research reactor a second or two of fusion is an achievement. For power generation it’s nothing.
-Neutron activation of otherwise inert materials means you’re going to have serious radioactive waste. It’s unclear just how dirty D-T fusion would be from soup to nuts, but “pretty dirty” seems like a good bet.
-Tritium penetration.
-Most of the energy produced is in the form of neutrons, and we don’t know how to use that as a source of power. Those neutrons, in addition to destroying the reactor itself and activating materials, represent a loss.
-What we really need is aneutronic fusion through alternative cycles to D-T, like p-p, but that’s a much hotter plasma and no one has a clue how to make it work yet.
-Coolant for a constantly running reactor is a boring, but unsolved problem.
There’s more, but these are the ones most poeple on HN probably are aware of when they dismiss this article.
If you’re in the US I’d suggest calling 1-800-273-TALK
If you’re in the UK try +44 (0) 8457 90 90 90
If you’re in AU try 08 93 81 5555
If you’re somewhere else I’ll find a number for you if you’d like. No one is going to judge you for calling, you’re not going to be wasting anyone’s time. @pedalpete is giving good advice too.
In the moments before the collision, which occurred at 9:27 a.m. on Friday, March 23rd, Autopilot was engaged...
The rest may be true, may be germane, or may not be. The only part that matters to me until the results of the NTSB investigation is made public, is that the autopilot did this.
I thought that seemed really high, so I did a little looking and horrifically it’s actually a bit lower than the industry average of 46%! Some of that is skewed by VW recalling more cars in a year than it sells in a year, but still...
Bullshit. This is an ICO off the back of people’s desire to fight cancer. No FDA approval, no actual system, no substance, just GLIA “utility” tokens. If they want to defend their approach with something substantial, I’ll retract the “bullshit,” but this looks like the usual ICO scam. I took the liberty of filling out complaints with the SEC, FDA, and FTC yesterday and hopefully they can get some real answers.