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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it’s weakest link in terms of safety.

    Now we are entering potentially decades of conflict and natural disaster and the proposition is to build energy infrastructure that is very centralized, relies on fuel that must be acquired, and is in the hands of a relatively small amount of people, especially if their societal controll/ oversight structure breaks down. It just doesn’t seem particularly reasonable to me, especially considering lead times on these things, but nice meme I guess.


  • Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

    So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

    I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

    A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.


  • I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

    The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

    There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.




  • I was at a theater for the first time in a long time recently and it was definitely my favorite to visit so far. “Zoo Palast” in Berlin, the interior/the entire vibe was great. The building screams 70s even though it was renovated/rebuilt 2010-2013 so they did a great job there. I can’t speak to video or audio quality because I just don’t have a a reference but the movie sounded and looked good to me. Also it has a lot of original language showings which is always nice to see here instead of just dubs.


  • Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

    This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

    All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

    • Reduced staff
    • reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
    • no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
    • simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

    Disadvantages:

    • Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

    I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.




  • So I mostly fried the SSD by using it to write and rewrite ML checkpoints and logs, this in turn made the device read only and I somehow managed to migrate to a different SSD probably using clonezilla or something, but it messed up the bootloader so I installed refind in a new partition, configured it and voila it works. It’s scary because you need to do everything without seeing your system even half alive anywhere along the process, but it’s not actually hard, just copying data and installing/configuring a bootloader. But for a then 20year old at his more or less first job my head was on fire for the 1.5 days this took.

    By far the most difficult single thing that I’ve ever had to fix that actually had to do with the system.

    I now don’t flood my SSDs with data that is constantly rewritten.


    • Bring Me The Horizon | POST HUMAN SURVIVAL HORROR
    • YOASOBI | everything is post 2020
    • Paula Hartmann | everything is post 2020
    • Toe | 独演会 "DOKU-EN-KAI

    It’s a bit hard to find stuff that is new that I’ve actually listened to a lot, but it’s not because there isn’t new stuff just because I have no new music entering my rotation except from artists I already know, other media or friends recommendations. And music from other media often doesn’t end up being on any album.



  • Every political position mostly tries to define in which ways violence is to be used. Realising this and knowing power is already established before you were even born. Seeing violence being used against your oppressor(s) is often times the only thing we feel we can still hope for.

    Or from another perspective, is the war in Ukraine worth it for Ukraine or Russia, can you really say a war with so many deaths is preferable to being a russian subject, or an international embarrassment of the Russian state. Is the self determination of Palestinians really worth the terror and the war. We’re the PIRA justified in bombing London for their brother’s and sisters discrimination and deaths in Ireland. It’s ultimately all subjective, wether the violence of the system you fight against is bad enough you can bring yourself to fight.

    Nothing brings back anyone but as long as there are people who want to, and do turn us into their machines, we have to rely on our interpretation of that being wrong, and fight them for it.




  • What you’re trying to describe is named public transit not robottaxi, especially the argument that driverless cars will reduce transportation costs doesn’t make any sense. It adds complexity to an already incredibly inefficient mode of transport. For road train like trucking on highways maybe it makes sense, for personal transportation on arbitrary streets it just doesn’t make any sense.

    There is no technology to help aging gracefully, it’s in the respect and help of our peers and in our interactions with them, in the structure of our communities… Entering the sterile empty self driving car isn’t actually more dignified than being picked up by a real human being. And sitting down in a tram or metro isn’t less dignified than being shuttled around by a driverless vehicle.

    It’s not fuck Progress, it’s fuck Cars, just because asbestos or coal power were progress at some point doesn’t mean we should embrace them forever, the same goes for cars and self driving changes nothing about that. If cars still rule the world in 100 years we’ll be dying even more than we already are.



  • Brother have you heard of both young people, and the concept of ‘having a future’, death might be inevitable, it’s still better to think about and implement things to quell the suffering, as well as to continue living with hope than to revel in the fact that we’re all dying.

    Hope isn’t at the bottom of the box of Pandora without reason, it’s both, condemning us to strive and suffer, and the only way to make anything of it.


  • I listened to the entire and it struck a chord with me, it might be because I’m similarly petite bourgeois as the authors or something. But if you couldn’t get through it I might suggest softly that you read chapter 4 first (or only).

    To me the order the book has it in makes sense, but it might be the wrong one for you. It explains the What for 3/4 and then carefully answers the Why with a short story in the last 1/4. It is essentially a manifesto with a reason to believe in it as the last part.

    For me the reason it worked is because the walk through philosophy and history sufficiently grounded the authors claims toward the necessity of economic planning and rewilding and in combination with my prior beliefs made the utopia real.

    The problem that unfortunately remains with this book is how we get there, but to me it seems reasonable to leave that part out for this book, not just because of the violence and messiness, but also because it seems like the much harder part to coherently write as well.

    Edit: I’ve played one round of the game and it’s fun, perhaps a bit easy after knowing the content of the book.