Zigurd

I once ran an inadvertent experiment by installing Austrumi Linux, but not realizing that the default language is Latgallian. I'm fluent in Latvian, but I wondered if something had gone wrong with my brain. I could understand most of the words I was looking at, but more than half of the sentences I read were baffling.

You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.

You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.

The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.

Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.

On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?

By the time they build one the kids will be asking what's a hyperscaler?

People are giving Trump too little credit for the one thing he's good at, and the one thing he's outsmarted the tech smarties at: he made them bend the knee, and once they did that with the ballroom donations, a proper bully will make them lick his shoes.

All orbital data networks are competing against terrestrial wireless, which is much cheaper and faster to expand, and it doesn't deorbit itself in five years because it's run out of maneuvering fuel. Selling space technology into a shrinking TAM takes bravado, or in the case of Amazon, it takes having a business that can carry you if the bet doesn't pay off.

The TAM eventually boils down to whatever floats or flies over the oceans, military customers, and places where the wireless network operator is too feckless to provide coverage to your cottage at the end of 2 miles of driveway.

Sergey has gone a bit culty. But yeah. There are no moats that can keep out everyone who has built and operated data centers before the AI bubble. For these players, overspending, up to a point, is a defensive move.

The cult definitely has some Jonestown overtones: the singularity is coming so things so mundane as a bond rating are of no concern. One way or the other.

Crew Dragon has a launch escape system. Starship can't, at least not without some fundamental changes.

Marginally greater skepticism is probably a good thing in terms of avoiding a big shock when some big AI player, like Oracle for example, gets into serious financial trouble.

They also put down a deposit for a roadster.

Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.

Overriding safety systems is itself a safety capability. But this wasn't a failure of the safety systems. It wasn't even a failure of the train drivers who had been over using safety system overrides. It was a management failure for not noticing that over use of overrides.

If I read the description correctly, those hardware level systems were manually overridden, which should only be done in extremis. My guess is that this is going to turn into a normalization of deviance case, since such a cavalier attitude toward safety was unlikely to be one person's first time doing something so dangerous. There was no dilemma here and no time pressure.

Your suggestion about limiting speed after a shut down is a good one. On top of that, the rail operators should have spotted a trend of repeated safety system overrides and investigated why that was happening.

I'm totally not on the spectrum so I've only watched about 80% of the Plainly Difficult channel on YouTube, but if you want a painless and entertaining, if you're into that kind of thing, way of learning about train signaling and safety, and how safety systems have evolved, I highly recommend it.

Leadtime for nuclear power, unless you wanna buy a sketchy Russian submarine reactor that's been rusting in an arctic bay, is decades longer than even the supply constrained gas turbines.

I don't know why you think solar needs two forms of back up. Batteries are very reliable.