cranky908canuck

Nuclear is high (business) risk for two reasons.

1) Recent nuclear projects plan for years to develop (never mind the extra years over the original plan). So there's financing, and the risk that the power economy / regulatory regime when the plant opens isn't what the planners expected.

2) $100M gets a small solar plant going [1]. $50m of that could get a quarter of it going. A nuclear plant ("economy of scale") gets nothing until it's done... $50m gets you a planning document.

"Overnight cost" matters.

[1] Actually, $10k gets a small (rooftop) solar plant going. Try that with a SMR in the back yard... :-)

Posted this to see what comments would be for a utility that seems to give good advice on conservation options.

In areas I'm familiar with, anything other than the largish single family house with big yard / garage / etc. gets built as strata title. Lots that ought to be wide enough to split either get duplexed or bare-land strata with two or more narrow houses ... for some reason, that's ok although freehold lots aren't.

Then "people want a house without dealing with strata" gets misinterpreted as "people want big houses on big lots". Not necessarily true, just that the premium for the BHoBL is the necessary price of not giving busybody neighbours power over your home.

This is more about 'OS Sovereignty' and less about usability.

Apple is still an American company.

As for the 'rewrite it in Rust' thing...

Depends on what you are rewriting from.

C, you have memory issues, but battle-tested code.

COBOL, you have to hire retiree consultants for $BIG.

Or, twenty years from now, hire psychics for $BIG to communicate with them.

I wonder if some of the RIOR is about worry over C being the next generation's COBOL?

On the 'possible backdoor' issue, this excellent and thorough post buries the lede a bit, I think.

What I get when I follow the link is that mrustc is a cleanroom Rust compiler which is only intended to build the official Rust compiler.

So: it provides a way to build a Rust compiler from source, which can then be used to bootstrap itself.

No need for extensive error reporting --- it's ok to assume correct code, and fail messily if not. In fact, the simpler the better, for audit of the alternative implementation.

If one suspects that C/C++ has been also been infected with "Thompson's Trusting Trust" *with respect to the Rust compiler*, then try it using Python, or Perl. Maybe even COBOL. Maybe even Forth (but first you have to bootstrap a suitable Forth, keep us posted...[1]).

If after all that you still think the 'reflexive build chain' is compromised, then either you're truly paranoid, or we are all doomed :-)

[1] I really like Forth (aside from traditional use-cases, it makes a great souped-up calculator DSL), but I don't think it's the tool for this job unless you really do want a 'start from bare metal' proof. If you do, then it could be a way to get there faster than raw assembly.

For trucks: interstate commercial vehicles have a scheme for this: "apportioned" plates.

Record-keeping required to support the proration of fees.

This misunderstands what I was trying to get across. The string is the file content, not a string in a file (so: a short snippet of source code), in text format; what followed was (an attempt at) a plausible binary tokenization.

I agree that the string "no" is ambiguous (though infamous as a somewhat pathological case), but at least it can be seen in context without having to spelunk a binary definition.

is_bright_and_shiny: "no"

vs

curt_negative_response: "no"

vs

country_code: "no"

It's not about writing a parser, it's about figuring out what the content is supposed to be in the first place. With plain text you can see what's a number, what's a string, what's an expression, etc... I'd rather try to figure out how to parse "2 7 + 3 -" than see a file with

0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x7 0x1 0x1 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x3 0x1 0x2

and try to figure out what that is all about.

"cakeistocracy". Wish I had thought of that.

RHD vs LHD is the issue. Waymo has "300+ million kilometres of experience" that will all be on the wrong side of the road.

I would not be confident of human driving with a lifetime of experience with one not screwing up the other; more confident of one with regularly maintained experience of both (IOW, aware of switching back and forth).

Must be early in the process, most if not all the photos and graphics where the driving side is visible show North American side driving.