wolfhumble

Good China numbers, but I’d still keep two things in mind.

China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.

The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.

For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.

Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.

And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.

Two things I’d think about here:

1. Maybe this isn’t mainly a money problem?

2. And if it is a money problem, there might still be trade-offs. If you give people enough support, some may decide it makes more sense to stay home with their kids. That could mean fewer people working, less tax income, and then less money available to solve the problem long term.

(And yes, I know Norway has the wealth fund, around $400k per inhabitant or something like that. But I’m keeping that out of it here, because otherwise it becomes harder to compare Norway with other countries.)

There are also other things to think about.

For example: Do we want a system where one part of society has more kids and stays more at home, while another part has fewer kids and focuses more on careers?

I’m saying this because earlier in Norway, families had more freedom to choose between staying home with kids with financial support, or sending kids to kindergarten. Some political parties didn’t like that model because:

a) They saw it as bad for gender equality.

b) Immigrant women were more likely to stay home than Norwegian women, which could make integration harder.

So I think there’s probably more going on here than just money, even though money obviously matters too.

This is like saying that Open source is not important because I don't have a machine to run it on right now. Of course it is important. We don't have any state of the art Language models that are open source, but some are still Open Weight. Better than nothing, and the only way to secure some type of privacy and control over own AI use. It is my goal to run these large models locally eventually; if they all go away that is not even a possibility. . .

> I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country.

In 2015, Germany produced about 650 TWh of electricity. In 2025, it’s around 507 TWh, a drop of roughly 22–23%.

Consumption has also declined, mainly due to efficiency improvements, higher energy prices, and weaker industrial demand.

Per person, that’s about 7,900 kWh in 2015 vs ~6,000 kWh in 2025. France is at roughly 8,000 kWh per person today, so basically where Germany used to be.

This happened despite adding about 100 TWh from wind and solar combined over the same period.

Wind is still volatile and hasn’t really ramped much in recent years, while solar is growing steadily, but mostly helps in summer.

And that’s the core issue. Solar output in summer is roughly 3× higher than in winter, so just adding more solar doesn’t solve those cold, dark winter periods without massive storage or backup.

To get back to 2015 production levels of around 650 TWh, Germany would need to increase output by about 30%. With solar growing by roughly 13–14 TWh per year and wind not increasing much recently, that puts you close to a decade just to get back to where you were, while 2030 demand is already projected at 700–750 TWh.

Given that Germany still imports around 70% of its total energy, it’s hard to call it a “facepalm” to suggest nuclear as part of the mix.

Also worth noting that Germany is still slow on smart meter rollout, with only around 2% of metering points using smart metering systems so far. That limits how much consumers can respond to real-time prices. During tight periods, this can increase reliance on imports and contribute to higher prices in connected markets such as the Nordics.

> tldr; competition is as stiff as it is vicious-- Apple's "lead" in inference is only because NVidia and AMD are raking in cash selling to hyperscalers. If that cash cow goes tits up, there's no reason to assume NVidia and AMD won't definitively pull the the rug out from Apple.

These companies always try to preserve price segmentation, so I don’t have high hopes they’d actually do that. Consumer machines still get artificially held back on basic things like ECC memory, after all . . .

Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price?

Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

> Weird collisions with desktop security features

Linux is not immune to BIOS/UEFI firmware attacks either. Secure Boot, TPM, and LUKS can work well together, but you still depend on proprietary firmware that you do not fully control. LogoFAIL is a good example of that risk, especially in an evil maid scenario involving temporary physical access. I think Apple has tighter control over this layer.

They have already been doing that for 10-15 years via page builders and themes in Wordpress. It is easier now, but small players have had relatively decent tools for quite some time.

> For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun.

For .com domains, if the rationale is data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, avoiding dependence on a handful of American hyperscalers, then from an operational standpoint I don’t see much value in using European-based registrars. Ultimately, these domains remain under U.S. control regardless. If the focus is 'stubbornness' [one of the points in the article], then of course you have other priorities.

Personally I am all for data sovereignty etc, but very seldom for country boycotts.

Completely agree! I have a child that teared up when (A)I created a song just for her, in the style she likes, with lyrics that have human(!) traits and character that inspires and lifts up the whole family.

Personally, I like making the kind of songs I enjoy listening to myself, across all kinds of genres. Next time, I want to mix a few completely different genres and see how that turns out. It's like a creative hobby were you just enjoy the process.

As for changing the lyrics, yeah, that’s taken me hours as well. You really need to get the lyrics right from the start. I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.

If you have all your “stuff” saved on ChatGPT, you’re naturally more likely to stay there, everything else being more or less equal: Your applications, translations, market research . . .