remember that flock cameras can be seriously impaired with a little spray paint

apparently. “natural uranium” refers to uranium with about 3% U235 content meanwhile the remaining 97% are U238, i think.

edit:

ah i had the numbers somewhat off apparently.

debt-to-gdp crisis

is not an actual crisis, money on those political levels doesn’t work the same way as it would for households.

did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?

CANDU 9

very interesting. for those who want to know how it works:

Most commercial reactor designs use normal water as the moderator. Water absorbs some of the neutrons, enough that it is not possible to keep the reaction going in natural uranium. CANDU replaces this “light” water with heavy water. Heavy water’s extra neutron decreases its ability to absorb excess neutrons, resulting in a better neutron economy. This allows CANDU to run on unenriched natural uranium, or uranium mixed with a wide variety of other materials such as plutonium and thorium. This was a major goal of the CANDU design; by operating on natural uranium the cost of enrichment is removed. This also presents an advantage in nuclear proliferation terms, as there is no need for enrichment facilities, which might also be used for weapons.

From Wikipedia. So the key is to improve the neutron economy sothat there’s more neutrons available; then, these extra neutrons can go on to split extra material, which is thereby consumed.

better yet: pour it into concrete, dump it in the ocean.

it’s just not done yet because people are thinking that there might be another use case for nuclear waste in the future.

yeah and until recently they imported all their uranium from states like niger which is why it took till 2023 for niger to kick out the last french troops from its country.

which is interesting because solar became the cheapest form of electricity in 2020 and france let go of niger shortly after that.

How dependent is France on Niger’s uranium?

The military coup in Niger has raised concerns about uranium mining in the country by the French group Orano, and the consequences for France’s energy independence.

FYI 1 kg battery when fully discharged loses about 10⁻¹² kg of its rest mass …

yeah it’s pretty crazy how much energy is in fuel.

1 kg of oil contains about 30 MJ of energy. enough to accelerate an object of the same mass to 7.7 km/s. which is almost escape velocity on earth (11.2 km/s), or enough velocity to shoot the object out of earth’s gravity field altogether.

(a kg of oil, ofc, costs about $1)

plus: most people learn graphically (visually) much easier than text-based. at least for me, it’s much easier to build an intuition of something if i get a graphical display of the contents in a directory. that’s why i always ls -alh every new directory that i enter, before i do anything else. for many people, it’s better to use GUI file explorer because you also get image previews etc. but the same concept also applies to other issues:

like, if you want to configure various hardware on your machine, you open the settings app and get many icons that you can click on. meanwhile, on the terminal, there’s no clear list of things that you can even configure.

i used AI last week to modify the characters that get produced when i type special key combinations on my keyboard. after looking with classical search engines (duckduckgo, google) for about 20 minutes and getting confused with not much of a clear answer, i asked chatgpt and got the task done in 15 minutes and learned a whole lot while doing it, because it also explained exactly why the files are the way they are.

the issue with the terminal is that you can easily fuck up really badly if you don’t know what you’re doing.

the following look the same to a new user:

rcifconfig -r 0 -f puny -l all

rctrl -r all -i root -f

(both are imaginary made-up comments sothat you cannot just say "oh well obviously one does this and the other one does that)

then one goes on to nuke your home directory while the other one restarts the wifi adapter.

(and this can actually happen in practice. consider all the “always remove the french language pack” jokes that has been going around for years.)

for graphical user interfaces, you typically have icons to help you give a sense of what it’s doing, typically warning signs before you do anything dangerous, etc.

unfortunately true. this whole gender issue has been used as a huuge distraction scheme from the economic situation and other urgent issues.

oh very interesting. i’ve been wanting to get into the details of how federation actually works, and i wanted to figure out why mastodon<->lemmy federation does often not seem to work. but i guess that’s a deep rabbit hole too!

actually i do sometimes think that life is in some sense a drama (theater stage), and what we perform is often at least as important as what we actually do in reality.

i.e. there’s a whole lot of symbolic interactions throughout the day. for example every time that we speak to someone. it doesn’t change reality, but another person’s mind, so it’s a symbolic interaction.

would you like to know whether you’re speaking to an actual human on the other end of the line?

“bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.

at some point we will give a name of this phenomenon of internet users who are completely undecipherable for normal people … and call it autism (/hj)

It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement.

huh that’s weird, it’s not paywalled for me.

uhh, the bots are requesting multiple sites in parallel, not in series, so it’s difficult to say “hey look, that user moves through 5 pages per second”. instead, you’d say “hey look, there’s 5 users each crawling through 1 page per second”.