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> the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.

Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.

Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't have anywhere to put it.

> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!

And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel cycle:

> Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.

Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

Right, but my point isn't that "we all need to use only Free Software" (even though I think it would be great if we did), but rather that these companies, let's take Apple for example, consist of engineers like ourselves. Why are we not fighting harder internally that these products & platforms should be less restrictive? There's a myriad of arguments about "security" and whatever else that can be made, but even something like in the case of Apple with macOS just having a checkbox that lets you run unsigned code and if you select that then you acknowledge the risks would go a long way in my book. It's similar to how Pixel devices work. There's a barrier to unlocking the bootloader that requires the user to acknowledge what they're doing, but it is possible. It doesn't need to be everyone using Free Software, but we should at the very least be far more insistent that these companies give us the option to use our devices as if they are truly our devices.

Completely agree with you here. Even in my circle of engineer friends I'm generally viewed as the open source zealot for only buying Pixel phones purely because I can unlock the bootloader on them and root them still. I only have one app that actually uses it (for making backups of installed apps) but it's the principle of the thing: if I bought and paid for a device I should be allowed to run whatever darn code I want on it, not only code that the manufacturer says I'm allowed to run. It's my device, not theirs.

Apparently that's a radical position to have these days and I find it irresponsible that software folks of all people won't stand up more for the right to run their code on their own devices without the approval of the manufacturer. As you said, the existence of our industry is due in large part to the openness of previous systems. We owe it to ourselves and those that will come after to ensure this level of openness persists.

So that means the price reductions will continue at that same rate? Extrapolation of a trend is not a forgone conclusion with anything. In fact, the price of lithium has gone UP in the past two years. Batteries may very well not be getting cheaper for the foreseeable future.

Reactor designs such as the AP1000 can be and are standardized.

> Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida.

Earthquakes happen everywhere to varying degrees and flooding typically doesn't happen with some warning. I'm not sure about extreme heat being a large problem? If it is, then don't build there. Build elsewhere and then build powerlines to get the power where it's needed. Sure, different areas involve different threats, but you can make a set of designs that work in different areas instead of doing bespoke designs for every one.

> There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.

There is to a certain degree. Consider the Vogtle 3 & 4 project. It was hugely over budget in costs and time. Westinghouse went bankrupt during its construction. One (of many) reasons for this was the lack of nuclear construction knowledge left in the US because we stopped building reactors. There are other pending nuclear projects that will now benefit from the knowledge and experience that was re-learned from the Vogtle project. Having an active industry most certainly does bring some economies of scale to life.

What's your point? The guy doesn't have a few billion to single handedly throw at the problem to test them out. There are feasible solutions to make it less expensive, whether or not they get put into practice is a different topic. The point is that nuclear is not inherently and permanently as expensive as it has been for the past few decades.

> And it didn't address the time scale issue at all.

The time scale issue is directly related to the cost issue. Costs are so high not due to material costs, but because of the engineering and construction overheads. Standardize the designs, streamline the approval processes and both construction time & costs will decrease.

And to your solar point, until there's a viable way to store the energy that solar produces it's not a solution on its own regardless of how cheap it is. Same goes for any renewable that doesn't have the on-demand characteristic of nuclear.

To be clear: I'm not saying to not use solar. I'm saying to build solar, wind, nuclear, AND whatever else. I honestly don't really care how expensive any of them are anymore because the costs of not stopping carbon emissions will be far higher than the cost of building these renewable/nuclear generating stations.

> That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems.

Clearly you didn't actually read it because there's a large section describing exactly how to improve the economics of nuclear construction: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...

This is fairly liberal use of the term "decentralized." Building many more nuclear plants is still "decentralized" in that some of them can be offline and the system still works.

Major solar and wind installations are typically concentrated in similar generating stations as nuclear plants are. Many more people will likely have solar on their homes, but it's not like wind and solar is going to lead to a purely decentralized grid where every small community is generating their own electricity. There will always be large scale generating stations for the bulk of grid electricity.

Before the typical "nuclear is too expensive/takes too long to build" comments start: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html. Understand why this is the case and how it's entirely reasonable to fix those problems with sufficient will & funding.

Yeah, I always roll my eyes at the phrase "passenger acceptability." For example, a few years ago there was this idea that passengers would not fly on the 737 Max after it re-entered service in the US. Which is nonsense since I'm willing to bet that 90% of passengers can't identify if the plane they're on is Boeing or Airbus let alone care about individual models. The only "passenger acceptability" metric is what does the ticket cost?

I think there's a parallel in surveillance systems. For example, it's perfectly reasonable for a police officer conducting an investigation to follow a suspect as they drive around town. After all, it's happening in public and it's not illegal to watch what someone does in public (caveat being taking it to the level of stalking).

However, is it reasonable to write an AI system that monitors the time and location of all license plates seen around town, puts them into a database, and then that same officer can simply put in the suspect's license plate instead of actually following them around? Maybe, maybe not, that's not my point here. But the creation of that functionality can easily lead to its abuse.

Is this exactly the same case as Copilot? Of course not, these are two wildly different systems. But I think it's an interesting parallel to consider when discussing the point of "it's okay when a human does it" because humans and algorithms operate at two very different levels of scale. The potential for abuse of the latter being far higher and far easier than something a human has to do manually.

Agreed; I've often wondered if this is a result of early CS classes usually expecting students to handle weird/bad inputs. It's only natural for a programmer to want to write a program that gracefully handles all reasonably bad inputs, like nulls. So we're taught early on to write defensive code that handles those. And that's fine when you're writing short, academic programs. But when the complexity goes up by a few orders of magnitude trying to gracefully handle that null value 10 levels deep in some parsing logic maybe isn't the best thing to do. Old habits die hard, however.

Have you tried to call an electrician or plumber recently? Assuming you can even get one on the phone, they can basically name their price for any job.

This is an idiotic decision. There are real issues around improving the UX for making it more clear when a message was sent as SMS instead of being encrypted and dealing with the problem of undelivered messages because the recipient uninstalled the app, but to drop SMS support entirely instead of improving those pain points? Terrible, terrible decision.

> It's very common to log when a button is clicked. Which means we can already reconstruct a user's session because we know what coordinates buttons have. We might miss out on the random movements and such, but that might not be a big deal if we also log the timestamp when a button was clicked.

The point I was making above was that there's a difference between purely client-side events like mouse movements and keystrokes and server-side events like button clicks and page requests. This may be a trivial difference for most websites, but I have an expectation of privacy around client-side events. Collecting them without the user's consent violates that regardless of the technical mechanism of implementation of that collection.

> Your car collects huge amounts of data about your driving habits. A Tesla, for example, might auto-report that data, but your "dumb" car also provides that data to an ODBII reader. In fact, that was the premise for those Progressive (I think) Car Insurance things they wanted you to plug into your car to "prove" you were a safe driver.

Right, and the difference is that the data provided through the OBD port requires me to physically plug something in and upload it elsewhere. I have control over that data. This is different from these websites that are collecting data like my mouse movements and immediately sending it off without notification or consent.

I didn't work on the integration directly at the time so it's certainly possible some of my details are incorrect. That said, from what I remember of the demos that were given there was the ability to set regions of pages which contained PII that were not collected but this was entirely up to us to configure. Otherwise, it was possible to watch an individual user's full session on the website.

This was years ago too so maybe it has changed since, but my issue is with the whole premise of products like Fullstory that make it possible to essentially watch your user's over their shoulder without being given proper notification that level of monitoring is occurring.

> How would this be any different if I were to design my site to use a websocket and stream mouse events and keystrokes to figure out if you are clicking a button, versus using a javascript event handler or something?

It shouldn't matter the collection method. The point is that you'd be collecting these keystroke and mouse events as they happen in an environment that I, the user, may believe they are not leaving my system.

> The very same non-technical folks that you allege are misled here also have no clue how buttons work on a site either... it's all magic to those folks. Are we not supposed to do any logging now?

That's a fair point. Some users will have no idea at all what data they're sending to the likes of Facebook, for example; it's just a magic box that shows them photos of their grandkids. The test here is given the average person's understanding of the products they are using, is it reasonable to assume the data being generated is not leaving your local system? I think even the average user would assume mouse movements are not being sent away to reconstruct their session on a website down to that level of granularity. You may disagree but that's the tricky issue here: where does the line of an expectation of privacy get drawn? From a technical point of view, I'd argue it's at the separation of client-side and server-side interactions where anything not needed for the functioning of the product on the client-side remains client-side. Hence, something like my mouse movements on a run of the mill website for analytics is across that line but something like mouse movements in a multiplayer video game is not.

> Your TV tracks what shows you watch, what buttons you press, how often you skip commercials, etc.Your smart fridge tracks how often you use the ice feature, your car tracks how often you drive aggressively, etc.

The point is where does this data get sent to? Admittedly I don't know exactly what data my car collects on my driving habits, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't leave the car in that it doesn't have an Onstar-like system installed in it.

If this data is used to essentially be an observer sitting over my shoulder without telling me when I don't have a reasonable expectation that it's happening then, yes, that's a violation of an expectation of privacy. The fact that all of this is legal really demonstrates how far behind laws are to the issue of data collection around usage of services and products.

> I don't think it matters at all. There is no expectation of privacy when browsing a website (from the website operator). We can see everything you do... obviously.

Server logs will of course tell the operator what buttons are being clicked on and which pages are being requested. But once those pages are on my computer, I disagree, I do have an expectation of privacy around my mouse movements and keystrokes on my own computer. If I choose to send those to some third party server so be it, but having those collected without consent is a problem.

As engineers we may assume this is being done regardless and accept it as a reality of the web, but I'd imagine the average person would be quite surprised to see what is a recording of their browser window reconstructed without being informed that was happening. They may rightful have that expectation of privacy here, which is being broken by these tools.

> Also, it's not a recording of their screen that is being taken, but rather it's mouse coordinates and keystrokes which then re-assemble a replay of the actions. Just like a video game replay.

It doesn't matter what method is taken to generate a video if the end result is the same as if you were recording my actual browser window.

A few years ago I was at a startup that integration one of these video playback services (Fullstory) into their product. At the time the PM team was all jazzed up about the idea and engineers were rushing to get it implemented. I was the only person to bring up potential privacy concerns which were immediately dismissed under the excuse that the PMs absolutely needed this level of functionality to view individual user's full sessions on the website.

Anyway, Ublock blocks Fullstory's JS from running by default so at the very least your ad-blocker is potentially saving you from this level of intrusion.

> It's kind of a ridiculous notion that a site operator cannot monitor how users use the site... this is not wiretapping and I assume (hope) it gets thrown out.

Putting aside how many other ways there are to determine how users use a website without needing to resort to this level of intrusion, the issue is that almost always the user isn't aware this level of monitoring of their actions is happening. Sure, it may be buried deep in some privacy policy or terms and conditions no one ever reads, but that's not exactly what I'd call informed consent. This is where regulation to at least require websites notify their uses that there's literally a recording being taken of their screen interacting with the website would be helpful.

They do! Although they require a correction factor to better match the government's fancy air quality monitors when measuring smoke. The EPA published a paper on it: https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...

While we're on the topic: Shamless plug for a PurpleAir clone I made last year that uses the same sensors but at half the cost (and keeps all of the data within your LAN): https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir and https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industri...

> Firefox is by no means the "best" product, it's an average Chrome clone that's worse than competing Chromium derivatives (Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc) from a compatibility and performance point of view.

1. I admire the irony of calling Firefox a Chrome clone when Firefox far predates Chrome.

2. That's purely your opinion. I personally find Firefox to be more performant and customizable than Chrome but to each their own. I'm not going to fanboy browsers here.

3. Where exactly did I claim Firefox was the "best" product? I made a generic statement saying that you can have the best product in the market but when the market discriminates towards you so that it's impossible to get users it doesn't matter how good your product is.

> Maybe Mozilla can knock off the grandstanding, the money wasting, the back patting, and just work on making a competitive browser.

You can have the best product in the market but if the deck is unfairly stacked against you it doesn't matter how good your product is.

Why build a rail line when you can ship goods down the coast?

India's independence was 1947, before her 1953 ascension.

Easy: "We need that land for more strip malls, box stores, and overpriced condos."

Oh please. Single engine planes are far more than toys for rich people. General aviation is training new airline pilots, medical flights, aerial surveying, charter flights otherwise inaccessible areas, and a method to fly supplies to areas during emergencies. This level of ignorance is extremely frustrating.

Thanks for the info. I figured there was more to it than that and there were ways to extract more fuel.

> I don't know how to make them perfectly safe and their have been incidents where unfortunate accidents occur

The issue I have with this argument is that if we don't dramatically reduce CO2 emissions far, far more people are going to die from climate change than nuclear might kill.

Plus, as another commenter already mentioned, the amount of deaths coal is responsible for is 470x higher than nuclear from air pollution alone. We accept these deaths for coal but somehow have a problem with a much smaller number of deaths from nuclear in the theoretical case of a massive incident. I'm not saying there's an acceptable number of deaths to just live with but pragmatically speaking I'll gladly take the proven option that kills orders of magnitudes fewer people than the status quo is already doing.

> Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-saf...