fsh

China has a larger population density than the EU. There is more empty land in Europe.

In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France

The real problem are transport and heating. In most countries, those consume significantly more primary energy than the electricity sector and are still mostly fossil fueled. For example, more than half of the primary energy consumed in France is oil and gas. Heat pumps and electric vehicles or trains can now finally change this, but the transition is very slow.

I don't find it reasonable that Google wants to make me wait 24h to install software on a device I own.

This is great!

Input: The first paragraphs of the Watson and Crick paper [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0

Output (minus a lot of emojis): BIG NEWS: We’re excited to share a game-changing structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.)! This model introduces some truly novel features that are going to have a massive impact on the biological space.

We know Pauling and Corey previously proposed a model (shoutout to them for sharing the manuscript early! ), but after a deep dive, we found a few pain points:

1. The X-ray data suggests it’s a salt, not a free acid—without those hydrogen atoms, the structure just doesn't hold up under pressure.

2. Some of those van der Waals distances are a bit too tight for comfort.

Fraser also suggested a three-chain approach, but it was a bit too "vague" for us to provide actionable feedback on.

So, we’re pivoting to something radically different: A double helix! Two helical chains coiled around the same axis. We’re talking: Phosphate di-ester groups Right-handed helices Bases on the inside, phosphates on the outside (optimized for cation access! )

The structure repeats every 10 residues (34 A), keeping everything perfectly aligned. We’re leaning into the standard configuration to ensure maximum stability and biological interest.

The future of genetics is here. Let’s disrupt the fibre axis together! #DNA #Innovation #Biology #Science #DoubleHelix #GameChanger

On the contrary, displays are commodity components. So much so that motivated enthusiasts have managed to swap better panels into their ThinkPads for a long time. Manufacturers don't prioritize display quality in cheap devices because it doesn't show up on the spec sheet and most customers don't care that much.

Which notoriously favors anything made by Apple.

The article is about case reports, not about empirical studies. Putting a fake case report on GitHub wouldn't make it any less fake.

Any interaction between light and matter can be modeled as absorption and re-emission (stimulated or spontaneous) of photons. In this picture, there is not much difference between a photon traveling through the sun or through a piece of glass, and the analog makes physical sense. Since photons are massless elementary particles, they are indistinguishable and their number is not conserved. The notion of "the same photon" is questionable in any case.

From the article:

> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.

The abstract is not very clearly written. The 3.5 mV/cm is the maximum detectable field strength before the system starts to saturate. I would be interested how the sensitivity compares to conventional (cryogenic) semiconductor detectors.

Considering the state of japanese IT, there is probably a person typing each reservation from the website into a 1980s mainframe.

This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be purchased by residents of Japan.

Hydrogen is not great for airplanes since the extremely low density makes the tanks too large. The best solution would be synthetic hydrocarbons (synthesized using hydrogen) which can outperform fossil jet fuel.

These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.

This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.

The Bohr radius is the result of a simple classical physics calculation (a common exercise for undergraduates in their first year). It depends only on the electron mass and the fine structure constant which is the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. In the SI system, the speed of light has a fixed value which defines the unit of length.

Yes, LLMs have become extremely good at coding (not software engineer though). But try using them for anything original that cannot be adapted from GitHub and Stack Overflow. I haven't seen much improvement at all at such tasks.

IQ tests only work if the participants haven't trained for them. If they do similar tests a few times in a row, scores increase a lot. Current LLMs are hyper-optimized for the particular types of puzzles contained in popular "benchmarks".

Companies are optimizing for all the big benchmarks. This is why there is so little correlation between benchmark performance and real world performance now.

That is exactly what I wrote. Gas plants being at 1% implies that there is no cheaper source with available capacity. Why should anyone sell electricity for less then?

This is highly misleadling. Nobody is setting the price, it is determined by an open market. This naturally drives it towards the price of the cheapest energy source with available capacity (often natural gas). It would be irrational to sell electricity for cheaper than this. If more batteries get deployed, the price will more often get set by battery storage instead.

A lot more people drive around sports cars than ride around sports horses.

The EV-1 was launched with lead-acid batteries and later upgraded to NiMH. It would still not be possible to make a practial BEV with these battery chemistries. The breakthrough came through the microelectronics industry producing billions of cheap devices with lithium ion batteries in them.

I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.

These church-owned entities in Germany are almost 100% government fincanced [1], while abusing a loophole in the German constitution to discriminate their employees for religious reasons. For example, the Catholic ones are notorious for firing employees that get divorced. This system is an absolute disgrace, but the churches are still too powerful in German society and have so far been able to block any attempt at fixing the constitution.

[1] https://www.malteser-international.org/en/about-us/how-we-wo...

Find me a consumer IPv6 router sold in the last ~10 years without a restrictive firewall enabled by default. I have never seen one.

If your router had only NAT and someone (i.e. your ISP) sends it a package addressed to somewhere inside your internal IP range, it will happily forward it. A firewall would block it.

If you really don't have a stateful v4 firewall, your ISP can happily connect to all of your devices.