Inspired by this post I spent a couple of hours today trying to set this up on my toy server, only to immediately run into what seems to be a bug where <video> tags loading a simple WebM video from right next to index.html broke because the media response got Anubis’s HTML bot check instead of media.

I suppose my use-case was just too complicated.

Almost as if dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive and not prescriptive.

Thank you Mr ChatGPT

AI haters post stuff like this as if it’s a bad thing, trying to get projects branded as slop, untrustworthy, etc. and canceled. The attitude of the OP of that Reddit thread is plain to see, for example.

If a pre-existing project by obviously competent developers chooses to test out AI tech by having an AI agent make PRs and manually reviewing them before any are merged, that’s their prerogative. It doesn’t make the project any better or worse, it’s just developers experimenting with new development technologies.

I am so tired of cancel bait like this.

Most solar installations, like the one in the picture, don’t rotate or only rotate on one axis.

There’s some actual research into how different crops react when grow between rows of solar panels. Vertically mounted solar panels are especially suited to this because you can drive between them on a harvesting machine easily. Sadly I don’t have any links to give off the top of my head.

Some plants actually grow better in the shade under solar panels than in direct sunlight. Of course it will depend on local climate too.

One is that nuclear plants are, among other stuff, massive heat engines. Because all the steel, tubes and whatever expands when it is heated up, switching it on and off stresses the material. This can be improved on by design but such design has extra costs and has its limits.

Yeah, and this is something that has been improved on for modern reactor designs precisely so that they can operate in load-following mode. There’s essentially no impact on operational lifespan (typically 60 years for modern reactors), because the impact has already been factored into the operational lifespan.

The second is that when you turn down your plant to half the output, you spend essentially the same money to get half the result. Which means you have just doubled the cost per kilowatt hour. And this with the background that nuclear is not any more cost-competitive to begin with.

This is mostly an opportunity cost thing. The actual running costs, e.g. the fuel, make up a negligible part of the €/MWh of nuclear. Most of the cost comes from the construction of the plant, which should be publicly subsidized the same as other clean energy is. Lack of subsidies and other public support is one of the main reasons nuclear is relatively expensive, though it is still the cheapest ecological method for meeting base load that we have, besides geothermal which is not feasible in most locations.

In the result, a fleet of wind power plants plus battery or hydro storage is cheaper than such a nuclear plant.

The thing about battery storage is that it doesn’t exist yet and may never exist in an economical way. Hydro power and storage, on the other hand, is absolutely devastating for ecosystems, clean though it may be in terms of carbon emissions. It would be preferable if hydro dams did not exist. Now of course you could build a hydro storage system in a completely artificial pair of reservoirs, but that will be incredibly expensive compared to natural reservoirs (read: flooded valleys) so I am skeptical that it would be feasible at scale.

No one is suggesting to get sloppy with nuclear material or advocating for some bizarre Fallout-style radium cola society. What I am advocating for is a world where people know that getting a chest X-ray or eating a mushroom in Eastern Europe does not increase their risk of cancer from radiation exposure.

For example, maybe you’ve forgotten, but the radiation psychosis when Fukushima happened was insane. We had loads of people in Europe, which is just about as far away from Fukushima as you can get, poring over those ocean radiation heatmaps for years – when in reality Fukushima released so little radiation that not even the people in Fukushima were at any real risk. This is a direct consequence of unscientific, alarmist policies and messaging poisoning public perception.

People should not be made afraid of radiation, because them “respecting it” gives them absolutely no benefit. There isn’t really anything anyone can do in their daily lives to meaningfully avoid it regardless of how aware they are of it.

This is why it is an organizational responsibility of society to create an environment where people can live their lives without ever thinking about radiation hazards – which is what we have successfully done. Scaremongering contributes nothing to that except give people mental health issues and cause them to vote for insane policies that shut down clean, carbon-free nuclear plants in order to replace them with coal and LNG (which, ironically, contribute more to radiation hazards than nuclear does).

In comparison, nuclear has quite constant generation, but demand varies more strongly compared to it. This is why in reality it needs coal in addition, to adjust for deman

In theory, one could adjust a nuclear power plant by switching it on and off once in the morning and once in the evening, and sometimes in winter. But that “filling up of the mix” with nuclear would just not be economical - nuclear is already by far the most expensive energy source and one can better spend the money by installing battery storage and improving the grid.

“Modern” (newer than the 90s) nuclear plants can do much more granular load following than that, and it’s what they already do in France and Germany: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf (see figure 2 for an example from Germany). Or it’s what they would be doing in Germany if they hadn’t been shut down, heh. The French in particular are masters of nuclear load-following, because they use so much of it.

That’s not the message here at all. The message is that this overly cautious policy contributes to the public’s poor understanding of the risks of radiation, which in turn causes harm e.g. in the form of overreactions when things go wrong (see the section from 20:50 onwards). For example, with the benefit of hindsight, evacuating Fukushima likely did much more harm than good, and the actual health effects of Chernobyl are to this date widely grossly overestimated.

Honestly OP this is such a weird message to be pushing. Are you heavily invested in nuclear or something?

What is so weird about pro-nuclear messaging on a green energy forum? Dispelling myths about nuclear is just as important as dispelling myths about renewables. And while I am not monetarily invested in nuclear, policy-wise I am heavily invested – like anyone who cares about sustainability should be.

Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. For example the 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.

The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions

No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account for the decommissioning costs of everything on the chart. See table 1 on page 3, column “One-Time Downstream”.

The links I added above about France tell another story.

The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.

On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.

That’s what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste annually – 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is… well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.

Nuclear’s stagnation has more to do with short-sighted financial incentives and public backlash from people acting as either useful idiots or paid shills of the fossil fuel lobby than anything else.

Thankfully the world is gradually realizing this mistake and investment in nuclear is improving again.

Nuclear is statistically either the cheapest or the second-cheapest form of production in my home country of Finland, and yes that statistic does take into account the construction costs of our massive 1.6 GW reactor that was finished 13 years behind schedule and ran several billion euros over budget becoming the 8th most expensive construction project ever.

In terms of cleanness it is also incredibly clean. Even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima (the latter of which leaked barely anything anyway), nuclear has emitted orders of magnitude less radiation than coal. Indeed even thinking that radiation has anything to do with nuclear’s emissions betrays your lack of understanding of the topic – the main emissions concern are the construction and fuel extraction emissions, not because they’re radiological hazards but because they’re not free in terms of carbon emissions. Accounting for those it’s still pretty much the cleanest energy we have though.

Yeah who the fuck cares about limitless free clean power that also works when it’s cloudy and calm.

Calling it a “one-man spam campaign” when that one man does not send any of the emails himself (well ok, he probably sent a few himself) is pretty rich. Good article, terrible title and lede.

Joachim’s campaign is blocking more traditional lobbyists and campaigners, too, they said. Mieke Schuurman, director at child rights group Eurochild, said the group’s messages are no longer reaching policymakers, who “increasingly respond with automated replies.”

Great success.

I was under the impression that libsvtav1 was still underdeveloped, but turns out the ffmpeg documentation for it was just lacking. Looks to be pretty good quality and even supports two-pass (which the documentation doesn’t mention).

I wish they made a 100x leap to the AV1 encoder. Even on my 12900k it runs at like 0.001x real time, which is… well, unusably slow.