I’m going to exercise my free speech here: what a good job ChatGPT did at summarizing this video. Is this really a thought provoking post or just a way to boost the views over at YT?

If the US model is so great, why is the country so royally fucked right now? The first amendment only tells governments not to limit what people can say. If you have enough money you can buy CBS or the Washington Post and silence critical voices or just scuttle the whole ship respectively. And that’s not the government censoring, it’s just a good buddy of the big guy or some brownnoser doing it looking for favors at the court of the king. Freedom of speech becomes something you need to be able to afford. When even the big guy files frivolous lawsuits against media outlets that didn’t want to get up his ass for a gazillion dollars. Just to tie them down in courts hoping they will settle and in the meantime be extra careful not to incur more wrath. What happens when hate speech and libel laws don’t work, you get Alex Joneses who make a business model out of being a despicable excuse for a human being. Your freedom of speech situation is very much like your healthcare system, in that it is very different from lots of other developed nations and the consequences are tragic.

Don’t call me Shirley.

It’s like with planting trees. The best time was to plant some 50 years ago, the second best time is now. But it is too late in many ways.

No. And not likely at all.

No.

Why do you post the same stuff under different titles in different communities? What’s the weirdest thing in english?

I vote spelling. English spelling makes less sense than French or Danish and they take mothereffing liberties as well. No naturally occurring, alphabet using language will probably score perfect on that but I suspect English will be in the relegation zone of that table.

Nothing fills my heart with such joy as negative Meta headlines.

Machine translation is not good at tone. So if a friendly fuck you is a different expression from one uttered in anger, I’d be very careful. Puns and slang only if it’s established enough. By which I mean is been around for a while and the model could train on it. Hyperbole will also be tough because if it’s devoid of tone how would the computer know? And even if you run instant spoken translation I wouldn’t trust any assistant to get it right.

There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Granted, languages that are more closely related and in places that are culturally similar make it easier. But translation is also making choices. Different translators will make different choices. It would be madness to assume that any book would not contain parts that are at least questionable. That’s regardless of source and target languages. You’re operating under the false assumption that stuff in English is just better, maybe because it’s the most understood language on the planet if you count nonnatives as well. Free yourself of these biases.

I would also point out that neither 死亡 nor 戦死 strictly mean “died.” Without very specific context or a version of an accompanying する they would be translated as death/mortality and death in battle respectively. There you can see how little mistakes can creep in.

Also, since we are sliding into the movie Idiocracy by outsourcing more and more stuff to LLMs, expect more shitty translations. Who knows, your book may have been translated by a bot.

Wrong community. Nothing mild about that.

The Yahoo!tech writers went on a deep dive and watched a YouTube video.

Yahoo!tech digging deep for a story there.

I’m not sure I understand the issue with fortifying the edges

Imagine a stack of papers on your desk. Clumsy you knocks over your coffee cup. Coffee hits all the papers, gets between them, everything is ruined. Now imagine it’s got spine binding. The coffee will not get into all the pages. Now imagine, somewhat unrealistically, attached under the spine binding is a little halfpipe sunken in the desk. Most of the coffee now flows away on the pipe. The drainage acts a bit like an anchor keeping stuff in place on the side.

So we need to find a perfect site, of which there aren’t many, with some miraculously unbothered or even welcoming citizens and then built a facility to reinforce the natural defenses and keep our fingers crossed that nothing unforeseen happens? Got it.

Germany decided to phase out nuclear power plants and still hasn’t found a final resting place for all the waste. Because nobody wants it in their backyard. I think it’s not a easy as you think.

Fukushima Dai-ichi is next to the ocean and still couldn’t keep the cooling chain up. They said 30m waves wouldn’t happen. They thought they thought of everything. These risk assessments are too hubristic and the consequences when they’re wrong too catastrophic. Climate change will bring more torrential rain on arid soil. More landslides. Droughts bring more fires. What we thought was a given in the past may very quickly turn out to be ephemeral. This river won’t stop and then somebody upstream builds a dam. Or a surprise lahar happens. Couldn’t happen like that 30m tsunami, right? We thought a big sarcophagus around a blown up reactor would give us peace of mind and then some asshole started a war or attrition in the area. You. Cannot. Plan. For. Everything.

Stop gap means you can still use it. I’m not in favor but I’ve repeatedly admitted it’s better than fossil energy generation. I’d just rather we get out of it as fast as possible. Why don’t we take the time and energy of finding these new, fabled, riskless disposal site with the kind people who dgaf, built out extra defenses, label it in such a way that future inhabitants don’t unearth it and get sick, and just cover everything in solar panels? Until we have better batteries you’re still allowed to split atoms to fill gaps renewables leave because god forbid we tolerate a brownout to slow this climate crisis! I’m not in favor of building new gas power plants like they’re doing to fuel this so-called-AI psychosis. Split the atom if you cannot do something better. But really, do better.

If you want to shoot back one more time, I’ll read it but probably won’t reply;)

People would run into the oncoming traffic on the other side more often if the lanes are slanted inwards. And you have a single point out failure for the drain in the middle (e.g. blockage). Leaves will travel. I’m not an engineer but I play one on Lemmy: you don’t want your road to get washed away in a storm. If the edges aren’t fortified with a predetermined escape for water away from the road’s foundation, you run a higher risk of erosion.

Not this again. For the love of God.

I am in Japan where they have just discovered a cartel of ice cream manufacturers pushing up prices. Supply and demand. This is capitalism, baby!

This is a lawsuit, right? It’ll go through a few judges’ hands on appeals and what not and by the time the companies get their slap on the wrist in 2-5 years they will have made so much money it doesn’t matter.

A fair warning up top: my mind is very much made up about this. The risks of nuclear power generation from feeding the grid until the radiation mess has half-lived itself into harmlessness are too great in my opinion. And that’s what this is. My opinion. I suspect yours differs. If you keep reading, you’ll probably get the feeling that there isn’t anything you can point out that gets through to me. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t.

It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere …

In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.

A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.

I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.

Current? Maybe. Since the 1750s? Nope.

Nuclear power is also a stop gap solution if you ask me. It isn’t clean. It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.

The problem is batteries. If we could have batteries that store the sun and wind energy for when sun and wind are on a break, we’d be set. We don’t have that. The tech isn’t there yet. And we’d probably empoverish all the countries who are unfortunate enough to have the necessary rare earths in the ground in the process. We’re fucked in more ways than one.