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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

    People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

    But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

    Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”


  • 10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

    If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

    And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

    Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!


  • There is pretty much nothing done in Matrix that couldn’t be done with XMPP. But XMPP suffers from multiple issues:

    • The protocol is very well controlled, but the downside is it takes forever to have any extension approved, leaving sometimes features you would want fast in limbo for months, years, and clients/servers dev waiting for the extension to be finalized. The worst example is probably when Google dropped a group video implementation for XMPP in 2005 on the table, (at the time, Google messenging system was using XMPP) with source code, free license and everything. They would just have to take it and use it. Version 1.0 of the protocol extension was released… in 2009! Meanwhile, many clients were just “waiting” for the protocol before starting implementing anything. When the protocol was finalized, XMPP’s world could congratulate itself for being 3-4 years late on every other communication system. This story repeated recently with an encryption extension.
    • There are many clients project, most of them are carried by 1 or 2 devs, each of them almost single platform.
    • As XMPP is “older”, it doesn’t benefit from any buzz effect, and some of the “waiting for features” have worn out many adopters.

    As it was said in another comment, there is a company and some investors behind Matrix, and with that:

    • Protocol can change as fast as they need to implement a new feature. Worst case it is updated again later
    • Having much more resources, they could develop a true multi-platform client with a quite consistent interface. That eases a lot the adoption by non-technical users.
    • Being the new thing and with a bit of marketing, they had a buzz, and that leaded to more servers and more clients developed, though they all have to follow the company’s train.

    Now, from a self-hosting point of view, Matrix has a huge flaw: rooms are entirely copied and synced on all servers from which a user participates. It takes only 1.

    For example: if any of your users join a room with 10k users exchanging thousands of messages per day, your humble server will synchronize the whole flow in a local copy. There is not a chance a small server can take that kind of load. Last time I checked where they were for solutions (it was years ago, might be different today), the proposals were:

    • Option for admins to prevent users from joining room bigger than xxx ?
    • Wait for a new server implementation that’s lighter than the mainstream one? (still not released in prod to date, and won’t really solve the problem)

    And for some positive points about XMPP:

    • It proved its scalability. Whatsapp started as an XMPP server/client with no federation (don’t know how far they drifted from the base protocol now, though)
    • It is extremely versatile. Right now, there are 2 leading project that include blogging/microblogging features and more

    https://movim.eu/

    https://libervia.org/

    The last has microblogging, events, forum, ticket management, file sharing features, etc… Still needs a lot of love but it shows the potential of the protocol.

    There are other projects using XMPP for whole different things (IoT, …)



  • Looks like it’s happening already. Natural disasters are on the rise, costing billions, insurance companies start bailing out of some area. I was also wondering if international help would come back every year to address a fraction of the wildfire in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and soon pretty much everywhere.

    Pretty sure the cost of the disaster is soon going to be unbearable and we’ll start abandoning places and infrastructures instead of rebuilding (not officially, of course, we’ll just “push back until conditions allow to rebuild” and forget about it as more disasters will occur).

    It will be a slow death, though.


  • Theyve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low,

    This is a fake news. Period.

    Some reactors had to REDUCE THEIR OUTPUT because otherwise they would exceed the temperature increase they’re allowed to cause in the river, this to preserve life in the river. No reactor was shutdown because of a low water stream.

    What happened last year is a systematic defect was found in an external protection layer, and the decision was made to fix all the reactors having the same potential defect at once. The work took longer than expected, and that caused France having very limited capacity for months, causing worries about power outage.

    Not to say it could never happen in the future, but it didn’t yet.


  • So is it better to start a nuclear project and hope it can start reducing coal & NG emissions 10 years from now? Or is it better to add solar and wind capacity constantly and at a fraction of the price per MWh?

    It’s better to do both!!

    Nuclear is not more expensive than solar and wind. And today’s paradox is solar and wind are cheap because oil is cheap…

    Besides, comparing the 2 is totally misleading. One is a controllable source of electricity, the other is by nature an unstable source, therefore you need a backup source. Most of the time, that backup is a gas plant (more fossil fuel…), and some other time it’s mega-batteries projects that need tons of lithium… that we also wanted for our phones, cars, trucks etc. Right now, every sector is accounting lithium resources as if they were the only sector that will use it…

    And then you have Germany, that shut down all its nuclear reactor, in favor of burning coal, with a “plan” to replace the coal with gas, but “one day”, they’ll replace that gas with “clean hydrogen” and suddenly have clean energy.

    There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems

    So we’ll have very very exactly the same conversation 10 years from now, when we’ll be 100% renewable but we’ll have very frequent power outages. People will say “we don’t have time to build nuclear power plan, we need to do «clean gas/hydrogen/other wishful thing to burn»”. And at that time, someone will mention that we will never produce enough of these clean fuel but … How many times do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot??

    I think you’re forgetting that once the waters from a dam break dry up you can rebuild…a nuclear accident has the potential to poison the land for generations

    In the years to come, we’re going to lose much more land just because it won’t be suitable for human survival, and that will be on a longer scale than a nuclear disaster. Eliminating fossil fuel should be the sole absolute priority, and nuclear is one tool to achieve it.