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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

    The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.


  • That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.


  • It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.





  • Putting "false" in a YAML file gives you a string, and just false on its own gives you a boolean, unless you tell the YAML library that it’s a string. Part of the point of YAML is that you don’t have to specify lots of stuff that’s redundant except when it would otherwise be ambiguous, and people misinterpret that as never having to specify anything ever.


  • Most of the problems can be totally avoided by telling the YAML loader what type you’re expecting instead of forcing it to guess (e.g. provide a schema or use typed getter functions). If it has to guess, it’s no surprise that some things don’t survive the string to inferred type to desired type journey, and this is something that isn’t seen as a dealbreaker in other contexts, e.g. the multitude of languages where the string "false" evaluates to true when converted to a boolean because it’s non-empty.



  • Male to female A-to-A cables are pretty common (they’re just basic extensions) and totally legal under the spec provided they’re limited to a certain length or contain a powered repeater. It’s just the rare male-to-male (which my keyboard stupidly uses) and even rarer female-to-female that aren’t legal. There’s also the exception of USB-on-the-go cables with a micro-B end and a female A end for devices like smartphones that are capable of being host or connecting to a host, back before they switched to USB-C.







  • This is silly. Everyone knows that DRY is telling you that if you do the same sequence of mouse clicks three times in a row, you should spend the day writing a script to automate the task instead of quickly finishing what you were doing by doing the same sequence of clicks a fourth time. If you are supposed to apply it to the code you write, then there’d never be boilerplate-heavy languages like Java.




  • They have to defend their trademark. They don’t have to defend copyright, and most of Nintendo’s reputation comes from copyright claims. Someone streaming a let’s play isn’t selling a counterfeit Mario game, they’re just showing you things in a real Mario game, so there’s no trademark claim.

    They’re also big abusers of the fact that most of the people they make copyright claims against can’t afford to defend themselves against such a behemoth. Even if you’re sure you’ve not violated their copyright and your lawyer’s sure, too, it’ll be much cheaper to roll over than get the legal system to agree with you.