Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.

This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.

Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.

If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.

Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.

And if you fail the V2, it’ll just take your word on it and let you pass anyway.

The Trojan Nuclear Plant near my city was closed in 1992. They started moving stuff away in 2003. The cooling tower was demolished in 2006. The various other buildings were demolished in 2008. All that remains are some security posts and abandoned office buildings and empty tool sheds.

It does not ignore any information.

The cost per kWh is the totality of all information. It is the end product. That is the total costs of everything divided by the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity produced.

I understand that you’re deeply invested in this argument, but you’ve lost. You’re repeating the same claim over and over, and when proven wrong, you just said “nuh uh” and pretended that nothing I said is true.

Nuclear energy can be cheaper than solar or wind. It is more reliable than solar and wind. It uses less land than solar or wind. All of these are known facts. That’s why actual scientists support expanding nuclear energy 2 to 1.

But people will still dislike it because they’re scared of building the next Three Mile Island or Fukushima. That, as I explained, is the reason why fewer nuclear plants are being built. Because the scientists, the ones who know the most about these, are not in charge. Instead, it’s the people in the last column that are calling the shots. Do not repeat this drivel of “iF nUcLeaR pOweR PlanTs So Good WhY aRen’T tHerE moRe of ThEM??”. I have explained why. It is widely known why. Your refusal to accept reality does not make it less real.

That is the end of the argument. I will not respond to anything else you say, because it is clear to me that no amount of evidence will cause you to change your mind. So go ahead, post your non-chalant reply with laughing emojis and three instances of “lol” or “lmao” and strut over the chessboard like you’ve won.

Because I don’t give a pigeon’s shit what you have to say any more.

Utility-scale solar comes out to around US$0.06 per kWh (source). Nuclear power comes out to US$0.07 per kWh (source).

Commercial-scale solar costs US$0.11 per kWh. Residential rooftop solar comes out to US$0.16 per kWh.

Edit: This does not take into account the cost of battery capacity or pumped-storage hydroelectric solutions, which are necessary for solar solutions but not nuclear ones. Lithium-ion battery storage costs US$139 per kWh. You’d need at least 500 MWh to accommodation a medium-size city, which would cost US$70 million. If you get 5,000 charge cycles out of the battery, this adds an additional US$0.03 per kWh.

You seem to think that the politics behind choosing energy sources is based on rational reasoning. It is not. It is fear and emotion that drives the decision to not build nuclear plants. If humans were all rational, there would be more nuclear reactors coming online every year.

But yes, you are correct, the fossil fuel industry has a hand in this… in fear-mongering nuclear power to discourage its adoption, that is. Because when countries take nuclear power offline, they are usually replaced with fossil fuel plants. This has happened all over Germany, who are replacing decommissioned nuclear plants with new coal plants. And it has happened in my city as well. Portland General Electric decommissioned their Trojan Nuclear Plant, which at one point produced an eighth of all the electricity in Oregon, and its capacity has been replaced with mostly natural gas plants.

One kilogram of uranium produces more power than one hectare of solar panels does in two years.

The value proposition is absent for developing countries. When you have a lot more money, then nuclear starts to become a serious option.

You can build nuclear plants in almost any climate. That is not true for solar and wind. Nuclear plants are also “one and done”. You don’t need accompanying battery infrastructure to accompany them to get reliable output. As long as you have water, uranium rods, and nuclear scientists to run the plant, you will have reliable electricity output.

On top of that, one nuclear plant can produce as much power in two hectares of land as a wind farm could in a hundred hectares.

If you hate nuclear energy because you think it’s dangerous or polluting, that is as dumb as choosing to drive instead of taking the train for the same reasons.

Nuclear energy is one of the methods of generating electricity with the smallest environmental impact and also much, much safer than the alternatives. The number of nuclear accidents can be counted on one hand, while the number of people who have died from cancer from coal power plants is conservatively estimated to be in the millions.

I love the Internet Archive but they are pretty clearly legally in the wrong here.

Not morally, mind. I support open access to knowledge. But they very clearly broke copyright law here.

Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.

What are the implications of this?

Because I am a developer and I have also been a sysadmin, and I really do not care. Yes, the format is good but I’m not particularly excited for it.

And I suppose sysadmins and application developers are not people?

My argument is not “we have a current standard”, it’s “people don’t give enough of a shit to change”.

I think this might sound like a weird thing to say, but technical superiority isn’t enough to make a convincing argument for adoption. There are plenty of things that are undeniably superior but yet the case for adoption is weak, mostly because (but not solely because) it would be difficult to adopt.

As an example, the French Republican Calendar (and the reformed calendar with 13 months) are both evidently superior to the Gregorian Calendar in terms of regularity but there is no case to argue for their adoption when the Gregorian calendar works well enough.

Another example—metric time. Also proposed as part of the metric system around the same time as it was just gaining ground, 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour definitely makes more sense than 60, but it would be ridiculous to say that we should devote resources into switching to it.

Final example—arithmetic in a dozenal (base-twelve) system is undeniably better than in decimal, but it would definitely not be worth the hassle to switch.

For similar reasons, I don’t find the case for JPEG XL compelling. Yes, it’s better in every metric, but when the difference comes down to a measly one or two megabytes compared to PNG and WEBP, most people really just don’t care enough. That isn’t to say that I think it’s worthless, and I do think there are valid use cases, but I doubt it will unseat PNG on the Internet.

What’s wrong with PNG?

Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll generate twenty gigabytes of weird anime fetish content.

This is the only true use of AI