Indeed. And we are getting better at that. A lot better. Improvement in solar power have been happening a lot faster than fusion power. It's far better than it use to be, and has the advantage that it is already very good today.
blind3rdeye
joined 1 year ago
I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista's search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.
I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn't work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.
And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I've been using Duck Duck Go. But you're right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)
It's good to see some progress in this area. It's something people have been working on for a very long time. I just wish they wouldn't keep pitching it as a 'solution to climate crisis'. It isn't.
Fusion power is not currently viable. Progress is being made, but a lot more research is required before actual usable power plants can be designed; and then a lot more time will be required to actually build them. And even then, we're only guessing about how good these power plants might be. They could be really great and clean, but currently they don't exist at all. People have been working this this technology for a very long time, and it is yet to succeed. So the claims about problems it will solve are just hopeful speculation.
Climate change was once a distant future problem for which fusion power sounds like a good answer, but that was a long time ago now. Today, climate change is a right now problem and fusion power is still a distant future technology. We must not gamble the planet we all live on for a bet that fusion power is just around the corner and will somehow fix all our power needs. That would be a really bad bet to make. Delaying actual meaningful action in the hopes that future fusion will save the world... would be a mistake. So lets not think of fusion as a solution to climate change.
It's near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. ... But to be honest, the 'unlimited energy' thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That's even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn't the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it's a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.
That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It's not complete garbage green-washing (unlike "carbon capture and storage", which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it's some holy-grail of unlimited power is ... well ... basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.
Presumably the goal was to gather and communicate interesting information.
You gotta put backtick quotes around your password on lemmy, otherwise it is automatically censored. It's a security feature of ActivityPub.
I tried to start that video, but I got "Failed with error code 1003, see logs for more info". (I don't think I have have access to any logs, so I guess that part isn't for me.) Maybe Chipotle wasn't able to watch it either, and so that's why their system is broken.
Seriously? My workplace uses google drive, and many documents are made with word. ... A very common problem is that sometimes someone opens a word doc from the web interface of google drive - which automatically can conveniently opens it with google docs, which totally screws up the formatting and then autosaves it.
(I hate google, and I resent that even after I've removed all aspects of it from my home & personal usage, I still have to use it at work.)
Looks like they've lost something.
Is that because he already gave it away in exchange for processed potato-puree chips?
It could be that the characters in the movie thought it was about energy, but were mistaken. (But to be honest, having a group of people believe that to be the reason is just as implausible as it actually being the reason - either way it makes no sense and we just have to suspend disbelief.)