I feel genuinely bad for any democrat supporter with an ear injury right now.

Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.

Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.

You might want to do some basic math on the current rates at which renewable energy and global energy demand is growing.

The world burned 140,000 TWh worth of fossil fuels last year, a new record because global energy demand is still growing faster than total new renewable generation.

Let’s say we built an island of floating PV panels in the ocean large enough to generate that much energy.

It would be the 8th largest country in the world.

No we’re not going to hit 70% by 2035 even assuming it maintains exponential growth, not even close.

Sometimes ChatGPT/copilot’s code predictions are scary good. Sometimes they’re batshit crazy. If you have the experience to be able to tell the difference, it’s a great help.

I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.

Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.

Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.

You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.

Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.

And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.

Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.

It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…

…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.

Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.

There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.

Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re both correct.

LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.

It’s expensive and dirty fuel.

It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.

I thought the Quran made no mention of FGM, and that the practice was discouraged (or outright forbidden) by Islamic fatwas / religious scholars.

I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.

I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.

Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.

This is great to see.

80% of carbon offsets are creative accounting at best and bold-faced lies at worst.

If you don’t agree I’ve got a ~a bridge~ I mean some Carbon Offsets for sale.

And you’re forgetting that about 1% of the population is pregnant at any given time and has another whole human inside of them.

I concur with everything you’ve written here.

I concur that a left-to-right interpretation of consecutive explicit multiplication and division is wide spread and how most calculators and computers would interpret:

a / b * c.

But the sources you quote in your blog post and the style guides I’ve read, state that a fraction bar or parenthesis should be used to clarify if it should be interpreted as:

(a / b) * c

or

a / (b * c)

You make the argument in your post that:

a / bc

is ambiguous (which I agree with)

but

a / b * c

is not ambiguous. Which is the part I disagree with, and I think the sources you quoted disagree with you as well. But I’m open to being wrong about that and am interested if you have sources that prove otherwise.

If I’m understanding your response correctly, you believe that

a / b * c

is unambiguous, and always treated like

(a / b) * c

because of a wide spread convention of left-to-right interpretation (a convention that we both agree exists), not because you found a source that states that.

Anyhow… I’m not out to convince you of anything and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your thinking to me.

I would be particularly interested if you found something in a mathematical style guide that recommended an expression like

( a / b ) * c

Should be re-written as

a / b * c

Generally speaking, style guides advise rewriting equations for maximum clarity. Which usually includes a guideline of removing parentheses when their existence isn’t needed to clarify intent.

I believe, and I’m particularly interested to see if you found evidence that my understanding is incorrect, that the LTR convention used by calculators and computer programming languages today exists because a deterministic interpretation is a requirement or the hardware, not because any such convention existed prior to that or has been officially codified one way or the other by any mathematics bodies.

So like, forget division for a sec…

In a mathematics paper, you usually wouldn’t write:

(a + (b + c)) + d

You’d write:

a + b + c + d

(Except perhaps if in your paper the parentheses made it easier to follow how you got to that equation.)

Because in mathematics, it will never matter which order you do additions in, so you should drop the parentheses to improve clarity.

On a computer or a calculator though you might get a different result for those two equations like if a+b overflows your accumulator and c is a negative number, or when these are floating points values with significantly different magnitudes.

I believe english speaking engineers just adopted LTR as the convention for how to interpret it since they had to do something, and the english language is a LTR language. I don’t believe that convention exists outside of the context of computing.

The Wolfram quote and ISO quote in particular that you have in your post imply that an inline division followed by an explicit multiplication is ambiguous as to if it should be interpreted as a compound fraction.

If that’s correct, then it would be the inline division that makes it ambiguous, not the implicit multiplication that makes it ambiguous.

If there’s some source from before computers, or outside of the context of computers forcing a decision. Then your assertion that it is the implicit multiplication causes the ambiguity is correct.

I’m not trying to prove you’re wrong, I’m just genuinely curious which it is. And if you found evidence one way or the other.

My apologies, I wasn’t trying to spar with you friend, just trying to understand why a/b*c wouldn’t also be considered ambiguous, particularly since an author could have written a*c/b and removed any doubt.

In your blog post you also quoted ISO

In such a combination, a solidus (/) shall not be followed by a multiplication sign or a division sign on the same line unless parentheses are inserted to avoid any ambiguity.

You seemed to speak rather definitively that it’s only ambiguous when combined with implicit multiplication.

I agree that almost all calculators and programming languages will interpret consecutive explicit multiplications and divisions with left-to-right precedence.

But as far as I’m aware no such LTR rule has global agreement in mathematics, I was curious if you found something in your research that says otherwise.

Will you accept wolfram alpha as credible source?

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Solidus.html

Special care is needed when interpreting the meaning of a solidus in in-line math because of the notational ambiguity in expressions such as a/bc. Whereas in many textbooks, “a/bc” is intended to denote a/(bc), taken literally or evaluated in a symbolic mathematics languages such as the Wolfram Language, it means (a/b)×c. For clarity, parentheses should therefore always be used when delineating compound denominators.

What is your source for the priority of the / operator?

i.e. why do you say 6 / 2 * 3 is unambiguous?

Every source I’ve seen states that multiplication and division are equal priority operations. And one should clarify, either with a fraction bar (preferably) or parentheses if the order would make a difference.