The basic problem is that identifiers can be either types or variables, and without a keyword letting you know what kind of statement you’re dealing with, there’s no way of knowing without a complete identifier table. For example, what does this mean:

foo * bar;

If foo is a type, that is a pointer declaration. But if it’s a variable, that’s a multiplication expression. Here’s another simple one:

foo(bar);

Depending on how foo is defined, that could be a function call or a declaration of a variable bar of type foo, with some meaningless parentheses thrown in.

When you mix things together it gets even more crazy. Check this example from this article:

foo(*bar)();

Is bar a pointer to a function returning foo, or is foo a function that takes a bar and returns a function pointer?

let and fn keywords solve a lot of these ambiguity problems because they let the parser know what kind of statement it’s looking at, so it can know whether identifiers in certain positions refer to types or variables. That makes parsing easier to write and helps give nicer error messages.

Not so sure. Stuff like ITAR exists to prevent exactly that. The us could also declare SpaceX to be some kind of national security interest.

It will not, actually. This bill is far from budget neutral. The tax breaks for rich people are so massive that they far outweigh the big cuts to vital social programs. This bill will grow the deficit by trillions of dollars over the next decade.

AC is not common in Europe. There’s a variety of heating systems: gas boilers, direct electric heating, district heating, etc. Heat pumps are a growing market though.

Unfortunately, when you do find a text article explaining the thing it’s often unnecessarily long and padded out with meaningless fluff, just so more advertising can be stuffed within the contents.

Technically any Catholic male is eligible to become pope, it doesn’t even have to be a cardinal. But yeah cardinals are the only ones voting so they always elect one of their own (with a few historical exceptions)

Drones work now because they are $1000 (random number in the right range), while a patriot missile is $4 billion dollars each. Sure you could shoot a drone down with one, but if you do the enemy will just send more and bankrupt you.

I agree with the point but these numbers are some orders of magnitude off. A patriot missile is typically 4 million dollars (so not billion). Drones vary widely depending on the type. Man-portable scouting drones can go as low as a few hundred dollars. I don’t think a patriot missile would ever target something that small flying that low though. The Iranian Shahed is estimated to cost around $30-50k. Russia produces its own upgraded version (better navigation systems, bigger warheads, etc.) that costs around $80k.

Even then, you can make 50 drones for the cost of a single patriot. The economics are not favourable.

I’ve always heard it referred to as infringement, in a legal context. I’m sure game publishers (and music, film, etc.) would like to equate it in the public mind with common theft of physical goods, but it’s all just propaganda.

We’re just playing games with words at this point. The law is pretty clear, that distributing a copyrighted work such as a copy of a video game is illegal. I don’t know why people like to repeat this line, that “if buying a game isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft.” Maybe it is a moral/ethical argument? It’s not going to help you in court.

As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.

Even if they moved the factory into the US, wouldn’t they still need to import all the parts, and get hit by tariffs on those parts anyway? Like, the whole supply chain would have to move into the US. That could be a decade worth of effort.

Another big factor is that every plant is effectively a completely custom design. Because of how few nuclear plants are constructed, every new one tends to incorporate technological advancements to enhance safety or efficiency. The design also has to be adapted to the local climate and land layout. This makes every single plant effectively one of a kind.

It also tends to be built by different contractors, involving different vendors and electric utilities every time. Other countries have done better here (e.g. China and France) mostly due to comprehensive government planning: plopping down lots of reactors of the same design, done by the same engineers. Although these countries are not fully escaping cost increases either.

You are completely correct that regulation is also a big factor. Quality assurance and documentation requirements are enormously onerous. This article does a pretty decent job explaining the difficulties.

Seriously though. Weasel words. If journalists adopted even 20% of Wikipedia’s manual of style, news would improve by orders of magnitude.

A system I work with gives all keys a string value of “Not_set” when the key is intended to be unset. The team decided to put this in because of a connection with a different, legacy system, whose developers (somehow) could not distinguish between a key being missing or being present but with a null value. So now every team that integrates with this system has to deal with these unset values.

Of course, it’s up to individual developers to never forget to set a key to “Not_Set”. Also, they forgot to standardise capitalisation and such so there are all sorts of variations “NOT_SET”, “Not_set”, “NotSet”, etc. floating around the API responses. Also null is still a possible value you need to handle as well, though what it means is context dependent (usually it means someone fucked up).

VAT is a universal tax on goods. A tariff is basically a tax that applies only to imported goods. So a tariff distorts the market, making imports from a region more expensive relative to other regions, or domestic goods.

Note that basically any tax is bad from an economic perspective. However for the government to function revenues must be raised. It is considered better for market efficiency to raise revenues in such a way as to least distort the market. Tariffs are a very distorting instrument, VAT is generally considered less distorting because it affects all parts of the market equally.

No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.

The CEO said on twitter that even their $200/month pro plan was losing money on every customer: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/

I don’t see how they would become profitable any time soon if their costs are that high. Maybe if they adapt the innovations of deepseek to their own model.

Most likely there is a separate censor LLM watching the model output. When it detects something that needs to be censored it will zap the output away and stop further processing. So at first you can actually see the answer because the censor model is still “thinking.”

When you download the model and run it locally it has no such censorship.

Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn’t really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

“Saving Europe from Hitler” paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.

is the energy used to heat the solvent creates more CO2 than the CO2 it captured?

Ah yeah, no absolutely not. In total it takes much more energy to capture the CO2 than was generated by burning the fossil fuel that emitted it.

What about algae or moss? They can be more space efficient than trees, and we can technically build a structure vertically.

I’m not too familiar with algea/moss CO2 absorption, but it could be better. Usually the downside of a vertical structure is you increase the capital investment again, negating the advantage of plants. And to provide lighting you’ll need energy which takes space as well (e.g. solar panel field)

A typical process passes ambient air over some liquid or solid solvent that can absorb CO2, then later inserts energy to separate the CO2 again for storage. For example, sodium hydroxide reacts with CO2 in the air to form sodium carbonate. Then later, the sodium carbonate is heated to release pure CO2, regenerating the sodium hydroxide in the process.

This doesn’t violate any laws of thermodynamics because of the constant energy required. Compared to growing trees, direct air capture is generally much more expensive, requiring large capital investment and constant energy input. It is more space efficient though.