For me the root of the problem is politics rather than money. Or to be clear, the reasons for procrastinating are not economic. We have the technology to de-carbonize energy and in most cases it's cheaper and better than fossil-based energy production. On the consumption side, the move to electrification is also compelling and in most cases economical - EVs, induction cooking, heat pumps, etc.
But in terms of politics we have Trump paying companies to abandon half-built offshore wind farms and various European countries offering subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption 'to help with affordability' to shield consumers from their dependence on a volatile source of energy.
And that is ignoring the huge and persistent subsidies dished out by governments (estimated at about $800 billion globally - which ignores the externalities like pollution and global warming).
As a foreigner, “Pouletschenkel und Pommes” makes me smile. A German word sandwiched between two French words - one pronounced the French way (“poolay”) and the other nativized (“pommez”).
This is subjective of course but for me Kotlin is certainly not minimal - I'd put it closer to C# than Java in terms of features. Typescript and Java feel like far smaller languages. Of course, C++ is in a class of its own in terms of anti-minimalism.
Wolves generally don't attack people, though, do they?
There are no recent (last half century) documented cases of wolves killing people in Europe as far as I know. The few times people have been bitten by wolves they've been feeding them or doing other stupid stuff.
Nope. The basic rule is that you don't do things with wolves you shouldn't do (like feeding them and thus gradually letting them get comfortable around humans), and that you don't do boneheaded shit like leaving a small child alone in nature (which is common sense in most of the world). For a wolf a three year old child is just about the same as a boar or small deer.
Anyone over the age of 12 though? Wolves won't bother you unless you've managed to fuck up nature to such an extent that they can't find their usual diet (deer, boar, etc.), and even then attacking an adult is really desperate.
There was an interesting interview with an Italian expert about wolves and people in the news this week:
I also found myself reading the manual all the time.
I have a toy project I use for learning different tools. Given a CSV containing every MLB game ever played, calculate the win percentage for each team during its first season.
Pandas makes that kind of simple thing painfully unintuitive. Tools like Polars and dplyr and even SQL require code that's far closer to how people think.
Learn SQL and interface with Duck. You will be 100x faster than Pandas/Polaris duo at fraction of memory. Also SQL is supported literally everywhere with a much more capable than Pandas API. Duck outputs to a Pandas Dataframe, but just treat that like a dictionary. Do all your processing, filtering and aggregation in Duck.
Also, try fx.wtf as a replacement for jq. it comes with a in-built tui viewer that supports vi-keybindings. Ecmascript is built into fx.wtf so you can query the JSON with JS notation (where JSON was born). You can use any JS functions including map/reduce/filter or perform any kind of transformation instead of learning jq dsl that you will forget tomorrow.
> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.
I agree that they hit civilian targets, the evidence is there. How do you know they targeted them? Missiles sometimes can miss or or be shot down by air defenses, then fall and explode.
It's been broken down many times with a lot of examples from history: harassing civilians only mobilizes them. So Russia must be not only cruels but also stupid if you want to argue that they're targeting civilians.
The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
It's cheap to demonize and dismiss the side you don't like, picture them as cruel, stypid, evil. And from there, creatively explain everything they do with these qualities. It seldom helps you understand reality though.
So it could be that your case is special, you're not just being lazy and racist in building your worldview, but people you don't like are actually unreasonably cruel, evil and also stypid. Or maybe not, and your explanation is lazy and of poor quality. Guess which one is more likely.
Double-tap attacks are a tell-tale sign of this. If half an hour later another missile or a drone "accidentally" hits exactly the same spot to kill rescue workers, there's not much mystery left.
> The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
Modern drones and missiles are rather ineffective for killing lots of people. Most of them get shot down, and those that reach their targets have relatively small warheads. Nothing compared to old-school area bombing. A typical major air raid (500-800 planes) in WWII delivered 2000-4000 tons of bombs to a single city. A typical 200-drone strike in 2026 delivers potentially no more than 10 tons spread across the country, probably even less if we account for decoys. The largest strikes (drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles combined) had about 40 ton payload, of which 10 tons reached the intended target. In WWII terms, that's about 3 planes' worth of bombs.
I'm not sure how those killed in Bucha were _not_ targeted?
I'm also not sure how the execution of POWs could be accidental (with the evidence used in various reports provided by videos taken by Russians themselves) or the documented systematic torture (HRW report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-tortu...)
Or the kidnap of children (documented by UN) or the findings of the UN human rights commission:
> The Commission found that Russian authorities committed a wide range of
war crimes, and the corresponding human rights violations, including willful
killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape and other
sexual violence, as well as unlawful transfers and deportations of children.
Or the findings of HRW (Human Rights Watch) of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populated areas, including homes, hospitals and schools.
Reading about this stuff - by credible sources like the UNHRC, Amnesty International, HRW, endless media and independent journalists' - and forming an opinion does not make me "lazy and racist".
Sometimes, one side are simply the bad guys and in this particular case, it's the Russian regime.
Because I was responding directly (I even quoted the line) to the claim that Russian’s actions could be understood as being part of a “clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget”.
Your attempt to deflect is very odd. We’re discussing an aspect of Russia’s behavior and strategy with respect to the invasion of Ukraine. If you want me to comment on the behavior of a different belligerent in a different conflict then feel free to start such a discussion concerning that conflict - then I may (or may not) respond to claims about the behavior of some country that isn’t Russia.
These attacks have been too well documented for your "propaganda" attack to appeal to anyone but the brainwashed or those acting in bad faith. Outside of Western media, multiple UN reports have presented direct photographic and have found physical evidence for these attacks.
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sustained-large-scale-attacks-b... - documents and presents the irrefutable evidence for, among other attacks, the double ballistic missile strike on the historic centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday. The second exploded above a public area, killing at least 31 civilians and injuring 80. The UN describes civilians traveling to church, going to the market, working at a coffee stand, etc.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - another UN Commission report that found that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a civilian apartment building, killing 24 civilians. There was no military or economic target there and so the UN concluded that Russian forces had conducted an indiscriminate attack on a residential building
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Russian-attack-strikes-shopping... - found that a Russian long-range drone struck an operational shopping centre full of civilians, then another drone struck it about 30 minutes later. At least 16 civilians were killed and 128 injured. Investigators found no military presence, activity or equipment at the site.
Or read any of the Amnesty International reports (who have also been critical of some of Ukraine's actions so can hardly be accused of purveying Ukrainian propaganda), such as:
Retail cost per watt for terrestrial panel: under 45c
Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450
Annual performance degradation of terrestrial solar panel: under 0.5%
That of space-grade solar panel: up to 2%
Life span of terrestrial panel: about 2x that of space panel.
Total difference in cost per watt feeding a DC load in space vs on land: about x400
And that's ignoring launch costs. It makes absolutely zero sense. And given the scale of production and investment in manufacturing, terrestrial is likely to stretch even further ahead in the cost stakes.
Best cost to orbit I am seeing is $1500/kg. A GPU rack is ~1500kg. Let’s imagine you can take a terrestrial data center rack, no scaffolding, solar panels, radiators, radios, propellant, or propulsion. Fly it into orbit, kick it out the airlock, and let it work through magic. That’s $2.2 million to get into position.
Industrial power rates are cheap, say $.10/kwh, but pretend you sign terrible deals, and it costs you $.30/kwh to run and cool a terrestrial GPU rack. A 150kw unit will then be (150x24x365x.3) =$394k/year.
You can operate the terrestrial version for 5.7 years before the two hit parity.
Yes for now; Alphabet is optimistic costs will come down.
They're projecting the learning curve, that the more you do it the cheaper it gets, continues arbitrarily far.
However, they recon it will take SpaceX launching 370,000 tons to LEO to make the costs come down enough to be worth it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
Even my bull case put that 10 years off, which is so far away it lacks relevance just because tech moves so much faster than that timescale; my bear case says that's about 45 years off.
What about, never? The fuel cost of launching these are immense. I'm not seeing how this is 'cheaper' this doesn't even take into consideration cooling.
BUT it doesn't need to be cheaper for there to be value. Its much harder to shoot down a space GPU farm than a terrestrial one. And its closer to space assets which might want it for targeting during times of war.
Hitting satellites in orbit is still hard, but ASAT was demonstrated (albeit the target was designed for the test) by the USSR no later than 1968, and on a more arbitrary (end of life) satellite by the USA no later than 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon#List_of_...
The severity of one single missile depends on the orbital configuration; I'm expecting everyone to declare "we have adjusted our strategic priorities elsewhere" (i.e. "this was a bad idea") well before there's a relevant quantity of them.
Given how cheap laser welding has become, I also foresee ground-to-orbit lasers being credible. They still need quite a large aperture and corrective optics, but that's had known solutions for a while now thanks to astronomy.
> And its closer to space assets which might want it for targeting during times of war.
Not so far as I can see. If you want really low-latency you have edge compute on the weapon systems themselves; otherwise you use the existing satellite comms (e.g. Starlink) to just talk to something hardened outside weapons range.
Even if getting to orbit is free, the numbers don’t work.
5 years is a standard depreciation cycle for hardware, but plenty of machines last longer than that, but these satellites will not. On top of that, power distribution, cooling etc in the data centers is a huge percentage of cost and lasts much longer than 5 years.
If you think you can make a space air conditioner for less than a terrestrial one, I have a bridge to sell you.
I've actually got to finish working on that blog post about why this is all a terrible idea; there are many different proposals for how this will work, and they all suck.
> Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450
Where did this number come from, and why is it literally 1000x more than the Earth version?
I can totally believe the cost of the ISS panels was in that ballpark, but if we're talking about putting megawatts of these things in orbit, economics of scale will very quickly come into play.
The idea is still a real stretch, but according to Google's paper in Joule [1] they're putting satellites in low Earth orbit and only targeting a service lifetime of 5 years. Over that short time, with the correspondingly modest radiation exposure, you can use inexpensive silicon solar cells like you would use for terrestrial solar farms. The expensive space grade solar cells from e.g. Boeing Spectrolab are more resistant to radiation, and achieve higher conversion efficiencies, but silicon cells are fine for satellites like these.
Starlink satellites already use silicon solar cells, since they too are cost sensitive and don't have long lifespans:
On the Starlink V2 mini satellite, we predict that approximately 5% of the mass of the entire satellite could survive reentry. The biggest contributor (~90% of the surviving mass) is silicon from the solar cells, which has a high melting point...
Can I just compare this to buying some slightly remote land, building one small nuclear reactor on it and offering free electricity to everyone in a wide radius of the plant/datacenter?
Someone else said the facility needs 370MW. Great, because SMR designs provide 470MW. That’s 100MW excess, given for free to locals to entice them to support the project. That can power 40k homes, easily. People object to these projects partly because their bills go up? Cool, those bills disappear now.
But no, I guess we’re creating massive arrays in space and polluting the night sky forever.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.
You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation
> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
But in terms of politics we have Trump paying companies to abandon half-built offshore wind farms and various European countries offering subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption 'to help with affordability' to shield consumers from their dependence on a volatile source of energy.
And that is ignoring the huge and persistent subsidies dished out by governments (estimated at about $800 billion globally - which ignores the externalities like pollution and global warming).
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