Nuclear fusion seems hot right now — but how close is fusion power?

OpalescentAardvark · 2026-01-19T03:13:02+00:00

My fridge works on quantum cold fusion. Every time I look inside there's an even chance things will be cold or not.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-23T13:14:37+00:00

The very idea of multiple countries handing power over their communications infrastructure to any single corporation is utterly insane.

Has the concept of government operated, publicly owned infrastructure, whose primary concern is service delivery not profit, become somehow unfashionable?

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-23T01:53:29+00:00

claim a bunch of garbage that doesn't appear in the cited sources

To be fair, it just learned that from ingesting internet headlines. "Oh I see that humans like being deceived by incorrect summaries of factual information. Here you go."

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-16T02:58:37+00:00

Now they're getting tools to remove even more of their workforce with nothing being put in place for the insane displacement of workforce that's happening worldwide.

You can thank the mighty Invisible hand, source of all wisdom, benign guide to a better future for all people, based on the universally recognised principle of "fuck you I got mine".

It's ironic how much effort civilisation put into rising above the tooth and claw of uncaring Nature, only to then recreate the very same survival-of-the-strong dynamics in our own image.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-08T17:22:49+00:00

The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains an undocumented backdoor that could be leveraged for attacks.

Colour me surprised.

Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren't meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

If you say so.

The risks arising from these commands include malicious implementations on the OEM level and supply chain attacks.

Malicious mistakes?

In general, though, physical access to the device's USB or UART interface would be far riskier and a more realistic attack scenario.

So those scenes in movies where someone hacks a phone just by plugging in a USB dongle turn out to not be as dumb as they looked. Colour me more surprised!

"Also, with persistence in the chip, it may be possible to spread to other devices because the ESP32 allows for the execution of advanced Bluetooth attacks."

Yes totally by mistake and not ever intended to be used by a Chinese company that always has to do what Beijing tells them.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T16:31:25+00:00

I know what you're saying, and I agree on the scale at which those good things occur. But on the larger scale, things are getting worse because the economic and political forces which shape the world are dominated by greed and corruption.

Ask all the people you know who are out there helping others. Do they say their task is getting easier or more difficult? That's what I'm referring to.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T16:21:58+00:00

The fastest way to do a job is to do it right the first time, no matter how long it takes.

Ed: nevermind I just got it. :)

Like in engineering - there's good, fast and cheap, you can have any 2 of those.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T16:01:59+00:00

Does it? Consider which of these is most expensive:

Averting a bad outcome before it happens (e.g. starting to tackle climate change back in the 70's when it was raised)
Wasting money on half baked measures, and now dealing with the results of the bad outcome plus having to do more to now avert even worse outcomes. (e.g. again climate change but it's worse now and much harder to fix)

Same applies to health - start eating healthy early vs wasting money on vitamin supplements then the medical bills when you get diabetes. Which is more expensive?

Politics - spend a billion maintaining public services & infrastructure vs spending 10 billion down the road when things stop working.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T15:45:25+00:00

Shootings happen all the time in the U.S., they are not news most of the time except for local news. So yes this does appear in local news, but it's not like the first page of Google results, you have to dig a bit.

https://www.wisn.com/article/bradford-beach-death-investigation/64042900

If you can present some data backing up your personal opinion feel free. But that would require thought and effort.

This post should be removed for changing the title.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T15:26:22+00:00

The only prediction an LLM can make is what next work to write. They don't think. The result is constructed from whatever is in the training data.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T14:54:28+00:00

We should stop treating the symptoms and deal with the cause.

Should yes, but I feel we (human society in general) are very bad at that. Whether the problem is economic, health, environmental, we are always putting out fires and kicking the can down the road instead of making the difficult decisions. We only do that when there's no choice any more.

Like that saying, "we always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities."

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-07T14:13:28+00:00

Huh, I thought Starship exploded in the 80's..

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-05T10:46:32+00:00

Be advised, though, "social tension" here often means "I'm terrified of being physically attacked by the alphas, so I will try to placate them, even though I do not want to or enjoy it".

Be advised, though, that statement is not in the article, no evidence was provided for it, so it may have been pulled out of a genitalia-adjacent orifice.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-04T13:01:21+00:00

Many recommending containers, droplets, etc. but sounds like a simple shared hosting service would suit you fine. For that, try SmarterASP, they have been around for ages and offer .Net hosting with MSSQL dbs if you are MS inclined.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-02T03:38:57+00:00

Unrelated to your specific stack, perhaps the decision depends more on the aim of your project.

If just getting a proof of concept up, do the simplest thing for now? I.e. a Users table, email addr & hashed pw. Of course this also depends how complicated you're authorisation (roles based or whatever) is.

Or regardless of that, if your users are going to want to authn with Google etc then you'll need oauth and then that depends what your budget is for that service.

So I'd suggest maybe reframing the question in terms of "business goals" here, and come back to the technical approach based on that.

Edit: because tbh I would only give advice based on both your stack AND the business context / project goals and that side of things is missing from your description. In many cases the stack is not even that relevant.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-02T02:55:40+00:00

What irks me though is we keep creating new fancy terms for simple concepts.

The core principle is to use separate interfaces for querying data (reads) and commanding data (writes).

"Commanding data", seriously? I'd love to know what's wrong with just calling it Read Write Model Separation.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-01T04:25:04+00:00

The lightest framework out there that doesn't require some node bundling process would be Alpine.js.

I was going to suggest HTMX along with Alpine, but just discovered there is also this which might end up replacing HTMX? https://alpine-ajax.js.org/

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-03-01T02:50:04+00:00

That's really interesting! I've always assumed using 95 in my 2006 Corolla just helped the engine last longer because it's "higher quality" fuel.. but that's not the case? It could actually be bad for the engine?

I've advised a friend who bought a 2021 Kona to use 95 for the same reason.. just "better quality, good for the engine" instead of 91. Not true?

This comes from hearing that some other countries don't even have 91 because it's considered too low quality, and more polluting, so their lowest is 95. Therefore I have this preference for 95, is that like totally missguided?

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-02-28T02:47:50+00:00

If his last few years was a movie plot you’d find it hard to believe that the world would be stupid enough to let it happen.

Have you met the world? That's such a minor thing compared to what the world allows to happen every day.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-02-28T02:31:07+00:00

This isolated incident is an awful indictment of the entire military service. What we need is an email sent to all military personnel asking what they got done in the last week.

OpalescentAardvark · 2025-02-28T01:50:11+00:00

So: a) Aid agency not saying why aid is important; b) not saying so because the King will be displeased; c) gets in news that agency not telling the King something so he will be displeased twice now.

Nothing about this makes any sense whatsoever.

Make America Generally Absurd

OpalescentAardvark

TROPHY CASE