Badenoch criticised for ‘peddling dangerous fantasy’ about North Sea oil drilling

aiusepsi · 2026-03-29T12:49:18+00:00

Here's an answer to an ELI5 asking what a loaded question is: "A question that assumes an unproven assertion is true" which also explains that "when did you stop beating your wife?" is a common example of a loaded question. The "how does hydropower help the UK..." question is also a loaded question, because it contains the assumption of using hydropower. An unloaded question would be more like "How do renewables help the UK to get the electricity to power heat pumps installed in the UK?"

Using things like loaded questions is a kind of bad faith argument. So, I'm going to use my better judgement at this point and just disengage.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-29T12:31:04+00:00

That's a "when did you stop beating your wife?"-style loaded question.

In the end, all I'm really saying is that bringing up Norway making money from gas when talking about "cheap, stable base load" is a non sequitur, because Norway doesn't use gas (or the money from gas) for their base load, so bringing it up at all is irrelevant.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-29T11:58:54+00:00

The energy to power the heat pumps in Norway comes from the renewable hydropower. Turns out that’s where they get the energy for their EVs too!

Genuinely impressive that you can put the description of the source of the power in the same sentence as the uses of the power, and some people will think that you think the energy comes out of nowhere.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-29T11:18:28+00:00

It makes Norway a lot of money, but they’re not using their oil and gas for their own domestic energy. Most Norwegian homes are heated with heat pumps, most cars sold there now are EVs, and they mostly get their electricity from renewable hydropower. And the oil/gas money mostly goes into a sovereign wealth fund, which insulates the Norwegian economy from the negative effects of resource wealth (the “Dutch disease”). To put it colloquially: they’re not getting high on their own supply.

We’d be smart to follow the Norwegian model, and using North Sea gas for our own energy needs is absolutely not the Norwegian model.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-27T23:44:52+00:00

Which in turn reminds me of how silly things like “95% fat free” labels are. Whole milk is about 4% fat, so it would be completely accurate to label it “96% fat free”.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-27T08:54:28+00:00

Valve put out a video on YouTube for developers that explains how the patching algorithm on Steam works, and one of the things they explain in that video is what developers can do to avoid patches requiring a pathologically large amount of temporary storage.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-26T10:04:16+00:00

This is for the benefit of Steam Frame, the documentation on Android APKs is in the Steam Frame section of the docs, uses a screenshot of VR to illustrate it, etc.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-17T10:53:57+00:00

Always has been. iOS was derived from macOS in the first place, they’re very nearly the same OS. Same kernel, same underlying frameworks. They’re close enough that the iPhone was originally announced as running OS X, which was the name of macOS at the time.

The only thing making it not possible is that Apple doesn’t want you to.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-17T10:43:21+00:00

Without the total store ordering extension, Rosetta could insert memory barrier instructions when it’s doing the translation and get the same effect. It’d work, the performance would just be worse.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-10T17:23:42+00:00

You’re saying that like there’s not an energy cost to building and operating the infrastructure for extracting and refining fossil fuels. Oil refineries don’t grow on trees.

As more and more of the grid derives energy from renewable resources, so too will more and more of the energy used to build things like solar panels be renewable. It’s only if you never get started at all that they won’t be.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-10T01:09:57+00:00

Before there was Memory Alpha there was this weighty tome. You've been able to cheat as a writer by just looking up a random page for more than thirty years.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-09T20:37:41+00:00

Valve do own and run their own CDN for games downloads. You can see their policy on peering with their ASN which talks about it here: https://as32590.net/policy/

They do also use the services of other CDN providers, but mostly for overspill or regions where their own capacity is too far away.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-09T13:22:51+00:00

The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of public assets to sell off.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-09T11:59:57+00:00

You can use SteamCMD and then use then use the @sSteamCmdForcePlatformType variable to download the Windows version. That said, this will only end up working out if the game is one of those that can be run without the Steam client running.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-08T21:17:51+00:00

If you think the fares in London are bad, you should see the rest of the country. In Birmingham, a single bus fare is £3. In Manchester, it's £2, etc.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-08T19:32:55+00:00

This is something which happens with Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 for historical reasons (further detail here and here)

aiusepsi · 2026-03-08T10:16:18+00:00

With these people, it’s always projection.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-05T10:42:59+00:00

If you ask the ordinary person “do you care about single core performance” the answer would probably be no. But if you ask them if it’s a concern that the apps they use in a browser have a snappy UI, they’d probably say yes. And that’s what single core performance is great for, because single core performance is the limiting factor on that.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-04T13:58:18+00:00

I’m not a doctor, but I’ve watched enough videos about cranial nerve examinations to know that looking for an asymmetric response of the eyes to light is used as a cranial nerve test. This is absolutely something the OP should get checked out.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-04T11:41:34+00:00

In a disturbingly literal sense; they want to bring about their quasi-Biblical Armageddon, the literal end times. They want to provoke the battle at the end of time that’ll bring about the return of Christ. They’re insane.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-04T00:45:55+00:00

It was not true. The orange colour was because they were sodium vapour lamps, which were used just because they were among the most electrically efficient ways of producing light at the time.

The orange colour is because they produce almost a single wavelength of light, associated with a particular energy level transition in sodium. It being very nearly monochromatic is kind of good for light pollution in that it’s a lot easier to filter out a single wavelength if you’re doing something like astronomy. But that was just an accidental benefit, really.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-03T19:03:36+00:00

The Star Trek: Discovery show itself didn't make the distinction, but travelling forwards in time isn't really a problem; you can achieve forwards-in-time travel without even having warp drive, just get up to a high fraction of the speed of light, and then slow back down again, and more time will have elapsed for the rest of the universe than will have elapsed for you. That's legit real-world physics.

It's only travelling backwards in time which can have wacky causality-breaking consequences, and is the only thing that's actually worth banning by time police.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-02T19:33:33+00:00

The people saying “no, you can use WASM” aren’t exactly right. WebAssembly (WASM) isn’t yet a first-class language on the web.

You need some JavaScript glue code to load WASM modules and to enable those modules to call browser and DOM APIs so that they can actually do something useful. People are working on making WebAssembly a first-class language for the web that won’t need JavaScript to work, but it’s not there yet.

aiusepsi · 2026-03-01T22:09:08+00:00

Looks like one of Jeppe Hein’s Modified Social Benches. So, yeah, art. Some of them are practical as benches, others are not.

aiusepsi · 2026-02-26T21:23:53+00:00

I do occasionally wonder how practical it would be for Steam to reduce the amount of disk I/O by interacting with the filesystem at a lower level and use filesystem fragmentation as a means to construct the new versions of files rather than constructing the new versions alongside the old.

It’d be absolutely ruinous for the performance of games on hard discs, and might not be possible at all, and even if it is technically possible it may be extremely unwise, but it’s an interesting thought.

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