Headline is terrible. The big red flags are that they don’t do end-to-end encryption by default, the servers are in Dubai, and use a proprietary algorithm.

Last part should be clarified further. They didn’t reinvent AES or anything. It’s more like a protocol that puts together existing algorithms. It means they can use transport layers without TLS or anything else that wraps your messages in crypto otherwise.

https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

I’d still say this is a red flag. How you wrap encryption around your messages has several pits you can fall into. It’s not as bad as reinventing AES, though.

There’s apparently some people in the back who still can’t hear it. Somewhere around 20-40% of the US population.

Non-state actors who use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims.

Yup, checks all the boxes.

Lithium batteries are often -30 to 80C, but that’s just saying what’s possible to squeeze some kind of voltage out of them. Basic principle is that the colder it is, the harder it is for chemical reactions to happen, and thus this will affect all chemical batteries to some degree.

I am absolutely certain that experts have looked at it, and come to different conclusions.

I’ll even go as far as to accept that there is no scientific consensus.

And what reference do you have for that? A recent one, because as I said, the economics have totally changed in the last 30 years.

Nuclear power doesn’t really produce co2

Concrete does. Reactors need a lot of concrete. A lot.

Renewables are still not ready to deal with base load in a power grid long term

Which doesn’t matter. Base load exists because it’s cheap to make power plants that stay at the same level all the time. The economics of that don’t apply to renewables.

Nothing, nuclear power will buy us time

Utterly untrue. It’ll take 10 years to deploy a single new GW of nuclear. That’s not buying time.

You don’t have to pay to “prove” I’m right. You just have to accept that experts have looked at this, and nuclear does not need to be part of the conversation. Not beyond keeping whatever we have already, at least.

Oh, fuck a book, aahhhhhh

The newer sodium batteries are comparable to LFP batteries from a few years ago.

Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.

This 90’s talking point against Greenpeace is no longer valid. The economics have changed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/no-miracles-needed/8D183E65462B8DC43397C19D7B6518E3

The other side of that is matching supply to demand is basically instant. You pull power from batteries and they give you more (provided they’re not at their safe limit). There’s always a lag in getting turbines to spin up and down, and so there’s a non-trivial mismatch time.

While you’re not wrong, sodium batteries coming on the market have 200 Wh/kg. This is comparable to where LFP batteries were a few years ago. That means the newer sodium batteries are about as good as what’s in lots of EVs right now.

They are dirt cheap, don’t have the fire safety issues as some lithium chemistries (not all lithium chemistries do that), and sodium is abundant.

I think your confusion is warranted, because it’s not clear how SCOTUS’ decision is different from what the Constitution comes right out and says. On the surface, it does seem to just reaffirm what we already know, and maybe the liberal justices are just whinging.

The trick is that they did it in a way that causes a lot more work in the courts. In turn, that means Trump’s trials get delayed further.

Nobody sane is going to argue that getting a hostile crowd to surround and storm the capitol while an important procedural vote is taking place is an official act of a President. But now it has to be ruled on, specifically, and that’s one more thing to add to the pile before the obvious verdict can be reached.

Trump’s lawyers have already filed an argument in the hush money case that certain points of evidence should be removed because they were official acts. If so, that would potentially result in a mistrial, and so the only Trump criminal case that went forward would have to be redone.

Cults of personality don’t work that way. They don’t get replacements. They can try, but they’re not likely to reach a critical threshold of votes. They may not even reach a House or Senate majority, and Project 2025 can’t go ahead at the federal level without all three.

How come Trump gets to be as polarizing as he wants, but nobody to the left of McConnell can?

You keep doing this thing where you presume I don’t know about some issue

Maybe because you way overestimate the reliability of old drives. Yes, 10 year old drives can work. Doesn’t mean you should trust them with anything other than getting the data off of it.

Magnetic platters absolutely do break down from sitting around. Bearings and other mechanics can also go bad. For those things, a professional recovery operation could still get the data if you’re willing to pay, but the drive itself should be thrown out.

Edit: keep in mind that with bit rot, the drive may superficially function just fine. Your data may even be 99% correct. That 1%, however, could cause unrecoverable problems, such as videos that glitch in the middle.

I wouldn’t trust it that way, no. They might last decades. They also might not. It’s a gamble on any single drive, or even a few mirrored drives.

File system also matters. Modern ZFS has error checking that can handle some level of bit rot. Older formats generally don’t.

If it’s over 7 years or so, I want to get the data off of there.

- as opposed to +

WELCOME TO THE RABBIT HOLE

I upgraded my datahoarding server to a pair of 18TB hard drives on ZFS with mirroring a little while back. It’ll be several years before I need to upgrade again, but I expect that when I do, SSDs will be cheap enough to go that route.

Already have a 10Gbps fiber connection to that server, so the hard drives are the bottleneck.