somewhere between 30 and 5 years ago there used to be a thing, a very crass irregular webcomic of extremely low quality, made by a collective that eventually boiled down to two dead inside dudes working in advertising that escaped from ideological armpit of poland into buddhism and syndicalism, and they had like 3 blogs and fb and got locked out of all of them, their badly drawn jpegs lost to link rot and inexorable passage of time

anyway, they wrote also this, machine translated:

I have an idea for all these advertising festivals. Not like now, where some fucking ghosts* get awards, which were broadcast somewhere on channel tv9 once at 25:68, created after hours by sad advertisers, who somewhere subconsciously regret finishing this ASP [Academy of Fine Arts] and have to enlarge the logo and call to action. No, my idea is for all advertisements to be broadcast at festivals. Obligatory. Every brand manager, and every advertiser who produced something in a given year - all 10, 15 thousand people will be herded into one hall, everyone will be tied to a chair, they will get a tasteful, metal harness for eyes and ears like in A Clockwork Orange and we will start.

We are running a marathon without a break for peeing. We watch all your achievements, television, radio, internet, print. New media. A radio show about urinary incontinence? There it goes, in a loop. TVC where your shitty soda is love and solves the problems of racist violence? In all versions 45, 30 and 15 seconds and the storytelling 3:20. Then a short break for advertising banners obscuring reality. Buy. Buy. Buy. Billboards on quick assembly. Yogurt that loves children. Bathroom furniture assembled on Amiga with overcompressed, screaming voiceover. Shitty content on Facebook, where brands take long-dead memes from the trash can of history and shittily stick their logos on them.

A special section where we exclusively assemble warnings consult a pharmacist and it goes at 130 dB to the entire room. With boosted treble. If you go deaf, we’ll cure you, bitch, if you faint, we’ll revive you. If you die, you win. Maybe after the awards at this festival they would think more about what they are doing. Maybe we would finally stop wondering who came first: the stupid message or the stupid recipient. Maybe there would be no one left to revive (15,000 won! for a total sum of - ).

The award would be not to “win”, but you try so hard all year long that you have no chance. #dreams.

• works that prove to you that you still have some value, and that your thinking is needed (I’ll give you a hint - it isn’t)

higher voltage at the same power would actually make it more compact

ah yes it’s reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era

you okay out there bud?

what neutrons? we’re talking about shielding of spacecraft moving out of earth’s magnetosphere, not a spacecraft travelling through core of active nuclear reactor

the kind of radiation that is relevant are high energy protons (and alphas and electrons, with a sprinkle of heavier nuclei) from sun, mostly. there’s no relevant source of neutrons

(and incidentally water is pretty good at absorbing neutrons too)

water does not expand upon irradiation, what the fuck are you talking about. you can’t reflect high energy protons (what would be important in radiation in interplanetary travel) you can only either absorb them or let them pass, there’s no third option, same for anything above uv and electrons

to a first approximation (rather good one at that) (for gammas) absorption is proportional to how much mass per area unit is used as a barrier. 1 g/cm^2 of water is just as good barrier as 1 g/cm^2 of lead or steel. this means that you can absolutely use completely normal, regular potable water as a radiation shield

Water in its purest form would have to take on mass to “absorb” radiation, expanding a hull and destroying it over time.

i’m not even sure what it’s supposed to mean, unless your understanding of ionizing radiation is uncut nonsense

chemically speaking, it’s completely fine to irradiate water because whatever is formed as a result of radiolysis would just most of the time form water back, with the rest becoming very weak solution of hydrogen peroxide. this is big part of the reason why water is used as a coolant in nuclear reactors

there are also specific nuances to stopping anything that is not gammas, like secondary x-rays, gammas from neutron absorption etc and this actually favours light element shields, like water or liquid hydrogen, for this kind of radiation shielding

i don’t get what you fail to understand, water doesn’t became radioactive or harmful in any other way after irradiation, and irradiation of food is routinely used for extending its shelf life

“remove” what exactly? water is not alive so it’s okay to irradiate it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

thank brexiters for that, it’s illegal in eu

nvidia executive called saltman a podcasting bro

build without instructions

the problem with that is that training can’t be done “immediately” it takes tons of compute

Copyright and IP concerns disappear with an open dataset.

i don’t think i’d agree with that, doesn’t matter if dataset goes open if content went there without consideration for authors

also even things like thispersondoesnotexist were used to mass-create fake identities and such

i’m not. just because he’s an underdog here means that you’re gonna ignore all the harms of generative ai up to this day? it’s like complaining that big oil stole the idea of adding tetraethyllead to gasoline from you and you got no profits from that as a result

You might be semi-comfortably running linux mint cinnamon on these (assuming 4gb ram) with xfce you’re trading clunkiness and ancient looks for lower memory usage

no idea about the usual suspects, wifi, bt, graphics probably will require tinkering as is tradition

how low we’re talking

xubuntu is fine if your box is a potato or if you’re coming from windows vista

me walking around the workshop with the new apprentice:

i’m here to remind you that for last 20ish years half of the time chemistry nobel goes to biologists, and now they doubled down on ai wankery with giving it to alphafold

internet funeral material

because these end up generating most of electricity. older plants matter less specifically because these are less efficient - operating them means more fuel costs per MWh. normally, you can see new flashy plants generating all the time it’s practical, because these are more efficient, have less maintenance downtime etc and when demand grows, progressively less efficient units start generating coming from spinning reserve. the two exceptions are NPPs which are best operated at constant high power because of their neutron physics and renewables that are literal free energy so everything they do is taken in. the only place where you can improve efficiency of NPPs is in turbine, and that probably is pretty well optimized unless turbine is very old, because increasing steam temperature would mean changed conditions in reactor in way that could happen to be out of spec. we have figured out wind power pretty well, and perovskites aren’t a thing, and won’t be a thing until they become more durable, which they won’t. in all cases, upgrades would have to make sense both economically and/or in emission costs. this includes CHP and laying municipal heating grids, and good luck with that with how dysfunctional american local govts are (where probably biggest emission gains from CHP could be made)

you can redo this for other types of thermal powerplants and come to the same conclusion. if you say that saltman&co and his assemblage of lying machines can outsmart thousands of turbine engineers, you might be a shill for making other people believe that or a moron for believing that yourself