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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • As far as I understood it, SpaceX uses the word “orbit” liberally. If it reaches the hight where an orbit would be possible, that’s “being in orbit” for them. In an actual orbit, the rocket would not fall back down again in an hour or so without active breaking. If my understanding is incorrect, I’m happy to be corrected. And even of that was achieved soon, it’s still all without demonstrating that the starship could actually carry a load and return it safely. Not even an inexpensive dummy load. All SpaceX is showing in their live feeds are empty cargo holds that fill up with hot gases and fumes during reentry.









  • Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I’ve seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.

    In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh.

    Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power









  • As you mentioned, with Fedora the best alternatives are immutable spins. Updating means downloading a new base image, applying overlays and additional installations to it and on the next reboot you start from that image. You can configure it to keep as many previous versions as you need and boot into those directly on startup. Since you never change your current image once it’s built, you can’t break a known good system. You can only ever break your next version and in that case, just boot the previous.

    I’ve created an Ansible playbook that configures a vanilla Kinoite the way I want it. No need to back up the system if I can recreate it with less than a megabyte of text files. Secrets are in my password vault, personal files are in my personal cloud and get synced to and from the laptop continuously. I would never go back to backing up system files as opposed to recreating it with a playbook. That seems so wasteful in hindsight.