The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.

The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.

Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.

That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.

2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.

1GW of nuclear is worth about 3 to 6GW of solar if you account for the weather and nighttime. If you also account for nuclear not needing fossil backup its worth even more

Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.

Coal generation production in China did decline in 2025 vs 2024 - but that was the first year for it to happen.

It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.

I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.

I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.

Low.

While the NSA would, absolutely, use it to elevate existing internal access - it is such low-hanging fruit that they have enough alternative tools in their arsenal that it isn't a particularly big loss. Most of their competent adversaries disabled it years ago (as has been best-practice since 2010~).

More likely, it is Microsoft's obsession with backwards compatibility. Which while a great philosophy in general has given them a black eye several times before vis-a-vis security posture.

Most importantly, the NSA is not just about spying, it is also about protection.

A weakness anyone can exploit in software Americans use is not a good thing for the NSA. If they were to introduce weaknesses, they want to make sure only they can exploit them. For instance in the famous dual_ec_drbg case where the NSA is suspected to have introduced a backdoor, the exploit depends on a secret key. This is not the case here.

On the other hand if Snowden has shown us anything, it is that the NSA is more stupid than it looks.

There are tons of old printers/copy machines that allow SMB access or AD auth that will never see a software update that will break.

Honestly I blame the copy machine manufactures for requiring service contracts for security updates on a lot of this.

Those stupid MFD machines have been the bane of my existence as a sysadmin ever since I started in this career many, many years ago.

It's these machines, plus a few really old windows-only apps deep in basement of enterprises that keep this old tech around. There's usually no budget to remedy, and no appetite to either from leadership

Its also what happens when the people buying the tech are disconnected from the ones implementing. Microsoft caters to this.

Just photocopy some currency. Depending on the machine, it has a good chance of bricking the machine with an obscure error code until a service tech comes out, at which point you can point out this machine is really old and why don't we get a new one.

If you'd rather not commit attempted forgery, just print out some Wikipedia pages about the EURion constellation, which is what they detect in money.

Joking, obviously.

Microsoft supporting something doesn't mean that you have to use it. There's something as personal responsibility.

Do manufacturers also have personal responsibility for making safe products, or does it fall to consumers to become experts in the myriad different fields necessary to asses the safety of every product they buy?

Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.

Reamde and Fall are quite readable. But what does this have to do with endings?

Remade was snappy but Fall went on forever.

I did a meta-analysis for my masters thesis and I was convinced that 2 of the 39 papers in my dataset had fraudulent data.

I wrote an introductory piece on the economics and technology of enhanced geothermal with good technical sources. I think it summarizes the state of the tech better than the New Yorker article.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energ...