The problems I'm thinking of are those of the last several decades. That's LONG after they were useful military reactors. But if you prefer I could talk about the PG&E reactor built below a cliff and just about on an active earthquake fault (Diablo Canyon). That one got enough public notice that it was shut down, Perhaps many of the reasons were silly, but that was an EXTREMELY stupid location.

And, of course, one of the real problems is that there's no way to reprocess the spent fuel. And no acceptable place to store it.

It's not *that* bad a bet. There are probably places where a humanoid robot only slightly better than today's existing models would be useful. The real question is "How many of them?", and that clearly depends on both how much they cost and how easy they are to use/target/apply.

I get that you are very pro-nuclear, and it WOULD have lots of advantages were it done honestly and safely. Unfortunately there's a long history of management cost cutting on any safety measures they're allowed to. (This is not limited to private industry. ALL management. Look up the Hanford reactors.)

The advantage of solar in this area is that problems can be limited. I think more people have died doing solar installations that nuclear reactors have killed, and there's currently no good way to recycle solar cells, but the problems are more limited. (I'm not sure this is still true if you count the manufacture of the solar cells and their batteries, but I believe it is.)

Well, since it's pretty simple to generate methane, gas *could* get us away from fossil fuels. And since it's just there as a backup, it would definitely be *less* fossil fuels.

Of course, the problem is that we need negative amounts of CO2...and thermodynamics says that isn't going to be cheap.

No necessarily. It often took many months for a Fortran IV programmer to adapt to structured programming. Habits can be hard to break.

Sorry, but thermodynamics is real. Entropy is real.

OTOH, some choices are more destructive than others. If you pay attention, you can pick the less destructive ones. (But we probably *are* beyond the carrying capacity of the planet for our species. This isn't a certainty, as there are many different approaches, but I believe we're past the carrying capacity using every approach that's been tried up until now. Including "pastoralist" and "hunter-gatherer".)

Or possibly what it means is that the segment of people who want that capability is small. (I would have been part of that segment a decade ago, when my eyes were better. These days Txt message on the phone are too small to read.)

Your valid point is that it's no longer adaptive. But it *was*, and social customs tend to persist long after their utility. I'm sure you can think of a few currently being stressed in the US.

It's not moronic, but it only makes sense within a proper context. It's more of a society optimizing thing than a physical efficiency optimizing thing. It makes more sense when transportation and communication are slow, and laws aren't strongly enforced, so social customs depend strongly on trust.

That joke is a story based on a really early attempt at machine translation. There were several similar goofs. E.g. "out of sight, out of mind" into "unseen moron", "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" is the one you selected, but it was only one of several. Not a huge number. Computer time was expensive! I probably heard of around 30. And translating to and from different languages yielded different results. "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into Russian and back yielded "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.".

My sister was left-handed. It's NOT a myth. She had to really contort her hand to avoid smearing the stuff she'd just written. And this was with ball-point pens, not fountain pens (which I preferred, because I could use various colors of ink).

I sort of agree with you, but the appropriate thing to do is to change the law, not to violate it in the name of "doing what's right". It's true that this would mean amending the constitution, and that's difficult, but they have the legal right to choose what they allow.

OTOH, it would be quite reasonable to deny that they are common carriers if they use editorial judgement as to what posts to allow. That would be an easier approach, and in line with what's been done in the past. I just feel that it's blatantly unconstitutional. (I think the Supreme Court disagrees with me, but that was the Warren court, perhaps the current one would agree...but probably not. That would limit the executive power.)

Yes. So it should be legal for them to make that change. It should also inform everyone that YouTube is even less trustworthy than you previously thought. (Unfortunately, it probably won't.)

There are lots of domains were physical evidence is either missing or impossible, yet where many people feel the need to have certainty.

Actually, the space is even larger than that. Every area of expertise implies an area that is not being examined, since people have only finite intelligence and finite time to explore. So...I "believe" in the EWG multi-world interpretation of quantum physics (with a few modifications). This is a belief, because I'm nowhere near expert enough in the field to have detailed knowledge. I *do* acknowledge that there are other interpretations that fit the existing data equally well, but I find them...distasteful.

Also, I believe that my wife was a wonderful woman. This is not based on globally accessible knowledge, partially because "wonderful" is not well-defined.

Etc.

You are wrong. AI has done mathematical proofs that were new. It *can* only be original by combining existing information into new patterns, but if the "rules of inference" are good, this can allow it to create something new and good.

OTOH, you are partially correct, in that it can't derive anything that wasn't already implicitly implied by the existing knowledge.,,because it can't currently run its own experiments.

N.B.: This is a comment about "AI" not about pure "LLM"s. Pure LLMs are a lot less reliable, because they've been designed to never admit that they are uncertain. And because they've been trained on the Internet.