So what are these thermal power plants that need a heat sink but are not nuclear?

The Post Office lawyers were most to blame there, along with staff at the PO and Fujitsu. They are unlikely to face any real consequences.

Lessons won't be learned either. We are unlikely to see the end of giving certain organizations the power to prosecute people. It's not just the PO, the rail operators need to have that power removed as well.

You might consider "crewed", "piloted", or "staffed" as alternatives. You can also say "human space flight" as an alternative to "manned missions".

The frustrating part is the lack of cooperation, and the lack of proper long term funding for specific goals.

I'm not sure that cheaper energy will be enough to deal with NIMBYism. We just need to change the law so they can't stop critical infrastructure being built. Or new houses, for that matter. Sure, have oversight to make sure it is done in a way that doesn't trash the environment, but manage it centrally and have the overriding goal be to build stuff unless it's really bad.

NIMBYism is a relatively recent thing, at least on this scale. After the war we built a lot of new homes and towns, often on "green belt". Pylons everywhere to bring electricity and phone service. New roads. In the 80s when property started to become an investment rather than something to live in, when people started to get rich because the value of their house shot up, suddenly they were very concerned about anything that might slightly devalue it.

There are other genuine reasons, the big one being that we are really, really, really bad at building stuff. New homes in particular are crap, shoddy, and the promised infrastructure never gets done. Any industrial project like grid upgrades will be delayed and go massively over budget. We are too proud to accept any help with it either, preferring to just keep bumbling along instead of getting what we need and learning how to deliver it.

MacMann is just obsessed with finding reasons why everyone should build nuclear. Never mind that it's insanely expensive and takes 20+ years in Europe, you could use a reservoir as a heatsink to stop it melting down!

Here batteries are only really used for smoothing the output of renewables, we don't have very large scale storage. I'm not sure why, maybe partly because we don't make our own batteries and don't want to buy Chinese ones for some reason.

There are some big storage projects in the works, like turning valleys into pumped storage reservoirs, but we are also crap at big projects like that so it won't be available for a while and will likely go massively over budget.

So yes, we need more battery storage, bought in so we can't screw it up. But also grid upgrades to shift that energy around. The problem there is NIMBYs and green belt wankery. In fact only about 12.5% of the UK is green belt, but people don't want to build on anything green at all, and would apparently rather it be kept pristine (except all the existing farming, old buildings etc.) for another decade or two until climate change buggers it up anyway.

This would give the grid operator the ability to choke companies that they don't like and effectively put them out of business.

Seems like a poor comparison. What you reference is rote memorization but I'm talking about understanding concepts. To that end, if I needed to find a value for a logarithm, I have the knowledge to derive it.

Except sometimes it gives the wrong answer and bad info because it doesn't actually know anything being that it is a mere LLM.

Based on what evidence?

You're not wrong but this seems more like a suicide pact.

AI development is only just starting. Anything learned about AI is going to be worthless by the time they graduate. Besides that, why would they learn anything when they can simply rely on AI to give them the answer? You give a calculator to a child who is just learning math because they'll only ever learn to punch in numbers to a magic answer machine.

This will not produce valuable workers nor will it provide an education. This is foolishness.

With proper instruction, you can learn touch typing in a week.

There are free apps and websites that work well.

Maybe it's just me but I feel like the school's first priority should be preventing student dismemberment.

"Hey babe, I hope you like intellectual discourse because my sulci are this long and deep so I can go all night long."

Satellite imaging has become a fact of life, meaning that it's accepted that you could be photographed from space at any moment when you are outside. Given the proliferation of UAVs ("drones") that have photographic capabilities, it seems only natural that we're approaching a point where standards for what constitutes spying are going to be defined. I'm fairly certain this means photographing from a certain distance. However, this isn't entirely helpful if there isn't also a maximum optical resolution.

For warrant-less imaging, 500 feet above ground and one meter-per-pixel seems reasonable as that's what expensive optical satellites get you and sufficiently high enough detail to get a warrant for closer investigation. However, perhaps there should be a temporal bound as well, like you can only capture an image of the same area once a month.