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How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.

I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.

I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...

I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698

      Natural gas-fired generation uses a more energy-efficient technology to produce electricity than coal and has a lower water withdrawal intensity than coal. Natural gas combined-cycle generation had an average water withdrawal intensity of 2,793 gal/MWh in 2020, compared with 21,406 gal/MWh for coal.

Yeah, that's the gas turbine thing. The first-stage (which generates the majority of the power) isn't boiling water, but extracting energy directly from pressure from burning the gas in a jet-engine like fashion.

The coal/nuclear like natural gas is what is labelled as "Steam Turbine" in the chart in this article: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61444

Looks like it's already a small minority.


Coal and natural gas also emit some of their waste heat in the outgoing exhaust gases. Nuclear doesn't have exhaust gases (aside from evaporated cooling water) to carry away waste heat.

The big difference is the much lower thermal efficiency of LWR power plants.


Pretty much every power plant heats water to steam, then uses steam turbines to generate power. This is also how nuclear submarines and arcraft carriers work.

We never left the steampunk era.


We're leaving it now, the majority of new energy capacity is now solar, and not steam based (>70% in 2024). And a non-trivial chunk of the remainder is wind (also not steam based).

And in the US of the part that's still fossil based, new capacity is combustion turbine based, which at most gets a minority share of its power from a steam bottoming cycle.

Fresh water isn't meaningfully a closed loop. We are draining fresh water aquifers, causing the land above them to sink downwards eliminating the voids where fresh water was stored, and moving the formerly fresh water into the ocean where it is no longer drinkable, usable for growing crops, or for most industrial purposes.

We do get new fresh water at a reasonable pace thanks to rain - but in many parts of the world we are using it faster than that, and not just depleting the stored volume of fresh water but destroying the storage "containers" themselves.


14 years of progress on energy efficiency might also have an impact here...

10-ish 18 month doublings would be around 1000x so it explains a lot.

The wobbling one would be pretty major if you ran into it all the time in your regular workflow...

It's easily solvable with a case. I agree that it's silly that Apple does it this way, but I struggle to see how it rises to the level of being a fundamental flaw like file management is.

The wobble actually factors onto my device choice as well. It's just annoying to live with for the life of the phone if you can't find a case that widens it, which many don't.

Casetify makes decent cases that make the super annoying bump less annoying. My iPhone 13 Pro's bump is now more like 1mm, effectively.

> all phones

Eh...

https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/

https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/others/galaxy-xcover7...

Both from the same company and I think about an equal distance between them as the Nokia 8800 and a similarly dated Motorola Razr.


> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use

This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.


Safari on iOS worldwide supports extensions. There is UBlock origin lite and i.e vinagre for youtube background videos. I am still amazed google does not allow extensions on their default browser.

Microsoft Edge on Android now also supports some extensions, one being uBlock Origin. Seems just as powerful as the real thing. And has the benefit of using the Chrome engine.

Firefox on Android isn't just a reskin of chrome? When did that change?

It never was. There was firefox lite 2018-2021 that was apparently, but going back to 2010 Firefox was Firefox.

Are you telling me I, a normal unprivileged user, have a way to read files on windows that bypasses audit logs?

I'm guessing they are making an implicit distinction between access as the user, vs with the privs of the user.

In the second case, the process has permission to do whatever it wants, it elects to restrain itself. Which is obviously subject to many more bugs then the first approach.


If there is a product defect? Sure.

The dude found the bug, reported the bug, they fixed the bug.

This isn’t uncommon, there bugs like this frequently in complex software.


I think you just defined away the entire category of vulnerability known as "privilege escalation".

This isn’t an example of escalation. Copilot is using the user’s token similar to any other OAuth app that needs to act on behalf of the user.

If that is true, then how did it not get logged? The audit should not be under the control of the program making the access.

You're conflating two issues. The Purview search used to get the bad result wasn't clear, so unsure what system is doing the logging.

If someone (Copilot, in this case) has built a search index that covers all the files on your computer, and left it accessible to your user account... yes

Huh, there are CVEs for windows components all the time, random example: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

Including for end user applications, not libraries, another random example: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...


I'd hope that if a tool the LLM uses reveals any part of the file to the LLM it counts as a read by every user who sees any part of the output that occurred after that revelation was added to the context.

How would you handle “company name” or other common phrases in search? Log 1M documents every time that phrase appeared in a copilot response for any user?

> compilers (like Rust compiler) allow running arbitrary code without any warning.

It's safe to assume that the Rust compiler (like any compiler built on top of LLVM) has arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but as an intended feature I think this only exists in cargo, the popular/official build system, not rustc, the compiler.


Rust has "procedural macros" which means executing arbitrary code during compilation: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/procedural-macros.html

It can invoke procedural macros, but those macros need to be built by something, and rustc won't do that by itself: https://blog.jetbrains.com/rust/2022/07/07/procedural-macros...

I still think it's very not good that proc macros have full access to your system, but `rustc` alone cannot build a hostile macro as part of building some code that depends upon it.


Eh, rust has procedural macros, which means executing pre-built plugins during compilation. You can't execute arbitrary code, because you can't make and then execute new macros, you can only run the macros made available to you via the filesystem.

Admittedly that's a bit like saying "a simple shell isn't arbitrary code execution"... except there tend to be binaries lying around on the filesystem which do things, unlike procedural macros.


Any language that supports constexpr, like Rust's const fn [0], can execute arbitrary code at compile time.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/57563


Rust's const fns run in a restricted interpreter that does not allow for things like non-determinism, syscalls, unsound behavior, etc. They can neither read from nor write to "the environment" in any meaningful way. They don't even expose things like the host's pointer-size to the code being run.

Whilst it is restricted, you're not correct that it can't do unsound behaviour and can't do syscalls, and can't do non-determinism.

It can call unsafe blocks. They are more limited unsafe blocks, but they are still unsafe blocks.


I'm pretty sure I'm not, but feel free to make an actual demonstration to the contrary...

Unsafe blocks doesn't imply access to undefined behavior, merely the ability to write code that would be undefined in the regular non-const execution model.


That's all interesting about const fns, but AFAIK any dependency can add a build.rs that executes anything - and is usually automatically executed by the language server doing a build on Cargo.toml file change.

Not a Rust-only problem, but one that people should be aware of in general.


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