Rossphorus

It seems to be even higher, several studies suggest it's closer to 50%:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05002

Three different studies predicted emitted tire wear proportions (TWP and TRWP) of total emitted MP [microplastic] loads in the environment (both aquatic and terrestrial) for around 45%. (6,7,52) These calculations were mainly based on global, annual production data and matched the TWP proportions of around 40% in this study. However, since C-PVC was excluded here, a comparison of the percentages is not trivial.

If there's moisture in the filament it vaporises in the extruder, causing steam bubbles that expand and disrupt the laying down of plastic, usually causing inconsistent extrusion lines (which itself causes poor layer adhesion). Some of the filament may end up being heated in the extruder slightly longer than other bits depending on these steam bubbles, which can cause overheating issues like stringing and oozing, etc..

Not to mention that filament that has absorbed water tends to become more brittle, which can lead to the filament snapping off before reaching the extruder. As a result, a filament's shelf-life is usually dictated by how quickly it absorbs moisture (and also whether UV from the sun weakens it at all, but that's a lot easier to manage).

What's your ambient humidity? It's usually around 80% here and I can barely get my dryboxes down to 30%

AES-256 is fine actually. The best known quantum attack reduces key strength from 256 bits to 254.4 bits. The problem is that in order to use AES (which is a symmetric encryption scheme) you need to exchange keys using an asymmetric system like RSA, which is known to be weak to quantum attacks.

Whenever you make a String you're saying that you need a string that can grow or shrink, and all the extra code required to make that work. Because it can grow or shrink it can't be stored on the (fast and efficient) stack, instead we need to ask the OS for some space on the heap, which is slow but usually has extra space around it so it can grow if needed. The OS gives back some heap space, which we can then use as a buffer to store the contents of the string.

If you just need to use the contents of a string you can accept a &str instead. A &str is really just a reference to an existing buffer (which can be either on the stack or in the heap), so if the buffer the user passes in is on the stack then we can avoid that whole 'asking the OS for heap space' part, and if it's on the heap then we can use the existing buffer on the heap at no extra cost. Compare this to taking a &String which is basically saying 'this string must be on the heap in case it grows or shrinks, but because it's an immutable reference I promise I won't grow or shrink it' which is a bit silly.

Another poster already mentioned that transuranics and other such byproducts tend to be very dense, so a swimming pool can in fact hold tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel. Also, 'nuclear waste' is a generic catch-all term that includes less radioactive material, compared to 'spent fuel' which is just the really 'high-grade' material.

The part about not needing enrichment is worth discussing, but we do have solutions to that already. There are entire classes of reactors dedicated to not producing weapons byproducts or needing enrichment using the same processes capable of generating weapons-grade material. The reason we see reactors that can make these materials so often is because many of the early reactor designs (many still in use today) were explicitly selected for use by the US government during the early days for their dual-use ability to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Examples of proliferation-safe designs include molten salts and integral fast reactors, but there's an engineering experience chicken-and-egg problem - they don't get built very often because we don't have experience building them. A new design like this will face the same challenges.

TL;DR: Combining a particle accelerator and a nuclear reactor to turn Uranium-238 into Plutonium-239, which then fissions. The reactor itself is subcritical, so if the proton accelerator turns off then the reaction stops.

The main advantages of the system claim to be 'increased efficiency of fuel use' since the uranium doesn't need to be enriched, the ability to burn long-lived nuclear waste, as well as the system being passively safe.

The first point strikes me as an odd thing to focus on, since all nuclear reactors are already very fuel efficient, and if you want maximum efficiency then breeder reactors exist already, which produce more fissile material than they consume - you can't get much more efficient than that. Fast breeder reactors are also great for burning up nuclear waste too, but they never really took off because, well, there isn't actually much nuclear waste to use, precisely because typical reactors are already very efficient: A reactor might consume one ton of fuel per year. You could fit all the spent nuclear fuel humanity has ever used into a single swimming pool. I mustn't be too critical though - any attempt to close the fuel cycle is good, I just don't think it's a really pressing issue. Lastly, being passively safe is cool and all, but almost all new reactor designs are, and attaching a particle accelerator to a nuclear reactor sounds like an expensive way of doing it.

All of that being said, I'm always interested to hear about new reactor designs, so I guess we'll see how it goes.

There's nothing inherently wrong with digital ID, provided it's implemented in a zero-knowledge-style manner. In fact, it would be much better than what we have now: Uploading your physical photo ID to every company that is legally required to ask for it.

Bubbles are not an existential threat to society. We've had like four bubbles in the past 20 years.

This is how bubbles always go, see the Gartner hype cycle. People always overextend, try to apply new tools/tech into places that it doesn't belong, and only then do people realise the limitations of technology. This is common in business, C-suites explicitly exploit the hype cycle to secure naive investor funding, but investors always become wise eventually - it's a game to see how much money can be extracted from them before they become increasingly aware of the limitations of the technology. There will be niches where the tech actually settles, but it's always much smaller than what's promised. I'm a programmer, I've been listening to people say that LLMs are going to take my job for the past five years, and yet every time I've actually tried to apply an LLM directly to my work it's failed in a pretty drastic manner. I find existing systems useful as a tool, but that's about it.

Don't forget this is all under the umbrella of the initial hypothetical where AI stalled at it's current level. I don't believe that existing LLMs systems will destroy the economy. They're a tool that people are trying to fit into every hole, much like blockchain during the crypto bubble. We've already seen companies fire their customer service departments, try to replace them with LLMs, then have to go crawling back when that failed catastrophically.

If AI systems continue to improve, however? As I said previously, all bets are off.

Fine, you want me to be pedantic? When prompted with tokens that appear in an order that humans understand as a question that corresponds to some aspect of the universe as we understand it, the tokens predicted by the LLM correspond to an answer that humans agree is more representative than the tokens provided by the average human.

Tell me where in my initial comment I said they weren't an economic threat. I never said they weren't. I said they aren't an existential economic threat. Please read my comment.