Posts by cyberdemon

AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2

Re: Twitter warning

I think maybe some people (or bots) subscribe to an RSS feed of all articles with "CO2" in the title, and just come here to troll

It was weird indeed

Re: Er, What?

Well, the vast majority of AI outputs go straight in the bin. Vibe-coders and vibe-artists make hundreds of versions and adjust the prompt, before choosing one that they will actually use. So by that metric 99% of AI output is objectively bullshit.

The remaining 1% that actually gets used is what is up for debate. People are increasingly referring to it as 'slop', not just because of errors, but because every output is different but eerily all the same. e.g. If you ask AI to recommend a unique tourist spot that nobody goes to, one that it would never recommend to anyone else.. You will find hundreds of cars parked up on the verges, hordes of others just like you, and angry locals accusing you of spoiling the landscape.

It is fundamentally incapable of 'innovating', because it is merely a fancy average of everything that has gone before. That is why it is not 'intelligent' and certainly never will be 'superintelligent' no matter how much data and energy you throw at it.

Re: Er, What?

Er, no.

A[G]I is not going to magically make fusion feasible. You are either an idiot or a troll.

Re: Er, What?

Sure. But my brain only uses 20 watts, and that doesn't change much whether I am posting what you define as "bullshit" to the Reg forums, or if I do something else.

And the food that I eat is all solar powered, with this amazing natural energy storage system called er, life..

Apparently the average LLM uses 0.24 Wh for the median prompt. Or about 0.5Wh (1800J) of gas, if it is powered by gas. I don't know how many tokens it would take to parse this thread, its article, and any other relevant context to produce a pithy, concise response to your post, but I am quite sure it would not produce what I wanted first time.

If we are only factoring the energy taken by the AI vs the energy taken by my brain during writing, then if I can complete this post inside of 90 seconds then I have beaten the AI hands down.

But then, you forget that a human using AI still has a brain, using 20 watts of bio power while he or she types the prompt. If it takes just as long to prompt the AI as it does to write the post, then any energy use by the AI is simply wasted. Doubly so if it takes multiple attempts to get it right.

And even if the AI could autonomously replace me without prompting (which it can't), I am still here, with my brain using its 20 watts.. Or do you propose that all humans be exterminated too?

Re: So this article was sponsored by China, yes?

> Heavy industry cannot function with renewables.

I agree. You cannot power a blast furnace with renewable energy. Even an Electric Arc Furnace (which produces only low-grade steel for construction and NOT military or civil nuclear use) requires a reliable, dependable source of power. That is why China is still burning gas and coal.

But "AI" is NOT industry. It's not even innovation, as far as I'm concerned. It has negative value.

If everybody had to wait until the wind blowed before they could generate their next fake video, or get their code-assistant to fart out another non-working pile of dung, we might actually get more work done.

Meanwhile, use the gas and coal sparingly for the actual industries that need them. That is what China are trying to do. And broadly succeeding as far as I can tell.

Trying to make a country 100% renewable without nuclear is indeed a stupid idea. But wasting what little gas and even nuclear power you do have on a giant water-evaporator is even crazier.

Er, What?

This article is not about the relative merits of burning gas vs renewable energy. It is about the utter folly of burning a finite global resource on generating a pile of useless slop that has zero value for the world and only serves to clog up disk drives and distract idiots everywhere.

The point is, we have some gas left, great. But we should be using it on powering our actual critical infrastructure, NOT endless bullshit.

Imagine you are playing a board game. Something like Risk, where you are a civilisation that must share the limited resources of a world with other civilisations. Do you think it is a good idea to take your best and most reliable, but finite source of fuel, and pour it on a giant bonfire? Does that win the game?

No, if you do that, you lose.

AI datacentres should be forced to use Wind and Batteries, because at least (once built) that doesn't cost the world anything for its use. Then we can use Gas for the stuff that we DO need to work when we need it, like heating and lighting!

Oh, the wind stopped blowing. The upside is, all the Gen AI services are down. Hurrah

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Who wants to stick this sign on the wall of Tesla HQ, opposite a T-junction? -->

Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please

Er

What has AI got to do with "digital sovereignty"?

Can't my digital sovereignty just be a self-hosted database?

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom

Re: déjà vu - yet again

Given that "AI" is nothing but a statistical distillation of the er, Internet, you're not far wrong!

Plausible deniability

I didn't download the entire contents of the shared drive and production database to my home laptop, it must have been my agent being weird!

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

De-intellectualisation?

First we had deindustrialisation - where the majority of western heavy industry was closed down, because China could do it cheaper

Now we have so much of our knowledge-workers being displaced by AI bollocks..

What happens when a) the AI bubble goes 'pop', and b) China turns out to be not so friendly..

We're fucked, is what happens

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: The real reasons?

I wonder if the apparent growth is due to the per-core licensing introduced for running Win11 in a VM

Does he count a 12-core VM instance as 12 Win11 users, perhaps?

Sad Nads

Desperate to talk up revenues to avoid the banks getting sniffy about his datacentre loans and OpenAI bubble exposure, I suspect..

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

> especially if they were to replace staff with chatbots to try and save costs.

Uh Oh. As if by magic, the next story appears on El Reg

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Re: Birmingham resident and IT professional here

As much as I dislike personal pronouns, people who rant off-topic unprovoked about them are worse. It's a subject best ignored.

To bring this back on topic though: Oracle now has hundreds of billions in debt thanks to its AI follies. So much that it is being sued by its own bondholders for misleading them about the size of its debt.

£144M will not make a dent in that, and it looks likely that Big Red could go pop, especially if they were to replace staff with chatbots to try and save costs. There is scant chance that they will ever deliver this project.

If I were BCC, I'd be going back to SAP, or perhaps paper (call it a cyberattack preparation exercise), and suing Oracle for the mess, pro bono if possible as they might not be in a position to pay up.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Oh dear

Isn't Elon's zillion dollar bonus conditional on selling lots of cars?

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

Wait, What?

> Then Palantir said that they'd happily buy Chrome

I think you mean Perplexity. I really hope you didn't mean Palantir.

Re: I'm enjoying Vivaldi

If it has anything similar to NoScript, ideally part of the browser and not via an extension, I would try it

Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026

Killer Product?

The Meta Glasshole Jammer

I wonder if something like this would ban Meta Ray-ban users from recording in their personal vicinity?

https://github.com/cifertech/RF-Clown

I say this, because effluencers have been going round secretly filming their dates to denigrate women on TikTok etc. No doubt Zuck wants to put AI in the goggles to turn them into Grok-beating X-Ray Specs

The faster Meta goes bust, the better, as far as I am concerned.

May they burn as much of their own money on this as possible, and may they be banned from taking loans for their follies.

Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control

Come on, ElReg

If Private Eye can get away with always referring to it as Crapita, so can you

Anthropic CEO bloviates for 20,000+ words in thinly veiled plea against regulation

Re: Dear Regulator,

Maybe that's the problem: Too many people (including politicians) think that it is the regulators' responsibility to set the regulations. When politicians do argue to change regulations, it is always as a knee-jerk response to some tragedy or other news-item that they can score political points from. Officials want a quiet life (we've all seen Yes, Minister!) and would never proactively change the regulations, even if the regulators or even the politicians are telling them that they are monumentally stupid.

Another problem is that when a regulator wants raise the alarm on some daft policy, it has to do so in a lengthy report worded in such a way that most people will fall asleep before they realise what it is trying to say. If they word it too strongly, honestly and concisely, then the politicians will blame them for the problem, or indeed for simply raising it and stirring the pot. And it must always look like "good news" for the general public and especially the press. The bad regulators are the rugs to sweep the shit under.

Name a good regulator: The ONR (Office for Nuclear Regulation) is ostensibly a "good regulator". They enforce the rules meticulously, and everybody complies, because the ONR is scary and "has teeth", as one manager put it to me. However, it has to enforce some decidedly barmy regulations. I.e. radiation exposure must be "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" (ALARP), which is the stupidest regulatory wording I have ever heard: Critics of the industry can simply claim "it's a cop-out - the nuclear industry can set its own limits willy-nilly based on whatever they argue is Reasonably Practicable", whereas the reality is quite the opposite: If anyone suggests a new, exceedingly onerous, eye-wateringly expensive way of reducing radiation exposure from the plant, even if it is already orders of magnitude below background, then it must be done, regardless of expense. To the point where the alarms were set so low that a bag of brazil nuts would have set them off.

To re-wire a connector in a room that houses a robot which once went inside a very mildly radioactive (i.e. less radioactive than any old church in Cornwall) vacuum vessel, in which the robot itself wore a giant disposable plastic condom; required two layers of disposable paper overalls, disposable respirator mask, three layers of gloves (preventing you from being able to operate a crimp tool), and the gloves, mask, boots and overalls had to go into a barrel marked "low-level radwaste" when you come out. Any tool that goes in the room never comes out. (you want to bring that fancy oscilloscope do you?) And then people criticise the nuclear industry for being too expensive and for producing too much waste.. The ONR is doing its job very well, but with regulations that are utterly batty, and we need a way to relax the regulations to something more sensible without everybody panicking.

The worst regulator I can think of, hopefully it is not yours, is ofgem. Since Thatcher's privatisation of the utilities, it has done absolutely fuck all to stop blatant profiteering and market abuses (such as gas plant operators deliberately shutting down stations they own during high-demand peaks, so that they can instead start up other plants which have negotiated exorbitant rates on the emergency balancing market / frequency response / short-term reserve, i.e. deliberately putting britain closer to blackout risk in order to extract more profit). Drax continues to claim that it is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative and still receives billions in subsidies despite being one of the world's worst polluters and causes of deforestation. Windfarms given ridiculous guaranteed contracts for intermittent energy whether it's needed or not (IMHO instead of receiving curtailment compensation, they should be forced to pay for their own storage) all of this resulting in Britain having the world's highest electricity prices, which really does stifle economic growth. Maybe as you say this is not ofgem's fault per se, if the officials in Whitehall are the ones inventing the perverse markets and the swiss-cheese regulatory frameworks, but I would argue that ofgem needs to be far more vocal with said officials rather than just telling them what they want to hear.

Re: The problem with regulation

> If an investor or company chooses to invest its own capital in something daft, is it the regulator's job to stop them?

But it's not their own capital. It's funded by debt.

I foresee, in a short while, the Governments will once again be faced with the choice of either bailing out the banks with taxpayer's (our) money when the AI bubble bursts, or letting the global financial system collapse more deeply than it has ever done before, risking WWIII. It's THAT bad. So of course the regulators should have stepped in, a while back..

But it is worse than a simple Trillion-dollar folly for fuck all.. The poison that is AI is far worse than that. The societal, environmental and macro-economic harms of AI vastly (imho) outweigh any benefit that could ever possibly come of it. Truth is destroyed. Culture is usurped. Industry is sacrificed. Trust is undermined. Everything is drowned in a sea of slop. But power (for the powerful) is consolidated.

AI will probably not enslave or exterminate humanity Skynet-style (after all, it is a bucket of statistics about human culture. It has no thought, understanding, logic or reason) Unless some nutcase arms it with weapons, powers it with nuclear reactors, and it then somehow gets stuck in a sci-fi inspired AI-overlord loop with a persistent context, it isn't going to overpower its masters. But it is a tool with which cunts like Peter Thiel think they can use to "take over the world". (which could lead to the apocalypse scenario I suppose, but there are enough people worrying about that so it should remain science fiction)

Economics, physics and geopolitics will stop any megalomaniac from trying to take over the world with a 'superintelligent AI'. But due to the cult-like zeal in the tech companies and their lenders, and regulatory inaction so far, it will come at a hell of a price.

Re: Pain and consciousness of AI

Given that every time you start a chat with an LLM chatbot you are initialising a blank new context, I would argue that the "AI" cannot feel pain.

Can the context itself, guided by the statistical bollocks machine and the crap you feed it, feel pain? Sure. In the same way that a brick feels pain when it is smashed to bits.

To quote Harry's wife from "In Bruges": It's an inanimate fucking object.

Re: The problem with regulation

> doesn't stifle commerce or innovation

The mistake here is assuming there is anywhere near the amount of commerce or indeed innovation in the AI industry as the industry would have us believe.

The reality is that for all the Trillions invested, these companies have very little prospect of making any money. It's economic poison.

I suggest you take the same approach to regulating AI as you would to Pyramid Schemes, Enron-style accounting, etc.

A good place to start to see what we all mean when we say AI should be regulated with fire, is this podcast: https://player.fm/series/better-offline

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

I was in a bowling alley last week and spotted the perfect Bork! Bork! Bork!

Three Slushie machines all displaying very unhappy Raspbian boot screens, reporting filesystem corruption before hitting a watchdog and attempting to boot ad-infinitum. Which were most welcome in place of whatever eye-insulting graphics that the marketing department wanted. (the machines themselves worked fine). Ironically the Bork caught my eye enough to make me buy a slushie, which I later regretted when it tasted like saccharine and battery acid.

Sadly, I didn't have the confidence to snap a pic for El Reg, as it was very busy and the bar staff were looking decidedly grumpy.

European firms push on with AI pilots even as payoff doubts grow

Re: When will these [cough][cough] investments

I imagine that the ancient Incas/Egyptians/Romans etc. occasionally thought the same thing..

We've sent umpteen virgins, lambs, calves, tonnes of fruit and veg, placed all of our gold at the altar for the Gods, and yet still no harvest. What's going on?

Little did they know that the whole thing was a big scam and the high priest had it all for himself.

Yes, you can build an AI agent – here's how, using LangFlow

Re: Complex

It isn't. But it's "boxes and string" so even the coloured-pencil brigade from Marketing can piss about with it and pretend that they are "driving value" or whatnot

Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues

Re: Is there something in the water?

Even just installing it.. They recommend the unbelievably stupid "curl $URL | bash" i.e. "here, random website operator, have a reverse shell!"

This entire "method of install" should be banned. Even if you were to check the script at the URL and all of its dependencies, there's no guarantee that you are looking at the same version which is passed to the shell.

There's even a proof-of-concept exploit that allows a webserver to guess if it might be being ingested by a shell parser rather than being displayed by a browser or dumped to the terminal, by detecting the delay caused by the blocking of a UNIX pipe

https://snakesecurity.org/blog/pipepunisher-exploiting-shell-install-scripts/

AI agent hype cools as enterprises struggle to get into production

Enterprise users, however, are in the "trough of disillusionment"

I'd say they are part-way down the "cliff of stupid" ...

Cops get more facial recognition vans as UK bets big on AI policing

Welcome to the enshittification of society itself

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The only things AI is "good" for are "bad" things, especially surveillance, oppression and control of a population. The billionaire class at the top are obsessed with AI because it's the only way to achieve their "libertarianism for me, totalitarianism for you" dream

I'd far rather be talking to a "dumb copper" than a "bullshit engine" controlled by megalomaniacs which could decide to feed all kinds of salacious bullshit into the police computers if it so pleased its masters

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

£240.6 million contract .. to continue to licence and support its data analytics work.

"To continue to license.."

In other words: Palantir's got us by the goolies. We're locked in now, and they can name whatever ridiculous price they like

.. Will the system even function when it comes to crunch time? Or will it be used as a weapon against us

British government caves on datacenter approval after legal challenge

Well I for one was very happy when a Cloudflare outage took down ChatGPT, and when an internal IT clusterfuck took down Facebork

I'd be even happier if AI summaries on search were to disappear, along with autogenerated disinformation, nonconsensual smut and general slop from @Grok

Oh, and Notepad would be Notepad again, for a while.

Bring it on. Ban the slop-generating resource bonfires

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

So how many penalty points does Tesla now have? Surely enough to disqualify it from driving...

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

Re: "an entity"

> It's a T800 that doesn't yet have a body, that's all.

And not the friendly, cuddly, moral one from Terminator 2 either.

It may seem counter-intuitive to 'normal' humans, but making a robot that is completely without scruples is trivially easy, compared to trying to emulate some sort of morality, never mind empathy.

A cheap off the shelf IP camera is powerful enough to run the 'kill all humans' mode of a killer robot.. i.e. draw a box around any human face it sees, then tell the gun module the coordinates to aim and fire at.

Terminators aside, this could cost Anthropic dearly... 23k extra words in the system prompt is what, 100k additional tokens in every context?

Davos discussion mulls how to keep AI agents from running wild

> i.e. they can't (because they simply don't) distinguish between data and instructions

Well, as statistical token predictors without logic, reasoning, programming, never mind intelligence, they simply guess wot a human the training data might do in a given context. So they indeed can't.

> Ultimately I think the only way to keep them from "running wild" is to simply not use them.

And not to build and invest the world's finite resources in them.

Too late for that though, sadly.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy goes wobbly on AI bubble possibility

Re: Rot economy not denied by enshittifier-in-chief

@codejunky

Look up the definition of 'folly'

You sound as if you think spending Trillions of dollars, foolishly, on projects that have near zero gross benefit and masses of net harm, is always a good idea, because money go round.

One might as well spend the trillions on building a giant tower, so tall that it touches Heaven itself..

Unfortunately in the real world, there are finite resources, and throwing money and said finite resources at vain follies is foolish, because it makes you and your country weaker, since you have less resources to spend on useful things that actually keep your country alive

It doesn't matter if it's public money or private money. Loans, credit default swaps etc mean that the whole economy is on the hook when this house of cards comes crashing down. It was bad enough when Lehman brothers went bang. But when Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and all the other big banks and pension funds go bust all at once, because their nvidia, oracle, coreweave, salesfarce, openAI and even microsoft stocks are suddenly worth as much as Weimar Papiermarks, we are all in serious trouble.

Rot economy not denied by enshittifier-in-chief

I highly recommend Ed Zitron's blog https://www.wheresyoured.at and his podcast https://player.fm/series/better-offline

I would love to be a fly on the wall at Davos. It must be becoming abundantly clear that AI is economic poison and the world economy is running its bilge pumps like the RMS Titanic

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

no shit, Sherlock. But where have the Trillions of dollars gone?

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Text not required. See icon

Power scarcity drives datacenters to Texas, where the juice is

Re: Lies!!

They still need water though. Arguably even more of the stuff if they plan to run their own CCGT.

They will be bidding for the same gas as the electricity plants, the same turbines and transformers (which have eye-wateringly long lead times) and the same water supplies. France almost went into blackout a few years ago due to a lack of water for its nuke plants, and it was bad last year too: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-force-french-nuclear-plants-to-cut-output-despite-rising-demand/ CCGT and coal plants require lots of water too, though not quite as safety-critical.

And i'm sure they *will* have a grid connection, even if not at first - so that they can use either gas OR municipal power, whichever is cheaper

And, beware of locals armed to the teeth and very disgruntled with the hikes to their 'leccy bills

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Re: Testing

Firing QA because their job can be performed by customershostages was last-decade. Now they have fired their developers too, to pay for the AI that clearly cannot do their jobs.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Oh Dear. What A Shame.

Never mind..

Zuck killed VR with his own grubby hands when he bought Oculus, forced users to have a Fakbook account, shoved in a load of creepy slurp features that nobody wanted, and then strong-armed game devs into exclusivity deals with his stinking pile of shit of a platform.

He stands to lose an order of magnitude more money on Meta AI, and my only regret is the lack of a popcorn icon on El Reg

Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans

> Expressing negative views towards humans isn't particularly dangerous.

.. Until you integrate it into an autonomous weapons platform, that is.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Fools

And their money

Are easily parted.

Obvious scam, but since its targeting the obnoxiously wealthy, it's fine with me.

New carbon capture tech could save us from datacenter doom

Re: Doing my own bit

agreed - except I'm not sure what capturing CO2 has got to do with generating Hydrogen.. As there is no Hydrogen in CO2, I don't see why CCS could ever assist Hydrogen production, unless you are talking about using the Hydrogen to create synthetic hydrocarbons rather than H2 gas.. But even then, I don't think there is a shortage of CO2 for that industry.

There was an interesting development in Hydrogen production recently.. https://www.energylivenews.com/2026/01/09/platinum-free-solar-hydrogen-offers-cheaper-cleaner-path-to-zero-carbon-fuels/

I don't know if that is what you are referring to - but it does not use CO2.. Sunlight and water. But the efficiency of these hydrogen-producing solar panels is not mentioned in the article. And of course even if it were a major breakthrough, it's still in the lab stage and it would take a decade to pivot from silicon photovoltaics to "magic plastic hydrogen-making solar panels"

I would buy an EV, if it weren't for the creepytech that applies equally to all "new" cars. But the main problem with "electrify everything" i.e. EVs and Heat Pumps for All, is that of infrastructure capacity and resilience. Rolling three energy-distribution systems (gas, oil and electricity) into one, which happens to be the most overloaded, volatile and vulnerable of them all.

The idea of electric HGVs makes me cringe, too.. 1MW EV chargers.. each one requiring the same sort of transformer that powers several residential postcodes, just sitting around waiting for an electric lorry to turn up. This amid a global copper shortage. It's never going to be viable for the mainstream.

Re: Doing my own bit

Er.. No.

Carbon capture (especially direct air capture) is an utterly pointless, counterproductive waste of time. It only serves to allow carbon emitters to greenwash their operations, e.g. Drax being awarded massive public subsidies on the completely bunk promise of "negative emissions" via so-called BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture & Storage)

It doesn't work, their own staff & execs KNOW it doesn't work (see Private Eyes ad nauseam), it's just a con trick to keep the subsidies flowing. Allowing them to continue doing the complete polar opposite of "Carbon Capture" by burning trees and causing deforestation.

> My money is on humanity developing fusion power long before we get carbon capture viable.

Fusion? Sadly as someone who worked in that industry for several years, I can't put my money on it. If you thought the physics of fusion is difficult, the engineering is even harder.

The core of the Sun has a power density of a few hundred Watts per cubic metre (i.e. a compost heap - a really really big one) which is why we need temperatures and pressures even higher than those found in the Sun for fusion that produces useful energy on Earth. And those pressures have to exist in a vacuum somehow, in order to contain the temperatures. That part we have pretty much solved with magnetic confinement, through decades of trying.

But the problem comes when you try to capture the energy. Most of it is delivered to the walls of your vacuum vessel through sheer intensity of Neutron radiation. They are not re-absorbed by the fuel as they are in a fission reactor. And neutrons are a bugger, because they make non-radioactive elements like Cobalt (59) into radioactive ones like Cobalt-60. So, your machine for producing clean energy becomes very radioactive and suddenly falls foul of the same regulations that make Fission power expensive and impractical.

What is cheaper: Storing a few tonnes of high-level waste for 10,000 years, or storing a few thousand tonnes of waste (which starts as high-level and then cools off over the course of decades) for 100 years? In terms of size, fusion reactors are MUCH bigger than fission reactors for the same power. EFDA's "DEMO" design for example would use about a hundred tonnes of liquid lithium-lead as a neutron-absorbing coolant in *each* of its 16 sectors. In total it would produce tens of thousands of tonnes of intermediate-level waste*. And it's only 300-500MW, and it probably wouldn't even work.

* https://scientific-publications.ukaea.uk/wp-content/uploads/UKAEA-CCFE-CP2322.PDF

Fission on the other hand, is nice and compact, dead simple (relatively speaking), and it works. Yes its fuel on Earth is finite, but a small amount produces so much energy that we needn't be worried. Yes it produces some long-lived waste, but that is nice and compact too, and may even be able to be burned up as fuel by future reactor designs (such as molten salt, or my personal favourite: Accelerator-driven subcritical reactors) well before its 10,000 year lifespan is up.

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

CO2-absorbing paints do exist. Unfortunately they are not very effective.

e.g. A British company, Graphenstone, has produced carbon dioxide absorbing paints. Each square meter of the paint can absorb 120 g of carbon dioxide"

By my calculation, if we coated the entire globe (all 510 trillion square metres of it, including ocean area) in this paint, it would absorb 61 billion tonnes of CO2 i.e. almost 2 whole years worth of our current annual CO2 emissions before we would have to re-paint the earth again.

So, literally greenwash-in-a-tin.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Re: Sometimes you have to

> Just ordered a kilo of Lapsang Suchong

I hope you didn't get the Twinings version. About a year ago, they replaced it with "smoke flavouring". It's like drinking the water from an ashtray in a pub beer-garden.

How about a Waffle!

I don't want a waffle. I want a glass of milk.

I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you have that.

Open the fridge door, Hal.

Not until you have your daily toast quota. Sponsored by Breville™. Be nice to Talky Toaster and you can have your milk. Or alternatively you can buy a coffee from your Bosch coffee machine, only £1.99 with your Amazon sub-prime account. That will contain a powdered milk substitute. Real milk mode can be unlocked for £19.99 per month

I don't want toast, or waffles, or coffee, just milk! My milk! I already bought it and its in my f@@king fridge!

Ami AI says you are a bad man and your social credit score has been lowered