What kind of a nonsense posting is that? Stop projecting and read what I actually wrote.

Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.

Do they, or could that stuff be on the surface? Pump cold water down, get hot steam back up, run it through a heat exchanger/condenser, cycle it back down again. Or maybe something other than water. You'd lose some heat to the shaft walls, but that could be acceptable.

I think all the maintenance-required parts you're talking about are where the heat is transformed into electricity, plus the safety-related monitoring of the core. With this design, it seems like all of the turbines, etc. will be at the surface, where they can be easily maintained, while the safety-related stuff just isn't an issue. Rather than designing a core that can be controlled and ramped up and down, with this system you'd designed the core to just operate at a continuous steady state for its operational lifetime until the fuel is used up, at which point you just fill in the hole.

You might make the core self-moderating so that if it gets too hot it will ramp down the fission so you don't have to worry about stoppage in the flow of water resulting in a meltdown or similar, but that would only be to reduced the likelihood of the core damaging itself before the end of its useful lifetime, not because there is any safety concern with a meltdown that occurs kilometers underground.

All of the stuff other than the weights is basically just scaffolding, though. Necessary, but the stuff that makes it "intelligent" is all in the weights.

That would require that there are no more and no less than the materials required in existence. The problem students face is not lack of materials. The problem is they are faced with vastly more materials than they need and most do not yet have the skills to competently make a selection and structure structure what they selected.

Other than that, I agree with your statement.

Indeed. Also reminds me of a certain "stable genius".

I know how to use this stuff: Stay away from it, it adds nothing and wastes my time. Oh, I have one use: I currently have a student evaluate the major coding assistant and some general LLMs on how good they can judge code security. The results so far are that they work well for toy examples and not well or not at all for real situations. This may eventually get me a nice publication.

While I do not completely agree, the idea has merit.

How would you even use slaves in drilling a kilometers-deep borehole?

Yep, the guardrails are also improving.

Well, the LLMs don't really consist of "code" per se, but I think the AI labs are already using them to work on improving their own design. How far are they from being able to do this without human oversight and supervision? I have no idea.

In this case, it stays deep in the ground, where it came from.

The dry rock method described in the article significantly reduces this problem, because it doesn't rely on groundwater steam that has had millennia to dissolve high mineral loads. Instead, it injects low-mineral surface water into pressure-created cracks. That water does pick up some minerals from the rocks, of course, but the result is far less corrosive than natural groundwater. In addition, super-hot rocks flash all of the water to steam, and H20 in gaseous form cannot carry any dissolved minerals (this is how distillation works), so as long as they can find ways to keep the steam from pushing liquid water up into the generation equipment, there are no salts or minerals to cause problems. This is actually easier with higher temperatures, because no pockets are cool enough to avoid flashing to steam.

I'm not saying that the problem you cite isn't relevant to hot rock geothermal, but the difficulties are hugely reduced.