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.

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.

What sources? And when? I think the conclusions your citing predate the reasoning overlay models... and reasoning seems like exactly the right solution to both of the problems you cite.

I think you're fooling yourself. Confirmation bias at work.

This is a common perception among techies, but is not true. Google search usage and profitability has been rising steadily. It's actually still rising, though LLM usage is slowing it. I'm not sure whether the numbers I saw were public, so I won't cite them. If you'd like to verify, I suggesting looking at the annual reports.

I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?

If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're clearly missing the most important point, which is that the pace of improvement has been and continues to be incredibly rapid. You need to base your reasoning on what the models will be capable of five years from now, ten years from now. Unless we suddenly hit a wall, they'll be vastly better. How much better? No one knows, but it seems safe to expect that they'll be orders of magnitude better.

I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.

If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.