I looked at the eVinci website and it's hilarious. It tries so hard to avoid mentioning the major downsides, and even has a mock-up of it being transported on a trailer. The actual text notes that it needs a shipping container, presumably a very special one that it able to withstand the most severe road accident imaginable without leaking nuclear fuel all over the road.

It produces 5MWe, and 15MWth. That means it's pumping out a LOT of heat. Despite them claiming that it can work in any environment without cooling water, the reality is you need one hell of a heatsink of that. They quote "as little as" 2 acres but that will be the best case scenario. Already the portability claims are starting to crumble.

The only thing they say about spent fuel is that you can return it to them, presumably at considerable cost. Still no plan to deal with that mess, and they only mention refuelling once. That's a red flag - if they even can refuel it, there will probably be a load of waste generated from the process. They sound highly disposable.

Safety wise it's got the usual flaws where damage to the cooling system is a nuclear emergency situation. They claim that the control drums are passively safe. They must be spring loaded or something to rotate into the shutdown position unless held in the on position, but rotation in a system that experiences large temperature swings tends to be less reliable than gravity assisted rod insertion. If a drum jams you are in a pretty serious situation.

I can't comment on where sudo itself lives on the spectrum from aggressively solid implementation to really-dodgy-smell-around-the-edges; but it seems like its purpose is a fundamentally tricky problem even if its execution were impeccable.

The basic "user is authorized for root; but we'd prefer he be thinking and logged when he uses that authorization" is reasonably cogent use case; but it's more of a reminder than a security barrier. Then you get into the actually-interesting attempts at limited delegation and determine that you'd basically need a different userland for a lot of purposes: aside from the modest number of things(often with setuid already in place) built specifically to carefully do a very particular delegated function on your behalf and provide you with nothing else if they can help it; very little aside from garbage kiosk UIs or web or database-backed applications with user and permission structures mostly orthogonal to those of the underlying OS actually tries to constrain the user's use of the application(within whatever context that user is operating; generally having a privilege escalation is considered bad).

Half of what you run considers having an embedded shell to be a design feature; so including any of that on the sudoers list essentially means being able to chain arbitrary commands from that sudoers entry; and the other half doesn't outright intend to include a shell but would require some really brutal pruning, likely of important features, to prevent being able to chain a couple of interactions into having the ability to run whatever. And that is assuming that sudo itself is working entirely correctly.

Gamers Nexus reviews Chinese GPUs and CPUs sometimes, and they tend to be broadly in-line with the claims. The GPUs, for example, do perform as advertised, but have compatibility issues with many Western games as they are aimed at the Chinese market. For games that Chinese gamers like they are decent, and GN saw significant improvements in both the hardware and drivers from one generation to the next.

People always make the same mistake of doubting that Chinese anything can be any good, until it becomes undeniable like with EVs... Although there are some who are still trying to pretend that they aren't top notch. Instead we should take these as warnings that we need to step up our game and prepare for stiff competition.

It's yet another example of something that governments should be funding. The flu costs billions every year in lost productivity, and lost sales as people stay home. In the UK you can already get the flu shot for free, paid for out of taxation, because it's understood that the cost is less than the benefit to the economy and the tax take.

Indeed, Loonsong announced they have server CPUs that are comparable to Intel ones from a few years ago now. Chinese designed GPUs are catching up rapidly too.

It's probably already too late, the decision was made and the Chinese government isn't going to pull back from pushing for high end CPUs and chip fabrication now.

I always look to people with degrees in 'community development' to tell me whether there are enough spooks in my computer science or not; it's just good sense.

If it's dissociality and/or disinhibition without an LLM fetish it's just an ICD-11 personality disorder.

Saying that, much less in public in a way that suggests you either think that it will be helpful or that people will view you as being helpful, seems like strong evidence of an AICD-11 personality disorder.

Why, exactly, are we listening to someone who passed through software engineering on his way into management claiming that software engineers(presumably now his direct reports) are the most spoiled profession and how it's just terrible that nobody is willing to spend several years working for peanuts to get experience(because the argument from race to the bottom is persuasive now?)

He then meanders over to the theory that if you are a real actually-good software engineer your job is clearly safe, because AI isn't set to replace you; ignoring the fact that entire teams, competent and all, get wiped out when the money sloshes a different way all the time; and 'AI' has seen some cataclysmic levels of frankly irrational money sloshing by some mixture of conmen, cultists, and the good old 'animal spirits' of that definitely rational market.

It's basically the same story about 'web developers' who learned how to knock together some HTML at a bootcamp somewhere, or 'IT' back when that was something where the money attracted some people who had no interest, warmed over and presented as novel; with a side helping of boundless(but notably vague) optimism about all the cool new AI-things that are being created that will need real engineers at some point.

Honestly, it's almost impressive how he manages to be so grating while being so vacuous.

I had that problem back in the day with an original Leaf, and its small battery. Would pop in to IKEA for some free charging and lunch, and my phone would notify me of the charge ending before I was done eating.

You would have less illegal immigration if there were more legal ways to immigrate. Not just work visas, but family reunion visas too.

Work visas need to be for more than just skilled people. Americans don't want to do the hard, unpleasant work of picking crops for minimum wage. That's fine, it's a choice, but you need someone to do it.

Then there's the fact that your whole economy is based on the premise of never ending growth, and your birth rate is falling. Either you start with the handmaid bullshit, you make up the numbers with immigration, or you tell the billionaires that they need to adjust to a shrinking economy while still increasing your wages.

Human beings are not machines, they do not produce a constant stream of output while they are working. Outside of simple manual jobs, at least. They get tired, they have lives outside the office, stress and overworking make them sick.

Turns out that 5 days a week is less efficient than 4 days a week for most people, i.e. they can get the same amount of work done in fewer hours if the duty cycle is reduced. It's a win-win - the employee has more free time and better quality of life, the employer loses nothing in terms of productivity and saves money on their energy bills.

It's main advantage seems to be that it knows where the pieces are on the board.

I've had ChatGPT forget the current state of things with other stuff too. I asked it to do some web code, and it kept forgetting what state the files were in. I hear that some are better like Claude with access to a repo, but with ChatGPT even if you give it the current file as an attachment it often just ignores it and carries on blindly.

In fact one bug it created was due to it forgetting what it named a variable, and trying to use a similar but different name in some new code.

Speaking of which, EV articulated lorries (big trucks) are a thing in Europe and seem to be working just fine. Norway has EV ferries too, some with wireless charging.

Once people own an EV and understand what the range means and how charging works, they tend to lose interest in hybrids. You have so many downsides - a whole ICE that you have to lug around and maintain, combined with a small battery.

To give you an idea, Bjorn Nyland does 1000km tests of EVs against a reference PHEV that he filled up with dino juice. The PHEV clocked in at around 9.5 hours, and the best EVs are under 10 hours. He hasn't tested the ultra fast 5m charging ones yet.

Most people will want a break on a 9.5 hour journey, so in practice the difference is zero. Charge while you get a coffee. Even the more affordable cars like the MGS5 and Renault 5 add less than an hour, which again is typically less than most people spend on lunch and comfort breaks.