If they can be simpler, why not scale them to the size of a current reactor and reap all the benefits? What's in them that necessarily only works at the small scale?

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

SMRs are not simpler. They are reactors, the same as the large ones. They have all the same features. They are safer only in the sense that if they go bonkers, there is less to actually go defective. They are scalable in the same sense than larger reactors are. Most of the large ones are in plants with several of them, which means they were scaled. And the last one is unproven, as they are neither built nor deployed yet.

On the other hand, they have more surface which can catch stray neutrons for the same amount of power, because they are smaller, and you need more of them. That means more material gets contaminated and has to regularly get replaced because it degrades over time. If they operate at the same pressure, you need the same thickness of the walls, but with smaller diameter, you need more material per volume. They need the same amount of shielding per nuclear source to get the same protection level, but you need more of them, because you have more but smaller nuclear sources.

I've been to something which could be called an SMR. It was a scaled down nuclear reactor built in the 1970ies for studies and reactor experiments. It was 25 meters high, and it had a diameter of 6 meters. And its power output was 2 Watts. No. Not 2 kW or even 2 MW. 2 Watts. Enough to light a single LED lamp. Actually, it was designed to withstand 1000 Watts of power output, because that was the theoretical maximum the uranium-vinyl-pellets to feed the reactor could create when going critical. But even then... a 1 kW engine the size of a large grain silo.

This is the most important part. Right now, X-Energy is pure vaporware. And yes, I know, all reactor designs are essentially vaporware, because their task is to heat water to turn it into vapor. But this is vapor-vapor. The time line calls for 12 small reactors to be ready by 2039, each rated 80 MW. And the previous project, as mentioned, was already set up 2 years ago, and not a single foundation has been poured yet.

This is one of those incubator projects. Amazon is investing and probably betting on a 30% chance that this will ever bear fruit. Or a 10% chance. I don't know Amazon's calculation. But this project does not mean that any of those 16 reactors (4 previously, 12 now) will ever come into existence. But if they would, Amazon had an edge on powering data centers. So they think it's worth the risk.

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

I don't know what you mean. Look at the improvement in hiring when you can advertise an open position on LinkedIn and get maybe 100x as many applicants as before! OK, probably 99% of them will be completely unqualified for the role and barely capable of pushing the instant application button, but how is that a problem, really? Surely hiring managers can easily filter them out and no qualified applicant will ever get lost in the noise?

It's like a video I saw on YouTube the other week. Someone was talking all about "skills" for their AI agents and how they'd automated so much of their workflow using them. They started the video by kicking off four different tasks for separate agents to show how productive it was to have all this stuff happening in parallel and how it was so quick and easy to organise.

One of the tasks involved producing an infographic about a certain topic, and the AI duly produced one based on a one-liner prompt, taking only a few seconds of the presenter's time and with no further input from them about the content. The infographic had exactly the level of quality you'd expect from this: a load of boxes and arrows (with some of those arrows starting or finishing floating in space without connecting anything) and some words (a few of which might have been related to the topic mentioned in the prompt).

That infographic was the only substantial output from the whole exercise. It was the worst kind of AI slop imaginable, generated with literally no thought or oversight from the presenter beyond a couple of words about the topic as part of that one-liner prompt. This was probably about the average level of the LinkedIn posts I used to see before I left as well. As you said, I'm not sure you can be a "thought leader" without doing any thinking.

I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn't about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That's not going to happen, so I just don't use the site any longer.

As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it's one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I'm not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.

Actually, Yandex just had to update their contracts to make bombardment a Force Majeure. Until the first data center was hit, Yandex did not expect to be a target in a war, despite Russia starting to bombard data centers in Ukraine.

After 1986? Seven. Ignalina 2, 3 and 4, Smolensk 3 and 4 and Kursk 3 and 4. You were saying?

Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.

The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.

And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?

I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.

I have a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, which I install on all the services on my home LAN. However, because it's a wildcard, LetsEncrypt insists that I prove domain ownership by updating some DNS TXT records. My DNS provider doesn't support automated updates to TXT records. So ACME won't work, so I have to do that bit by hand.

Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.

"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.

Google says that patent expired in September of 2025, as it was filed in 2005. Yes, we are getting old.

Personally, I prefer the old rectangular Thinkpad charging connectors.

Does not matter in this case, if they don't host an online version of it. My impression is that Siemens wants to shut down the project completely.

If Siemens does not re-distribute them, then Siemens does not violate any copyrights on them. Only if Siemens would continue to distribute binaries of OpenRadiuss to customers, they would be in violation.