> "Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts

Only a few posts above we see that China has sold 68 GW of PV in the last few months. It's fun to watch this nuclear corpse twitching.

> Nuclear reactors have seen steady improvements, ... making them cheaper to build

The latest design built in the US was the most expensive power plant in mankind's history. It will be followed by the UK's current build. All indications are that the new SMRs in Ontario will take that title away from both.

Nukboi's will invariably point to China when faced with this reality, but that doesn't help us outside of China. Others will point to Korea, but their build outside Korea was a disaster. There is simply no evidence that we can build these things cheaply in "the west".

> Windows is currently the operating system most likely to change things, to break things, to render itself unusable

I'm writing this on a Mac, so I'm not being knee-jerk here, but I think this claim properly needs to be hung on Apple right now.

The latest OS and its moronic "Liquid Glass" effects are almost certainly going to go the way of the cassette tape display in Podcasts, so I expect some breakage in the future.

On the other hand, they don't change the Settings app *every freaking release*...

For those not familiar with the background to all of this, it's mostly a conspiracy theory that recently emerged with force from the UFO field.

It's not mentioned in the "real press", but the original claim was that all of these people were working on various bits of technology reverse engineered from UFOs. The MIB is cleaning up, although MIB in this case is a string of companies like Lockheed or even Raytheon.

The amusing thing is that the people on the list are not related. For instance, the "nuclear physicist and MIT professor" Loureiro worked on fusion projects at PPPL, and there is precisely zero mystery about his death, a disgruntled former colleague went nuts and shot him and other people. Yet he gets lumped into the story along with Hicks, a guy that studies asteroids, "independent researcher" Eskridge that published anti-gravity baloney, and Chavez, a construction foreman. Their only link is that the UFO hoi paloi seem to think these are related "because science".

Much of the basis for the claims of this being so strange has to do with the people simply disappearing from their home without various items like phones or wallets. This is positioned as something odd. However, this is precisely what a high school friend of mine did while suffering from mental illness, he simply walked out of the house in the middle of the winter in Canada without his prized pocket computer (this being the pre-phone era), wallet, keys or anything else, all neatly stacked on the table by the door. At the time I was told this is a common event in these cases.

This sort of thing has been going on for years.

I recall one where they replaced the multi-conductor mega-cables with coat hangers while the audio experts weren't looking. The experts then went on and on explaining how much better it all sounded.

Only in hi-fi do they question whether or not science really works.

This is so overdue.

I once wrote a paper on Mellon Optical Memory, a computer memory system from the 1950s which was never used in production. The only good article on it was in ACM. They charged $24USD for a PDF of the article that was a couple pages long.

> I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people

So... your worst people DID take them up on that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI

"Elsewhere, players said they couldn't hear the new automated speaker system, with one deaf player saying that without the human hand signals from the line judges, she was unable to tell when she won a point or not."

It would seem that both of these are trivialities.

If the speakers are not loud enough, make them louder or add more of them distributed around the court. This is not difficult.

And a set of lights in the former ref station would solve the second. If they can see the hand signals, they can see a light.

> Astral Systems' approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this
> will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional
> reactors. Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime,
> incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics. A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion
> (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020

So much to unpack here.

1) they claim the concept has been running for 15 years, based on a concept that is 5 years old
2) LCF is incapable of producing net energy (it's actually many orders of magnitude worse than existing approaches), yet they will commercialize it
3) they have always claimed to be aimed at radioisotope production, so this claim of commercialization of power is new

"Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target, making it harder to track and intercept them," the Office found."

The Office "found" what the US has known since the 1950s, and was built in MARV form in the 1959 Alpha Draco project from 1957's WS-199 effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All that is old is new again... and forgotten so we can claim its new *and bad*.

I've used AI for two tasks where I found it very useful, and some very minor ones as well.

1) I had to write some code to invert a matrix in C. I knew the code was out there, but Google's search is so polluted today I could not find it. ChatGPT immediately returned working code. I noticed it did not calculate the determinant, so I asked it for that, and it modified the code to do so. As I say, I know that code is out there somewhere in a book, probably a dozen books, but I can no longer find older topics because the search engines are so polluted today. So yeah, this was extremely useful.

2) as part of the same project I wanted to OCR the 1975 book 101 BASIC Games. Normal OCRs are completely useless, they do not understand monospaced fonts or dot-matrix, and got perhaps 50% of the characters correct, or less. I ran out of tokens in ChatGPT, so I moved to Gemini. By telling Gemini that it was BASIC code, and in some cases quirks of the particular dialect, the accuracy was over 90%. It had problems with certain things - and other engines had *exactly* the same problems - but once I learned the problem areas I was able to track down the issues quickly. This saved me a LOT of time and I was able to OCR the entire book in a couple of nights.

3) with the first wave of tariffs there was a lot of news about the US's trade deficit. I found lots of hits in Google but again, hard to understand. So I asked ChatGPT and it made a very useful summary. My curiosity piqued, I then asked it for Canada's, and found to my surprise that it is actually much higher on a per-capita basis. But then the neat part - ChatGPT added a second paragraph noting that I can't simply compare it to the US's number, because Canada actually owns enormous foreign holdings, and that the resulting balance is largely flat, meaning the Canadian overall balance is pretty flat whereas the US is heavily indebted because their money normal turns inward.

There is simply no way I would have even known to ask that question. I learned a very important detail about all of this that I would not have otherwise.

So yeah, I think they can be extremely useful, if they are useful at all. My feeling, based on my limited use, is that the key to using them effectively is to ask them to perform very specific actions where the total context is limited. Write a whole program? I can't imagine it can understand the complexity. Comparing the debt to GDP ratio of several countries? No problem.

> Storing a kWh now just adds a few cents to its cost.

It's more than that, it roughly doubles the cost of the install.

Of course doubling the cost in China means it goes from about 80 cents to 1.60, which means it's still 1/4th the cost the same dispatch capacity as nuclear, which is why their nuclear program is 1/5th of their original plan.

Does anyone know the technical details here? I see "playable ads" in most games on iOS, and it sounds like this was similar. I assume these ads are also playable on Android, but maybe using some other tech?

I was under the impression that there are very many species of mosquito, and only some of the bite humans.

If the total number of ones that do is only a small percentage of the total, wouldn't an intermediate solution be to breed away (etc) the ones that bite humans? That would seem to have minimal side effects as compared to wiping them out universally.

> as the coins cost more to produce than their one-cent value

I'm sure this will fix the 2 trillion annual deficit. Now we can afford those tax cuts for rich people!