There is M-x vi-mode. So you are wrong.

This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.

Will the employee base at companies like Microsoft eventually consist of a bunch of AI agents? With the General Counsel being the sole human, retained for legal purposes?

Don't give them ideas... Now that the market has surfaces a resource, the elites may start looking at wolves blood now - the wolverine stack.

Just in the last 24 months, Gulf, Iranian, Ukrainian and Russian cloud DCs have been targeted, including different availability zones of the same cloud vendor. So I think it's time corporates and governments start re-recognising the benefits of on-prem data centres. Yes, the old, distributed office-building DCs: halon fire suppression, lit/dark fibre, AC, cooling, giant boxy UPSs and captive power generation - all that. What makes it better now is that computers have gotten a lot more efficient (e.g., die shrinks, ARM solutions), while compute demands of most core business processes hasn't changed (I consider most AI loads are NOT truly 'keeps the business going' core. More like icing on a cake)

...then implement link security checking on employee PCs.

For businesses, tweaking temperature and increasing HVAC recirculation (i.e cutting down on fresh air) reduces power consumption.

So when the AC air in these building is unusually cold, warm or stale:
- at the doctor's,
- at the mall,
- at the cinema,
- at (God forbid!) the hospital! ...should we think of Voltus and Google?

What is Ellen Zuckerman, head of energy market development for North and South America at Google, doing to mitigate the impact on vulnerable on humans? Does she have constraints applied in her spreadsheet model to avoid this? Or has the accountability headache of managing impact just been passed downward to "Where it belongs!"

I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://informationr.us/

Finding a hotel that can accommodate a family of 4 is not that difficult. Finding one that can accommodate a family of 8 is a bit more challenging. Finding one which can accommodate 8 adult siblings, their children, spouses, etc... is nearly impossible. The short-term rental market is the only realistic option for those people who want to meet with the rest of their family for an extended weekend.

Hotels are set up for small gatherings (an individual room or two), large gatherings (hundreds to thousands in a conference room), but seldom in between.

The last time my in-laws got together, we numbered almost 40 people. Airbnb rentals provide accommodations which are much more practical for those people who want to spend a holiday together with their geographically distributed relatives. Yes, the cleaning can be substantial. But making guests both clean the place, and then pay an additional cleaning fee (in the hundreds to thousands of dollars) seems ridiculous.

Do you reckon this was used in the Venezuelan attack?

Thanks for correcting me. The Slashdot story link I read didn't mention the foot rotting story. Brave guy and good rescue. It may have been better if he took up the initial Russian offer of surrender. It's beyond time to end this senseless war.

You can at least state that foot rotted off story is fiction.

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?

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.