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

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.

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?

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.

Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.

While in general, I agree with your sentiment, you mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect is not appropriate here. Dunning and Kruger (1999) does not claim incompetent people would consider themselves above the experts. It's just that incompetent people do no consider themselves as incompetent as they really are, and competent people don't understand how far above the laymen their knowledge is. But both would agree, that the expert knows more about the topic than the layman, and both would sort themselves in the right categories.

You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".

When I am looking at the contracts my company has for our company phones, I doubt your promise. As an American company, it has decided that providing company phones to its employees is not a core competency of the company. So it outsourced the task to the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder has bought data plans for our phones which abruptly switch off everything above EDGE, as soon as the data allocation for the period has been exhausted. No warning. No graceful change. Just a hard cut-off. For everyone, including Field Service, who needs to have mobile internet connectivity to get and update trouble tickets.

No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

Obviously, I agree.

My other question, is how long will they be able to get away with this sort of thing, before customers decide the risk of disclosing your data to these external AI firms, is greater than the cost of building the capacity to run your own models in-house.

I don't use LLM, generally. But I was messing around and got some older models running on my laptop last night. Nothing special, no idea what I would use them for (couldn't generate a paragraph of text before clearing losing all coherence, because these were small old models running on 5 year old hardware). Supposedly Mac Studios and Mac minis are selling like hotcakes because hobbyists want to run local models. How long before the Venn Diagram for "can be run locally" and "capable enough model" overlaps for most use cases, making the risk of data exfiltration by these firms not worth the risk?

Lot of words to say this kind of thing may accelerate the bubble bursting.

How many of the other miraculous math solutions attributed to LLMs recently were similarly snooped from academics who bowed to pressure to stay silent on the matter?

They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.