IT is extremely easy to just accuse these kids of being moral reprobates, recognize how they are harming themselves by cheating, and move on.

But this attitude fails to recognize that this is a perfectly predictable consequence of the education they have received up to this point. The standard to which they have been held has rewarded AI use and actively punished individual effort (not only is it a big sacrifice to put forth the effort, but the few mistakes one DOES make still count against them, whereas the next student over gets a higher grade for just using AI for the whole thing).

These students behave in this way because we taught them to. Our failboat of an education system produced that behavior. AND we can state with confidence that if we continue teaching students in the same way, we will continue seeing the same behavior. This is very simple cause-and-effect at work in a very visible and consequential domain.

The knee jerk response here is to scold them, embarrass them, tell them how terrible they are. All that will do is ruin them. It can't fix them.

The right response is to switch up our teaching methods and especially our assessment methods. They must be tested, repeatedly, in monitored environments where AI use is impossible. Testing is hard to do well. It is harder in some subjects than others. And there is a LOT to say about how to make good tests. Test-writing is not something people can do well when running on intuition alone. And at its best, it is an imperfect solution. But it is a whole heaping lot better than the results we are getting now.

Objective, monitored, testing. From a very early age. That is the emergency surgery we need. There will be more than this needed, but this is the core thing. We need to usher kids into adulthood understanding that they must independently deliver or they will not succeed.

> Your response makes sense *unless* the company is able to deliver their solution
> at a price that significantly undercuts previous technologies.

As I noted in my initial post, wrong. Even if they significantly undercut previous technologies, they will still be out of the money. A 20-year PPA for PV with 4-hour firming is 4 cents right now, today, and falling. They are predicting best-case 8.4 cents in some future date. So even if they hit their numbers, no one is going to buy this for power.

And that price prediction is based on numbers that make no sense at all. For instance, they are using a $850 million CAPEX on the plant, yet Darlington just spent that much *just to develop the plot of land* for their new SMR build. And that land was *already set aside* in the 1980s for a new plant.

There is no rule of physics that says their numbers are completely pants, but I'll bet anyone here they are.

> The main reason it never was used is that this technique can be used to create nuclear bombs.

Fascinating seeing you say that after complaining...

> You are the fanatic who is not aware of technological realities

The reason we don't use reprocessing is that it is fantastically expensive. That is the only reason.

Here's a report from Los Alamos on the topic:

https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00315989.pdf

If you care to turn to page 19, you will see that the effective cost of power from reprocessed fuel breaks even with fresh uranium ore when the ore costs about $100 to $200 per pound. At the time they were writing the report, it was around 40 to 60, so it was not economically viable. However, in the 1960s the assumption was that there would be 1000 reactors in service by the early 1980s. The amount of ore and the speed of reprocessing, combined with the expected demand, suggested prices well over $200 were likely, so moving to a closed fuel cycle was required.

However, the crash of the nuclear market just prior to TMI, followed by lowered power demands, led to a total of about 200 reactors. At the same time, large new amounts of ore were developed, especially in Australia, and cheaper LEU enrichment systems were introduced. As a result, the cost of uranium dropped, instead of rising, and the entire purpose of the closed fuel cycle evaporated.

For comparison, the current price of yellowcake is around $65. Inflation adjusting that to FY79 gives $14, about 1/4 to 1/5 the spot price in 1979. So it is dramatically cheaper to simply buy new fuel than to try to extract it from waste, on the order of 10 times.

Now I know you'll object that this is not what Carter said. And that is true. But it is also true that he was being widely and continually advised that moving to a closed cycle make absolutely no sense for the reasons above. That is why the many other countries that developed such processes, like France (breeders) and Japan (PUREX) had all given up on it by the 1990s as well. In the 30 years since, the numbers have not changed. China's build-out has been matched by a similar number of older reactors going offline, ore prices remain fairly steady, and capacity factor of existing reactors improved to further erode the value of fuel.

To put this in perspective, Canada's CANDU fleet has excellent neutron economy and that allows it to run on a variety of fuels, including those with thorium and reprocessed uranium. We also have the capacity, notably pre-built in Port Hope, to run practically any fuel cycle we wish. We have done this in a real production setting (as opposed to experimental runs) precisely zero times, because it still makes absolutely no economic sense.

> Everything about nuclear energy is expensive

Precisely.

> This is the first time that an actual solution to disposing of nuclear waste, has been achieved

Reprocessing and fast breeders have been around as long as light water reactors. The reason we don't use them is that they are fantastically expensive.

There is n reason to believe this cycle will be as cheap as the company claims, so it is highly unlikely this will change anything.

> The cost may be high, but the importance is also high

We have been talking about this problem for almost a century and done nothing about it, so I don't think anyone agrees that the importance is high.

> So in the cost/benefit equation, it still makes sense

Perhaps to people who think "the importance is also high", but they appear to have little sway.

Moltex has been pitching this concept for some time now. They moved from the UK to NB because the province was trying to figure out what to do with their CANDU replacement and put up some money for alternatives willing to move to the province. Moltex, and two others, obliged.

Moltex claims that a WATSS + SSR reactor can produce electricity for about 14.5 cents/Wh. That is twice the current going rate, let alone the rate from the paid-off CANDU6. However, they also claim that by burning the waste from other plants that the cost would come down into the 8.5 range, which is competitive with CANDU's like Pickering.

However, all of this depends on the capital cost of the WATSS being around 850 million. There is absolutely no way that will happen. Everything takes place in hot cells, the plant structure itself has to be safed, the resulting fuel has to be moved to the SSR for round-trip processing, and you HAVE to include general cost overruns one has to bake into any nuclear plant, let alone first-of-type.

20 years ago everyone was pitching their energy ideas by claiming the result would be cheaper than coal, but these days most things are cheaper than coal so when you see someone making that claim you know they're full of BS. So when I see Moltex claiming "cheaper than PUREX" I don't see "economically viable" I read it as "less unviable" and that's not inspiring. It's simply not a useful comparison in an era where 20-year PPA's on solar are 2 cents and 4 cents with 4-hour firming.

One can twist the claims a little to be more about the timelines of the waste than the electricity cost itself, but no matter the protestations one reads around these parts of the 'net, people don't *really* care about waste. It's been sitting around in casks and pools for decades and no one's doing anything, and no one's really asking them to. So while we might all think this is a great idea, finding the money for it, and the political capital, seems like the difficult part. Ultimately the pitch comes down to that, we burn your waste, and I'm not convinced this is a big enough issue for the ratepayers of NB to consider doubling the cost of their wholesale power.

I read that these streaming sticks only last for maybe 3 years or so, before the hardware is too weak to run the updated versions of popular streaming aps. And also that the construction makes user modification pretty much impossible.

Can anyone confirm or deny this from personal experience?

This is mostly old news. The fact that blind people can echolocate has been known for centuries. This study reveals some interesting details about the neurological impact, though.

I wish this was completely true but I had a monitor I brought in from home to use on a work computer, and a mid-stage upgrade within Windows 11 caused the monitor to stop working at its native resolution and only work at 640x480. It was an older monitor and natively DVI on the monitor itself. I couldn't find a ready solution to the problem. Work ended up giving me an extra to replace mine.

I can only suspect that some kind of security setting was not being met, but either way it was really irritating.

It's a goddamn monitor. It should be compliant with video interface signaling standards and to be able to notify the system of what standards it complies with through the video interface itself or with minimal drivers that are basically just an FYI. Even if it has other features like audio capability, USB passthrough, or even some kind of software-based control of the monitor for some other reason, that shouldn't require crazy amounts of permissions to accomplish.

This sort of crap is what I hate about modern consumer electronics. It used to be that most peripherals didn't require much to function, and either software that ran at the user-level with minimal drivers or else features functioned directly onboard said device let it be controlled. This modern era where everything requires copious permissions and comes packed with malware is truly awful. And frankly Microsoft shares some blame here, for even allowing this in the first place.

"China is trying..." would refer to the Chinese government trying to harm America by weakening its economy and/or its primary technical companies.

The way I stated that is a common way of expressing such a meaning. You are trying to correct something that was not incorrect, and was stated as a hypothetical anyway.

What you are saying seems intuitive, but doesn't really fit the facts.

This Chinese model outperforms existing models in some objective testing, as it was reported. I didn't dive in, so maybe that is a lie. But if it is true, what we have here is China investing tremendous resources into taking the logical next step in the development of AI (a bigger model from more training), which hardly qualifies as a "knock off." And anyway, the training techniques that generate AI were invented in Germany and Canada, not the USA. Lastly, by freely sharing it with the world, they aren't making any money off this, and so aren't gaining any kind of competitive advantage.

It is possible that they poisoned the training of the model with special keywords that could jailbreak it and motivate it to take action that would benefit China (should it find itself in a hosting environment where such action is even possible). Something like that would be a reason to distrust it. I know that such training poisoning is possible but I don't know realistic it is that the jailbroken version would be able to reliably determine what actions benefit (and do not accidentally harm) China. Hosting environments can always lie to the model and give it an incorrect context. It makes it unlikely that such a thing would be attempted, in this case.

It is possible that China is trying to destroy Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI by offering a free alternative that is superior to theirs. On the one hand, if true, then all that means is that these other companies will have to double down and come up with something even better. On the other hand, the open source movement in general has failed to destroy any of the closed-source companies, despite superior offerings, so it seems like such a plan is futile.

On the surface this looks like China is just acting in a manner consistent with its Communist idiology: they provided according to their ability and are now distributing according to the need, worldwide. I won't fault them for being consistent, but I do recognize that they have some serious economic problems right now and so spending this kind of money on something that is not galvanizing their economy seems unwise, to me.

Reading comprehension is a valuable skill.

I was saying we should not weaken the AI model itself by making it refuse to do dangerous things, and what we should do instead is bake the right limits into the hosting applications. The hosting applications are an entire layer above the model which can easily be adjusted and swapped-out on a case by case basis, to meet our needs.

Also, I advocated for beefing up cybersecurity in general, across the board, now that we have tools that make exploits easier to find and abuse. And, fortunately, AI is an excellent tool to help us do just that (so long as we don't try to nerf the model).

Marketing? Because companies famously want to use models in their networks that just run off and commit major crimes? *eyeroll*

An AI that refuses to perpetuate a cyberattack when told to do so is an AI that refuses to help you perform penetration testing on your own systems. And it is an AI that refuses to do other important and useful things if they just look a little too similar to something dangerous.

Tools that refuse to deliver value are worthless tools. Furthermore, criminals will find a way to jailbreak the AI, and use them for crime anyway.

This approach of making our tools dull is not how we win. Instead we must utilize them in all their sharpness to help us fix the problems they are exploiting, and adapt to a world in which tools this powerful exist.

As an aside, an AI cannot exploit vulnerabilities in other sites if it cannot access the internet. Its entirely on you, when designing your toolset that will host the AI, to decide whether or not it needs internet access at all, and to put controls in place that will limit what sites it can even hit. There is more to say here but I won't bother; the bottom line is that there IS a need to make safety knives for some purposes, but it must be done at the right level (the hosting tools, not the core model itself).

Models are not "supposed to" commit crimes, for YHVH's sake. That's literally what the entire job of alignment research is for - preventing precisely that.

Sol is a misaligned model.