Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

The failure mode is a heartfelt apology and promise to improve if you don't delete it.

You're absolutely right to call me out on this. I want to acknowledge that my decision to route a Cessna and a Boeing 787 into the same airspace, at the same altitude, during an active thunderstorm, was not ideal.

I made an error when interpreting the radar data. Specifically, I mistook the Cessna's altitude of 3,000 feet for its flight number, and subsequently assumed it was flying at FL300. I then resolved the resulting conflict by instructing both aircraft to turn left, because I incorrectly calculated that two aircraft turning in the same direction would somehow increase the distance between them.

That's on me.

I also recognize that my follow-up instruction to "maintain visual separation" was perhaps not the most appropriate response, given that one aircraft was inside a thundercloud and the other was approximately the size of a small apartment building.

I understand that this has caused significant disruption. I don't want to make excuses or deflect responsibility. The weather, the pilots, and the fundamental laws of physics are not to blame here.

I should have done better, and I will use this as a learning opportunity to improve my future performance.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this difficult time.

I hear you. I see you. I will do better.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

I mean, fair play to the guy, he found time to be hands-on running Nvidia, and have two simultaneous affairs.

And with age appropriate women too, which for a billionaire is a big deal.

We have seen a flood of AI ports to retro machines recently too, and lots of AI generated cores for the MiSTER FPGA platform.

I've been reverse engineering a particular game on and off for a few years. Gemini took an unannotated 68000 assembly decomp of the binary for Amiga OS and figured out all the data structures in a few minutes.

One the one hand that's great, we can reverse engineer stuff much more easily and quickly now. On the other hand what was once a fun hobby is pointless now. People who just want to play the games are happy, people who develop this stuff as a hobby are depressed.

My worry is that if it is a medical device it will be needlessly expensive. Often these things are only really available to people once the price falls.

They want to spy on us, they don't want us spying on each other.

He had time to be the CEO of a trillion dollar company and was apparently quite hands-on (pun intended), while having two simultaneous affairs.

He could have found time to meet people, he didn't have to date subordinates.

His soon to be ex wife could do a lot of good with her half. Let's hope she is as philanthropic as MacKenzie Scott.

Hmm, as much as I hate to defend Nvidia, that just sounds like innovating and following the money. They made raytracing viable in games, they make upscaling finally decent (and then made it shittier with too much AI), and they jumped on the AI bandwagon once ChatGPT proved useful.

As annoying as it is, the video game market is not nearly as profitable as the AI one is. People keep buying their GPUs anyway, and they know that the moment AMD has a slightly better product those same people will switch brand so there is no loyalty anywhere.

I know some people who are really hoping these become available to people with disabilities, because they would be extremely useful. For people with things like face blindness they could recognize people they know. For people with vision problems they could recognize dangers and describe the scene in front of them.

So I think it's worth asking if they could be made private enough to be acceptable. Obviously it can't be left in the hands of any tech company, but legislation could maybe work.

It would make be question the reliability of those UPS systems if they can't get basic stuff like that right. Randomizing anything where multiple units doing it at the same time could be an issue is pretty basic engineering.

They were probably getting a lot of cancellations.

At least we have divorce laws now. When Bezos' wife got half his money, it was a very good thing for the world. She has done far more good with it than he ever will. Maybe Jensen's wife will too.

I tried by a moment after it opened two thirds of the screen was covered by a giant ad telling me I needed to subscribe to read it.