The last thing I want out of a map is a "conversational experience,"

The conversation I want is:
ME: "Show me the map."
MAP: "Here."

Neutron capture is not usually considered fusion.

Climate change is a long term problem. We will still need energy sources in 2040.

That's one of the selling points of thorium cycles, that it's more difficult to use to make weapons grade materials. Note "more difficult" may not mean "completely impossible."

That would be highly-enriched uranium ("HEU"), not thorium

Depends on what kind of radiation. Betavoltaics convert beta radiation, but most of the nuclear power sources we talk about don't emit betas (energetic electrons). There are also alphavoltaic devices, but so far these tend to degrade due to radiation damage, so they have only limited lifetime. Actual nuclear reactors emit neutrons and fission fragments, which tend to radiation degrade anything nearby.

I'll say! Commercial devices (using tritium as the source) are in the microwatt range.

Not yet flying on space missions, but the tech is getting better. I wrote a review on this a while back: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ab...

And my point is that AI wouldn't just stop being used even if the bubble imploded so heavily that all of the major AI providers of today went under. It's just too easy to run today. The average person who wants something free would on average use a worse-quality model, but they're not going to just stop using models. And inference costs for higher-end models would crash if the big AI companies were no longer monopolozing the giant datacentres (which will not simply vanish just because their owners lose their shirts; power is only about a third the cost of a datacentre, and it gets even cheaper if you idle datacentres during their local electricity peak-demand times).

Seebeck effect (aka thermoelectric generation) requires a hot side and a cold side. So, to generate power from this, you have to run the hot side hotter. The electronics you're trying to cool are on the hot side, and you want them to be cooler, not hotter.

ln summary, to the extend that you generate power from the heat, you aren't cooling efficiently.

Your scenario is impossible, so try again.

Because we're discussing a scenario where the big AI companies have gone out of business, remember? And the question is whether people just stop using the thing that they found useful, or whether they merely switch to whatever alternative still works.

It's like saying that if Amazon went out of business, people would just stop buying things online because "going to a different website is too hard". It's nonsensical.

They believed you could mimic intelligence with clockwork, etc. Why do you only count if it if it involves computers?

If you want to jump to the era of *modern* literature, the generally first accepted robot in (non-obscure) modern literature is Tik-Tok from the Oz books, first introduced in 1907. As you might guess from the name, his intelligence was powered by clockwork; he was described as no more able to feel emotions than a sewing machine, and was invented and built by Smith and Tinker (an inventor and an artist). Why not electronic intelligence? Because the concept of a programmable electronic computer didn't exist then. Even ENIAC wasn't built until 1945. The best computers in the world in 1907 worked by... wait for it... clockwork. The most advanced "computer" in the world at the time was the Dalton Adding Machine (1902), the first adding machine to have a 10-digit keyboard. At best some adding machines had electric motors to drive the clockwork, but most didn't even have that; they had to be wound. This is the interior of the most advanced computer in the world in the era Tik-Tok was introduced. While in the Greco-Roman era, it might be something like this (technology of the era that, to a distant land that heard of it, probably sounded so advanced that it fueled the later rumours that Greco-Romans were building clockwork humans capable of advanced actions, even tracking and hunting down spies).

I think this is an oversimplification. Musk dreams of a sci-fi future. Isaacman does too (and is friends with Musk). Duffy wants to gut NASA. Hence, Musk strongly supported Isaacman. It's not too complicated; you don't need to search for subtext when what's out in the open makes perfect sense.

They don't have to "understand" anything. They just have to know that "If I go to this website, I can still ask the AI questions, even though ChatGPT shut down". Or that "If I click to install this app, I get an icon on my desktop and I can ask the AI questions there".

This is what got me. Why the hell are they calling a crypto auction something aimed at "the AI generation", when they clearly mean "Cryptobros"?

This is unscientific, but long ago I once conducted a poll on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, and one of the questions asked about peoples' opinions of crypto and NFTs. Only a small percentage liked it. The most popular poll choice by far was one with wording along the lines of "Crypto and NFTs should both go drown in a ditch."

It's an entirely different market segment. Crypto and NFTs appeal to gamblers, criminals, and anarcho-libertarians. AI appeals to those who want to create things, to automate things, and to save time or accomplish more. There's no logical relation between "This high school kid wants to save time on her homework" and "this 42-year-old mechanic thinks this bad drawing of an ape is going to be worth millions some day because a hash somewhere links its checksum to his private key."

The GP's comment wasn't accusing there of being a nuclear waste problem (there isn't). They were talking about how nuclear waste can be burned in a breeder reactor, producing orders of magnitude more than the burning of a couple tenths of a percent of the natural uranium in a conventional reactor does.

Despite the press hype about thorium (which is way more popular among the media and nerds on the internet than with actual nuclear engineers), nuclear power is already basically unlimited, even without breeder reactors (which are very much viable tech, and much more mature than thorium). Only with an incredibly weak definition is it in any meaningfully way "limited" - if you limit yourself to currently quantified reserves, at current fuel prices, with production mining tech, you have a bit over two centuries worth at current burn rates. But this is obviously nonsense. Uranium production tech isn't going to advance in *two centuries*? Nobody is going to explore for more in *two centuries*? And as for "at current prices" - fuel is only a very small percentage of the cost of fission power, so who cares if prices rise? And rising prices or advancing production tech doesn't just put linearly more of a resource onto a market, they put exponentially more onto the market. As an example with uranium: seawater uranium could power the world's current (overwhelmingly non-breeder) reactor fleet for 13000 years, and current lab-scale tech is projected to be nearly as cheap as conventional uranium production at scale.

Also, if you switch to breeder reactors, you don't just extend the amount of fuel you have by two orders of magnitude - the cost of the raw mined uranium also becomes two orders of magnitude less relevant than its already very small percentage of the cost of fission power generation, because you need so much less per kWh.

As for any thoraboos in the comments section: thorium fuel is more complex and expensive to fabricate (fundamentally - thorium dioxide has a higher melting point and is much harder to sinter), it's more complex to reprocess (it's more difficult to dissolve), its waste is much more hazardous over human timescales, the claimed resistance to nuclear proliferation is bunk, the tech readiness level is low and the costs are very high, and it's unclear it'll ever be economically competitive - most in the nuclear industry are highly dubious (due to what's needed to actually burn it vs. uranium). Hence the lack of investment. And I say this with the acknowledgement that nuclear power is already a very expensive form of electricity generation.

That would be what is called a "bottoming cycle"-- you take the waste heat and use it. But you still have to reject the waste heat, and you have to reject it at a colder temperature than the (hot side) temperature of the bottoming cycle.

So, for example, if your system is capable of rejecting waste heat at say 350 Kelvin, you could run your electronics at 400 Kelvin. Now if you reject your waste heat at 350 Kelvin, you can use the fifty-degree temperature difference to generate power.

That's the trade off: if you want to use the waste heat, you have to run at a higher temperature, because you need the lower temperature as the cold side of your thermodynamic cycle.

Only if you can reject waste heat somewhere. Entropy can't decrease.