I've been using Claude to both understand and assist in writing new code in DB/C, an obscure dialect of another pretty obscure language called PL/B or DATABUS -- all of which are descendants of (or highly influenced by) COBOL. It's pretty fantastic. It's a codebase that is ~50 years old, hundreds of thousands of lines, with code spread throughout modules, with jump tables and gotos everywhere. The code itself is easy to read and understand, but the flow is not!

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

If that's true, why does the US military make the Pu-239 that the US uses for its bombs in special reactors that don't make power? Why does Russia have special reactors for making H-3 for the Tritium boosting of their Hydrogen bombs? Oh wait, its not true and you have no idea what you are talking about. What is true is if you make a really cheap type of NPP that uses natural uranium (yellow cake) then it naturally makes a lot of Pu-239 and you can process that out rather easily. However, this plant will need more safety precautions and have more downtime than the type of reactor the US uses, makes and sells. If you use enriched fuel, you make less Pu-239 and it becomes not a very efficient way to make enriched Pu-239. If you use Th-232, then it makes almost no Pu-239 and you don't have any proliferation risk.

Current reactors (designed mostly in the 1960s) don't load-follow (that's the term for a power source that can quickly change levels). Coal doesn't load-follow either for reference. Hydro does, renewable actually make the balancing problem worse and natural gas is usually used to balance that out. You can have reactors that load follow but its just cheaper and easier to use hydro and gas for that. What makes that problem worse are renewables and any grid with more than 20% renewables is going to have problems (see Spain).

Learn what capacity factor is. Then you will realize why your calculations are hilariously off. Just for reference, solar and wind have about 3.5x the utilization cost which is what you actual pay for power. You are looking at capacity cost, and the only person who cares about capacity cost is the CFO of the utility company. That's why advocates always intentionally tell you capacity cost which doesn't matter. This is why your power bill is so much higher (about 2x) than it was 8 years ago in CA. Renewable aren't actually cheap. They just use an accounting trick to make you think they are. NPPs are still the best use of nuclear power. They were when you were born. They will be when you die. The laws of physics don't change. The only change is the name of the politician who will be lying about that because most people are scientifically illiterate and scaring people gets easy votes.

Pure ignorance. There were over a dozen workable solutions. Politicians...mostly from one party consistently tanked those ideas. There was Yucca Mountain. That would work. There was reprocessing it, that would work. There was putting making it into a glass, that worked.

What they did do at this site was put it into big blocks of concrete, this also works fine. Also, not to point out the obvious, but this storage area is on top of a 60 ft cliff. So the idea that this will suddenly fall into the sea, probably not without a pretty huge earthquake (as in 10x the size as any seen on the west coast). Of course you can just put the concrete containers on a truck and move them inland. That works too. This isn't even a hard problem.

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”

Around 2029 we'll see that a ride is available for $16 or $31 with a driver.

Rider's choice. I'll guess it goes about 80/20.

He seems like a real scumbag but it's worth keeping in mind that the people who told us that have a massive incentive to pin their crimes on a scapegoat.

Since we pretty much know that FTX was the #1 donor to a party's political action committee with money laundered through Ukraine, he would have been smarter to wait for that conflict to conclude.

The people who benefited from the crime also prosecuted him which is never reliable.

It might not be FedSlop but unless it is proven that both parties didn't benefit we shouldn't trust this government either.

We do know that Ladybug Graham got $18M straight into his bank account from Ukraine so there is certainly smoke.

It's only since a dead man can't sue for libel that people are willing to print that nugget now.

Not in a Corporate Democracy.

The people who would prosecute OpenAI want to use OpenAI to maximize their power and wealth at your financial and legal expense.

Remember when they tried to extradite Gary McKinnon for twenty years for looking at a spreadsheet when he accidentally got RDP access to an unsecured NASA desktop with a simple Perl script? Intent is not relevant for prosecutors (mens rea should be an element in a Constitutional case).

The legal basis is there but the will to power is not.

Two systems of courts for different classes of people (yet again). It would be an error to call that a Justice System.

n.b. the Culture War psyop is there to try to convince you that the classes are something else.

There are corrections to gravity that include the current size of the Universe as s term that gives extremely small differences in calculations but explains most observations.

It has a certain allure from an Information Theory perspective and is extremely parsimonious in ask.

But funding is for finding wimps and axons and evidence of mysteries that use the old equations so you are called crazy if your simple theory threatens that gravy train.

Some people say useful physics is too dangerous to fund and we're better off wasting time and money.

Twenty years ago Dark Energy seemed like a good idea to me. So did Supersymmetry. Most new ideas that can be tested and used or disproved probably should be. That LHC found no Supersymmetric pairs is a good thing.

Apologies to the original.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09...

According to a report I heard yesterday Talarico has 50x the cash of Paxton and it's the Bush politicial machine that is funding him.

The situation was similar in the primary but the base favored Paxton over Cornin by such a huge margin that the spend didn't matter.

The dual state people hate Paxton so much they have been after him for years.

It's populists vs. oligarchs in most races where party affiliation is a distant second to the money machine.

Since Trump ran on populism but then did a 180 with Judas knives out for his "former supporters" the odds of any Republican getting elected anywhere but an R+20 are extremely thin regardless of warchest.

DC's interference in free elections is gross but it probably won't matter on Election Day.

Impeachments of officials over FCC actions are quite likely at this point.

"You're folding it wrong," obviously.

Perhaps Tim Apple had the sense to get out ahead of this.

Happy to be proven wrong! That would be amazing engineering and might actually allow the rollable Global to come to fruition.

But since everybody who has claimed to have perfected the engineering hasn't actually done so one should be cautious on such investments.

Consent is the difference between it and lovemaking.

A legitimate government listens to 90% of its citizens when they agree on an issue. Delegated powers and such.