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To be fair you got to also move a lot of ore to refine that metal. But there was also a lot of mechanically generated power used to get it.

Im glad to see there is demand. I absolutly love my OG steam cobtroller. Great for couch navigation of a PC and in some games, like souls-esque games, the simulated trackball is the best existing control scheme.

I mean that doesn't sound like very big hurdles. It is an inspection of a completed reactor to make sure it wasn't managed and built like trash. Every factory and business and powerplant is subject to an inspection before it can operate. Even most residentual homes require an inspection before people can live in it.

This is a sodium fast reactor, which is far more advanced than most nuclear reactors, at high temperatures (not that bad: "only 510 C, 950 F). Sodium is infamously hard to deal with, incredibly reactive to water, capable of embrittling metal, and any impurities in the incredibly hot loop can dissolve and transfer and create incredibly corrrosive systems.

Superphenix in France (1973-1998) and Monju in Japan (1994-1995, 2010-2016) have both had significant technical challenges. The Soviets built have some sodium reactors.

I used to be very for a PRISM style reactor like TerraPower is working for, especially with something like Integral Fast Reactor's on-site non-proliferation-safe pyroprocessing. But man, over the years, I just appreciate more and more how hard it is to build and maintain well. I'm both rooting for TerraPower, but also, it low key feels like an "if not when" situation, that this an incredibly energetic unsafe system to be dealing with, and it seems hard to imagine this being a safe long term cost effective solution. I hope the inspections are very very for real, very in depth, very detailed, given the scope of what is being built. It's not even a big reactor! But that much very high temperature sodium going around, right by a big nuclear reactor (smartly TerraPower has separate nuclear and energy "wings), is deeply concerning, and needs incredibly detailed inspections if this is to provide the lasting safe value it is purporting to deliver.


It is what typically all reactors get stuck on for years - or often decades.

I doubt it.

There used to be separate construction and operating permits, and sometimes you got the building permit, built the plant and then never got the operating license.

This has now been streamlined with a combined construction/operating license. If you built what you promised to build, you get to operate it.


Can you give an example of a plant that has been built under this streamlined process and what kind of timeline it had?

The only recent nuclear buildouts that I personally have knowledge of are expansions to existing plants and thus have a lower barrier to get going.


Since it was just released, that’s pretty hard to do eh?

I’m familiar with the reactors built on other previous ‘expedited’ processes that ended up being anything but fast. We’ll see how it goes eh?


If it was just released, then your claims about it are entirely hypothetical and best-case-scenario. Of course we have to "see how it goes" - there's no merit but hopefulness to your stance...

A change in regulations is not a meritless argument, it's useful information

Lol, that every prior process has gone this way (including ‘express’ processes) surely has no value? Uh huh.

Speaking out loud makes you translate your weird personal brain logic into structured instruction meant to inform others. And taking that other person's view, in order to explain what they don't know, gives you an alternative perspective.

I feel like trying to explain it to yourself as if you were ignorant of the problem may give similar insights.


You can try, but you won't be the first and they are going to have lawyers for this exact scenario with decades of legal rulings and legislation often in their favor already. It's not usually worth the time unless you are willing to risk losing many thousands in lawyer costs if you don't win.

Kamala is a turd regardless of how much worse Trump is. She was advocating the status quo while people are worried we are maintaining an unsustainable path and their lives are only getting harder.

When one person says we are going to slowly drive a train off a cliff and the other says they will drive quickly but may or may not drive off a cliff, I understand why many people at the front of the train would take the risk of voting for an unpredictable speed demon.


Trump sells all sorts of things. Anyone buying any of it is a fool.

I agree. But when the opposition tells you your shitty life will remain shitty in a best case scenario it isn't very inspiring or invigorating which you need to entice people to actually go vote for someone.

Yeah, why not make up a bunch of lies?

Or why not make an actual plan to improve things and solve problems instead of throwing in the towel before you even start?

It also doesn't help to be a prosecuting attorney that extorted poor people for judicial profit. Only the wealthy view prosecutors as good people.


>Or why not make an actual plan to improve things and solve problems instead of throwing in the towel before you even start?

I don't know, you tell me? According to you it's reasonable enough in this scenario.


What has Trump done that makes a meaningful positive difference in the lives of people making less than $250k/year?

I never said he did, I never said I support him or anything he does. But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters.

> But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters

Okay, and? Did anyone even dispute that?


I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.

Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.


The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.

Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.


The reality is experience isn't codified in text.

It's passed person to person over long periods of time.

And you can't train an LLM on that.


Yes. For every line of code or documentation I write there is a lengthy internal dialog that can never be scraped & used by an LLM.

It can barely read a datasheet correctly, in my experience, getting confused between different registers.

I'll be more forgiving: I found it gets confused easily when it extracts text from a PDF because datasheets tend to be written in a not so parseable way for a machine. But 1) if you tell it to take screenshots of said datasheet, it'll have greater success. 2) We're in year n<5 (depends how you count) of the age of LLMs, this will get better over time. Either on the LLM side or the thing you feed to it.

screenshot of the 300-page datasheet? (not to mention the 4000 page TRM?) no thanks.

If the datasheet is only a few pages I'll read it myself :).


Yeah throw it at a moderately complex STM32 clock arrangement and see what comes out.

Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.

"There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human."

I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.


Conversations about the costs of inference never consider the reality that API pricing is significantly higher than the operating costs.

Nor do they ever consider that the cost of datacenter hosted inference has to crash when the bubble pops and hardware vendors can't fill orders at sky high prices created by demand anymore and the hyperscalers can't keep things running near capacity at the high demand prices.

All of which leads to the ROI math for implementing AI looking much different.

Has everybody forgotten how much money Nvidia, TSMC, and all the hyperscalers are making, today, in pure profit? The costs of inference are high because we're in a bubble.


I think many of these problems still arise if inference is effectively free in monetary terms to the end user. In many economic processes, time to getting the final and correct answer is the major driver of profitability.

A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.

I think also, just seeing non-technical friends and family interact with it, there’s a lot of massaging you have to do right now to get it to work that just goes over their heads. Until they gets pushed behind an abstraction layer I see adoption crawling at a certain point.

It is free PR so corporations lap that kind of thing up.

It would be equally disingenuous to not ask children what they think, we already marginalize childrens views and ideas and they often suffer under restrictive laws because they can't effectively fight any legislation or legal rulings.

That is a weird analogy because so much of modern food borne illnesses we deal with today are because of the fact that we centralized food production so any contamination effects hundreds or more people at a time which necessitated strict safety regulations. If you ate Aunt Tracey's stuff and got sick, maybe a handful of people at most get sick, if you eat Aunt Tracey's Original Recipe Cupcake™, thousands of people could get sick.

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