apendleton

Zipcodes are not great for reliably describing locations. They're collections of multiple postal delivery routes, and that's it. There's no guarantee that any given zipcode lies within a single city, or a single state, or that it lies within the boundaries of the US at all, or that it's contiguous, or that it's stationary (there are some for boats), or that any given location only has one, etc., etc. People think this is a good idea because their particular case happens to work well, but zip codes are rife with edge cases.

I think they get to that a couple of paragraphs later:

The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on. Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.

The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products

But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.

In terms of cost of materials to build a reactor, sure, that seems right. But most of the cost of fission is dealing with its regulatory burden, and fusion seems on track to largely avoid the worst of that. It seems conceivable that it ends up being cheaper for entirely political/bureaucratic reasons.

Oh for sure, I'm not claiming that CFS (or Tokamak Energy or Type One or whoever else) will for sure succeed, or if they do, that they've already solved all the problems that will need solving to do so. My only assertion/prediction is that I think if they end up succeeding, when future historians look back and write the history of this energy revolution or whatnot, HTSC magnets will turn out to have been the key breakthrough that made it possible.

It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.

Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).

Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.

And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.

It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.

I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).

It wasn't Airbus yet, so more like: Bombardier had to sale a controlling stake to Airbus to gain access to its Georgia production facilities.

What is the alternative Other markets in the US are generally energy + capacity markets -- you get paid both for what you actually provide and for your ability to provide a certain level of power, whereas Texas is an energy-only market (EOM). It needn't be the case that that if you don't do an EOM, you have to have a monopoly.

As have Rocket Lab, Firefly, Astra (RIP probably), Stoke, Relativity, Spin Launch if that counts, and probably others.

The whole thing that differentiates this company from the dozen other seemingly-interchangeable new-space entrants is the novel technology they've developed to facilitate reuse. Even if it were the case that there isn't a market for five tons to LEO (and to be clear, Rocket Lab seems to be doing decent business launching a lot less) and all this was was a technology demonstrator, why would you build a technology demonstrator that doesn't show off the thing that makes your company interesting?

I'm not sure the goal of this competition, in and of itself, is AGI. They point to current LLMs emerging from transformers, which in turn emerged from a general basket of building blocks from machine-translation research (attention, etc.). It seems like the suggestion is that to get from where we are now to AGI, some fundamental building blocks are missing, and this is an attempt to spur the development of some of those building blocks, but by analogy with LLMs, the goal here is to come up with a new thing like "attention," not a new thing like GPT4.

Intent on whose part, though? Like, supposing in arguendo that the company's goal was to make the voice sound indistinguishable from SJ's in Her, but they wanted to maintain plausible deniability, so instead cast as wide a net as possible during auditions, happened upon an actor who they thought already sounded indistinguishable from SJ without special instruction, and cast that person solely for that reason. That seems as morally dubious to me as achieving the same deliberate outcome by instruction to the performer.

I think this is overthinking it. ChatGPT is billed as a general-purpose question-answerer, as are its competitors. A regular user shouldn't have to care how it works, or know anything about context or temperature or whatever. They ask a question, it answers and appears to have given a plausible answer, but doesn't actually do the task that was asked for and that it appears to do. What the technical reasons are that it can't do the thing are interesting, but not the point.

It wouldn't be 0 dollars, though; the majority of their users are apparently outside the US. So the question is: how does the amount you could get by selling a US-inclusive Tiktok compare the potential future earnings of a US-free Tiktok? If the market prices it accurately, you'd sort of expect the former to be higher (a US-inclusive version seems obviously more valuable), but maybe they think the market undervalues them, or maybe prospective buyers would smell blood in the water because of the deadline and try to low-ball, etc.

If you want to call from Go into Rust, you can declare any Rust function as `extern "C"` and then call it the same way you would call C from Go. Not sure about going the other way.

If it's any consolation, I'm pretty sure the leading edge is the blunt one, not the sharp one.

If you're building a submarine, you don't have to call it a "future submarine" until it submerges; people understand that if you say "I'm currently building a submarine," it has yet to go under water, but the thing you're building is still a submarine. I think that's generally true of not-yet-built or not-yet-used things: it's understood that if it hasn't done the thing yet, you're describing what it's going to be/do.

If SAFs are to be economically viable at all, they'll almost certainly need to be able to run in existing, unmodified engines. So: all engines will be able to run on some amount of SAFs anywhere for 0% to 100%, as will this new engine. This statement has no information content whatsoever.

They did demonstrate this during their Starship-only bellyflop/landing tests a couple of years ago. This wasn't in space, though, obviously, and wasn't after an extended coast period. So... we know they can relight them under at least some circumstances, but whether or not they can under _these_ circumstances is maybe unclear.

Orbit is mostly about speed, not about height. Going straight up and down doesn't count, even if you pass the height that some orbital vehicles attain.

This vehicle is actually going orbital speed, but not quite orbital height (or rather, it's in an "orbit" that has a very eccentric elliptical shape that would cause it to hit the atmosphere on its way back around; it'd be well above a typical orbital height at apogee, though).

Yes, the companies targeted here aren't property managers themselves, they sell software to property managers, and have ended up providing services to many ostensibly-competing managers and building owners in some metro areas, who collectively control enough of the rental market in those areas that they can "maximize rent" by moving the whole market up in concert rather than having any of the owners actually compete with one another.

From a ProPublica piece [1] about it, for example:

In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

They broke the story, so I think if anyone else is carrying it, it will be framed as "new report says X" rather than their own independent reporting. But Michael Weiss has written for the Daily Beast, New Lines Magazine, CNN, etc., and Christo Grozev runs Bellingcat, which has a long track record of breaking big stories and winning investigative journalism awards, especially vis a vis Russia.

Here's an article: https://newrepublic.com/article/179267/recycling-doesnt-work...

The gist: similar to Big Tobacco, etc., internally with the plastics industry, there seems to have been a much greater degree of pessimism about the long-term economic viability of plastics recycling, but it was sold to the public anyway via ad campaigns and lobbying to forestall regulation or legislation limiting plastics as public sentiment was shifting towards a greater sense of environmental awareness.

At least in a US context, the proximity advantage is often less about line losses than about the political realities of building transmission. We have way less transmission in the US than we're expected to need as we electrify, and the right-of-way acquisition, permitting, etc., to build new high-voltage transmission are really daunting. NIMBYs tend to hate it (somewhat understandably -- it's ugly), and every jurisdiction along the path of the proposed new line typically has its own permitting process which effectively grants it veto power (unlike gas pipelines, interestingly, where the federal government has permitting authority that supersedes local authority).

A big potential advantage of these kinds of solutions is that you can just site the plant such that you can avoid building the transmission at all. Of course, nuclear obviously has its own NIMBY concerns, permitting issues, etc., so it's not a panacea.

Yes, the gist is that in a fusion device, you've got a chain reaction where the splitting uranium or plutonium is making neutrons, and those neutrons strike other uranium or plutonium, which makes more neutrons, etc. But you have a very short period of time to take advantage of this chain reaction, because before long, your device has blown apart, so a large percentage of the fuel in a conventional fission device never undergoes fission (the device has blown up before it has a chance). The job of the fusion reaction in a fission-fusion-fission device (how "modern" thermonuclear weapons work) is, in addition to producing energy of its own, to rapidly produce lots of lots of neutrons, which can very quickly fission a second quantity of fissile material.

This is solvable with parking permit programs. Make street parking in those surrounding neighborhoods resident-only. And then people considering living in the "underparked" neighborhood who need parking will have no alternative but to select units that include parking, or live in another neighborhood (and if enough people opt not to live there, developers will include more parking to satisfy demand). This is a problem regular markets can fix: governments don't need to require developers to meet (or often, exceed!) what people actually want.

Just restrict who can park on the street. Then if people want to park a car, they'll need a residence with a space, and if there's demand for residences with parking spaces, developers will build them, minimums or not. The issue with minimums is that they require building spaces above and beyond demand, but markets should do just fine at making sure demand is met, as long as there are barriers to externalizing it.

I think the value proposition they're offering is a carefully integrated system where everything has been thoroughly engineered/tested to work with everything else, down to writing custom firmware to guarantee that it's all ship-shape, so that customers don't have to touch any of the innards, and will probably just treat them as a black box. It seems like it's chock-full of stuff that they custom-built and that nobody else would be familiar with, by design. If that's not what you want, this probably isn't the product for you.

Honestly it's probably not some kind of grand scheme. My guess is that whatever engineers or product managers decided to add the Meta Pixel in the first place had never heard of the Video Privacy Protection Act, and either didn't consult their attorneys, or their attorneys hadn't heard of it either, and now the damage is done: they're being sued, and if they lose, they owe a huge amount of money, even if they were to decide today to stop using Meta Pixel from now on, so now their attorneys are throwing whatever they can at the wall to see what sticks.

I doubt the revenue they earn from this is worth the bad PR, so I don't think it's about that, I think it's about avoiding paying damages, which could be $2,500 _per view_ if they were all disclosed to Meta -- potentially billions of dollars. It might well bankrupt the company.

I went to Mexico City, and this museum, for the first time this summer, and agree with the post: it's really an impressive collection, and certainly more than we could do in a day. This plus the Templo Mayor site in the middle of the city plus the Teotihuacan site ~an hour out of town made a great trio, and left me with so much better an understanding of Mesoamerican peoples than I had at the start.