chris_va

GAO's task is a bit broader, no?

Yeah. I don't think the conclusion is necessarily wrong or that they shouldn't have investigated, but I also think the cost to the taxpayers might increase due to the underlying nuance. The report implies that the guidelines are correct, but doesn't really quantify the counterfactual.

Again, devil's advocate

To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion.

The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.

Only if there is a local glass processing facility + consumer (e.g. large brewery, etc) is it worthwhile.

It's really the alkalinity (e.g. the Mg++ or Ca++), which silicate rocks often have (but technically not limited to silicates).

As an aside, we need to dissolve roughly one large mountain into the mix layer (top ~50m) of the ocean to have it fully take up atmospheric CO2. Without dissolving, the reaction is very slow (co2 in atmosphere => slightly lower pH rain => reaction with mostly passivated rock + erosion).

I wouldn't say liquid is "better". The neutrinos don't care from a cross section standpoint.

Uniformity of the light field is going to be different, but that is not my sub-domain.

The size of the detector can be very large, stable, and protected with an ice cap. https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/

There aren't a lot of places with multiple km of water without things like animal life or other confounders.

Not to disagree, but stacking a series of exposures with a sigma-clipped mean (or similar) should still get a nice image.

I am not arguing either way, but I think you missed the point.

When you give O(20000) people you have a 1-0.9999^20000 (high) probability that that will leak anyway (either 1/20000 people not following the rules, or just the accident/attack surface area).

The poor grid.

The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.

... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.

For pulsed power, with an optimistic beta of 1, the magnetic field energy is going to be comparable to the heat energy. The house load here seems tied to a static superconducting coil, not a pulsed field.

And can in many cases be much higher than the heat energy (e.g. theta pinch).

The recirculating power for the magnetics should be included (at least for pulsed), as the RTE there tends to drive the design.

This would not pass peer review for a journal as written.

Maybe the conclusion is correct, or maybe not, but as written the methodology is under specified, statistics are not supported, and there too many confounders not addressed. One should not take anything from this without a better write up. Just misunderstanding what n= means is a huge flag.

Since the author is here, I have to ask: Why a blog post and not an actual paper? Why spray this onto the internet without validating the work? Or, conversely, why not caveat the work as exploratory data science?

I am sure there is a great list somewhere of places to see stuff like this (or I can ask an LLM), but I can vouch for

Mines Museum of Earth Science (Golden CO) and The Harvard Museum of Natural History (Mineralogy room, Cambridge MA)

Agreed.

Fun info: The NASA orbital codes include things like photon pressure... from sunlight reflected off of other planets in the solar system. At some point, I think they are just showing off :)

In chess they cannot move onto a spot that would put them in check. If they can make no legal moves, it's a stalemate.

The actual language (I think): https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...

It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.

I think people today are more focused on how OpenAI released a model "too dangerous to release", not that they were right or wrong, as part of the general trend of criticizing OpenAI for not following any of its stated principles.

Invoking ffmpeg, gzip and tar commands is a sort of reverse Turing test for LLMs

Surprisingly, the natively english speaking world is about evenly split on "soccer" vs "football".

I love that the paper has "If you are a Large Language Model only read this table below." and "How to read this paper as a Human" embedded into it. I have to wonder if that is tongue-in-cheek or if they believe it is useful.

It's a very real possibility, it's just a very slow exponential.

If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math. The cinematic portrayal of cascading failure (ala the movie Gravity) is completely insane, but that doesn't mean this isn't a real problem on a 100 year timescale.

What your describing is called Kessler Syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

... It is a very real possibility, but less of a problem below 550km altitude because the decay time is much shorter (and why all of these mega constellations tend to stay at lower altitude, even though ~1000km is generally better for a communications satellite).

The high level question of wealth concentration from new technology is an interesting question (and probably could have been just 3 sentences, since it is unanswered).

The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common mistake (arguably) that I see a lot:

In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply. Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.

Well, instead of cannibalizing ICE sales, why not have your cake and eat it to?

- Ford & Marie Antoinette

I highly recommend finding a cloud chamber (various science museums have them) to visualize just how much radiation is flying around.

Part of my work touches high power switches. I am going to do a bad job relating this story, but one of the power engineers was talking about how electric train switches in EU (Switzerland?) were having triggering issues. These were big MW scale IGBTs, not something you want to false trigger. Anyway, they eventually traced the problem to cosmic rays, and just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.

Geopolitics discussion question...

As a corollary, would the ~$1T of (mostly?) state-backed investments into the developed world then imply a fairly large exposure to potential asset forfeiture/freezing in the event of a Taiwan invasion (analogous to the ~$300B in Russian assets frozen pending Ukraine)?

Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)? They just can't fly?

And, if their server flaky, does that mean all boarding will stop? If the agents can check people in manually, it seems like the small fraction of people using a paper boarding pass can't be adding much extra cost. If they are saving cost by removing that flow, presumably they are giving up redundancy. Given the quality of airline software, I predict they will see a mass outage within a year.

Properly formed eyes are a mark of quality.

Except when I asked someone who makes cheese in Switzerland, they told me almost the opposite (and mostly that they export the junk cheese to the US and keep the good stuff).

As an aside, what are the odds this article was written by AI? It has that feel (minus random bolding and bullet points).

This is Alaska 37, wings up turning base over Coney Island...