The more I read, the more I’m convinced SMRs are to clean energy as gadgetbahns are to public transit.

Fortune named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years.

Some Wikipedia editor has a nice sense of comedic timing, placing this right before the article picture and the infobox before dropping the

At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron’s reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal.

cope rocessor

I give it slightly higher odds than AGI.

Edit: or cryptocurrency replacing fiat

I don’t claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I’ve seen, smaller reactors don’t seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant’s footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.

If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I’m interested.

Like it or not, they arent going to stop developing AI and data centers.

Well they should. I’m not giving them credit for investing in vaporware nuclear plants when the ostensible plan is to waste all the power on glue pizza recipes.

I wish they at least put that money in real and known working designs available right now so at least when the fad is dead, we can maybe use that power for something else. Or they can maybe have the tiniest decency to unfuck their search engine or whatever.

Bastard Dictator For Life

Conversely, Benevolent Operator From Hell

For a second I was wondering how on earth race science got funded by torpedoing a network of tech billionaire.

Oh my god, the incredibly important numpy import and the way it’s not even reading the piped input but the clipboard using a shell command of all things are sending me. Is this the expertise you can gain in two weeks?

There’s a little bit of new stuff in there, but it’s all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, it’s a lot in one place.

No, obviously opinions like

• “if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein’s teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented”,
• “stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it’s supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine”,
• “I don’t believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.¹ What if you lie about who is dying?”,
• “Overtly sexualizing ‘parody’ ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is”,
• “It’s fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it’s basically proprietary, right?”,
• “You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>”,

are in the same category as “I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting” when it comes to evaluating someone’s aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I’d be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t understand everyone else had a life and thoughts of their own, just like I do. Maybe it helps that I grew up with a sibling of a similar age.

And yet there are some tasks I wish I could do in NETCONF instead of the thing we’re actually using, but apparently the documentation for this interface is difficult and expensive for the company to get my hands on, for reasons.

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it’s even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn’t help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like “sexual harassment is not a real crime” or “we shouldn’t give our employees raises because otherwise they’ll soon demand infinite pay” or “there’s no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn’t going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead” you’re a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

Ahh, of course it’s from a spam blog. I was trying to come up with a reason for this picture to exist, the purpose it might be trying to serve, and all I could come up with was “a placeholder header image in a lorem ipsum blog template”.

Well that’s a mystery solved. I can now stop wasting my precious life thinking about this image.

while true; do fortune; done is a good way to spit information out fast.

Why was this a thing?

Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.

That was a wild ride of an article. It’s also a good showcase of why it’s usually not the best tech that wins, but who can secure the funding and the marketing.

A social app for uploading and swiping through short videos is not technically all that impressive. It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to scale and implement well, but it wasn’t exactly science fiction in the early 2010s. He was not the only one around that time with a similar idea, anyone remember Vine? Ultimately, Snapchat and TikTok (née Musical.ly) had the bigger backing and more successful marketing. Maybe ten years from now the same idea will have been reinvented and people will point out what TikTok is today.

I remember the signs of a new AI spring from 2015 when DeepDream was in the news. It’s entirely expected that a techie serial entrepreneur with an Open Source mindset would have tried to foster open collaboration in a potential new and exciting AI renaissance. For all his techbro tendencies I think his goals for his Open AI project seem laudable enough and he’s entirely correct in blaming OpenAI for not living up to its name. It’s not the biggest issue we should have with OpenAI – being transparent about their research and open sourcing their products wouldn’t make them environmentally sustainable or morally fair to us mortals who have to abide by copyright law – but it’s a legitimate point.

This, as it happens, is the nearly identical contention of Musk, in a federal lawsuit filed on Aug. 5 accusing OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of deceiving him into giving $44 million to a nonprofit that isn’t.