The DeepSeek moment for nuclear power might be accelerator-driven subcritical reactors that make fission plants much simpler and safer (and therefore cheaper, the key element of DeepSeek moment) by never having a critical mass of fuel in the reactor - criticality is only possible when a particle accelerator is illuminating the core, and the accelerator can just be turned off.
A major challenge is getting the robot into the place you need it, along with other objects it needs like replacement parts, in between the other infrastructure like coils and cooling blankets. You mustn't damage the delicate reactor structures, you can't have rails and so on always in the reactor vessel, the vessel has to be vacuum tight, and most of all you must not allow the robot to fail and be unextractable, because humans can't go in an pull it out.
ITER seems to have a project called the Agile Robot Transporter which you can see some renders of that demonstrate how fiddly this problem is.
That's so cool. I wonder what the battery life is like when doing that. It's amazing that a human can do all that on a mouthful of potato!
The safety aspects of such powerful and heavy limb moving so fast near humans is going to be an interesting one, and society is going to have to get used to it one way or the other. A single mistake like the robot spinning an arm 360 degrees due to a bad kinematic solution could be a very serious injury. Presumably normally a robot has static "no entry" zones to protect things that shouldn't be hit, but that's a lot harder in an uncontrolled space.
I have seen robot arms bolted to benches at trade shows where they could physically reach out and strike a passerby and wondered if they had soft limits on movements, and if they didn't, or they were wrong, how could I know not to approach
Some datacentres do in fact recover the heat for things like municipal heating. It's tricky though because being near population centres that can use the heat is often (not always) inversely related to things that are good for datacentres like cheap land, power and lack of neighbours to moan about things like construction and cooling system noise.
There was also a startup selling/renting bitcoin miners that doubled as electrical heaters.
The problem is that computers are fundamentally resistors, so at most you can get 100% of the energy back as heat. But a heat pump can give you 2-4 times the energy back. So your AI work (or bitcoin mining) plus the capital outlay of the expensive computers has to be worth the difference.
I don't think it's universal, there are definitely teams and management structures where it's a group effort and people aren't hoarding story points or metrics or whatever.
I could go off on one about how is when the leadership becomes so detached from the with that they need layers of managers to deal with it, leading to horsetrading, artificial metrics and political chicanery. But fundamentally, if an organisation allows such cancer to develop within it, it chose to. Whether by carelessness or on MBA infection, the result is the same.
If you're a salary-chaser who signs up for that kind of company for the pay, you know what you're walking into. You might as well join the army and complain about the food as work for, say, Google in 2025 and complain about management cancer.
"Big" tech is almost tautologically companies that are long-term setting up battlements around their fiefdoms now they've made the land grab. But big tech isn't all tech.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process. Cuts, layoffs, new policies, commissars sent in to keep tabs, sales targets airdropped from another continent, endless, endless IT "harmonisation". The usual. So I left them to it. Life is too short to play that game if it isn't your thing.
The post is specifically about “large tech companies”.
But even in smaller companies if your entire job is “to close tickets” and you don’t close your tickets, that’s what you will be judged on. The only way that you can close the amount of tickets you should and help others who are not in the position to help you is by working overtime.
The author is specifically referring to PMs from other teams using back channels instead of going through the proper channels. He isn’t saying don’t help either junior engineers who need hand holding or other team members after they put some effort in their question and have already tried some things.
It’s been almost a decade since my job was mostly “to close tickets” even as an IC and I need to build relationships with other teams to get my job done. But I would be leery of reaching into another team for help and would first ask a team lead or PM could they spare someone.
> Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process
This is inevitable. The second law of dynamics is that “entropy always increases” or things always go to shit over time.
On another note, I’m 50 and spent 25 of my 28 years of working in non Big tech companies except between the ages of 46-49 and have no need to chase max compensation. But if the compensation of BigTech had been available to me when I was younger and unencumbered (instead of older and unencumbered), you best believe I would be “grinding leetcode and getting into a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and that’s my recommendation to anyone who is early career.
Again at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any large company - especially BigTech.
Not only compile time, but run/debug time. Just being able to say "I have an object here, so I must have some consistent state meaning XYZ" is very helpful.
Of course, it's on you to make that happen - if you have a Between6And10 type and you implement as struct with an int that someone comes and writes 15 into it, it's bad news for your assumptions.
If you can make it compile time safe, then great, but even when you can't, if you know the invariants are holding, it's still something powerful you can reason about.
Types imbue pure data with meaning. That's pretty much it, and the other uses of types flow from that.
Whether you use that meaning to produce IDE hints (say, via Python type annotations, though I am aware Python typing isn't only that), or you feed it to a compiler that promises that it will ruthlessly statically enforce the invariants you set via the types, or anything else, is up to you, your goal and the language you use.
For isn't, the return type STM () doesn't give you anything back, but it declares that the method is suitable for transactions (i.e. will change state, but can be rolled back automatically)
Quite. I use regex a lot, but mostly in bursts. Sometimes I still have to check how a negative lookbehind goes! The important thing, as with everything, is to try to keep in mind what is and isn't possible, even if you don't keep the specific syntactic details in your mental L1 cache.
Twitter took off because it is a journalism predigestion engine, and there's always someone saying something that you can make a headline out of.
You used to have to go out and talk to people to find out "people are saying", but that costs time and money, and local journalists were being culled hard.
With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. It's like crack for both sides.
The downside is it sane-washes the lunacy by promoting some guy, who used to be propping up the bar at the local pub and explaining his theories to anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby, to national news-worthy opinion-haver.
> With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in.
I think that says a lot more about the media than Twitter itself. Yes, it built upon the concept, but TV reports have been doing the same thing ever since the invention of the vox pop.
Yes, it's not specifically Twitter's fault that it can be can used it to mass produce "both sides" and ragebait at near-zero marginal cost.
But IMO it's still a large part of why it took off. When it started in 2006, every media personality was almost immediately absolutely hooked on it. You couldn't move for columnists talking about what they'd seen there, gushing about how great it was and the news articles would embed anything that would get a click. Even my university newspaper had a satirical fake "what's happening on Twitter", mocking the overuse of Twitter as a source in news media. And that was the start of the academic year 2006-7: it was already a meme within the year of launch.
Yes, vox pops have been around since it was realised that the person on the street might have telegenic hot takes, but you have to pack up, go out to a specific place and interview enough people there to get all the takes you need. That's tens of thousands in gear, a minimum of two people (camera operator, interviewer) plus a stack of editing. Twitter just meant you could sift tens of thousands of takes, possibly from all over the world and select for the maximum engagement. And because the tweets could and did go national, every kook out there was posting madly in hopes of getting noticed.
On one hand, if I squint hard enough, I can almost see it, but not exactly for the reasons they propose. Potatoes are infamous for having an extremely high satiety index, that is, you feel very full after eating them. If that holds, it would be easy to see how it could lead to weight loss, since you would feel full earlier and thus eat less.
All that aside, almost all of the results they show are deep within statistical error bounds. My weight easily varies 5lbs (2kg) within a week, saying you lost that amount after a month of diet doesn't really say much to me. I could weigh myself a week from now and say I lost that, then one week on and say I regained it.
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