acidburnNSA

Very nice!

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the lights of the icon computers light up for transmitting and receiving?

It'd be cool to write a little script that dumps them out into an Anki deck for spaced repetition.

This is the way. Do you use frigate for NVR or something else?

Frigate is incredible. I have 3 instances of it (different homes across the family) running using various amcrest and reolink local-only PoE and Wifi cams. I access the remotely using wireguard. One is running on a 2017 miniatx box (Intel i7-7700T) using openvino to do local-only object detection with the 2017 intel CPU. One is using a Beelink EQ14 Mini PC, Intel Twin Lake N150, also using openvino for object detection (people, dogs, cars, etc). One is using a nvidia 5070 gpu. All notifications are processed via the home assistant integration.

Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.

For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.

https://docs.frigate.video/

I used to do that but switched to Logseq and love it. Most people use obsidian.

Lots of good stuff in here. One thing to note about building off-grid self-sufficient abodes for "Problem space #3: The zombie apocalypse" is that the roving hordes of warlord-run gangs will consider finding those to be the ultimate booty. This point is made quite clearly in Six Minutes to Winter, the new book about nuclear war by Mark Lynas. As much as I always wanted a sweet prepper cave, the idea has now soured on me a bit.

If you have the compose key enabled it's trivial to write all sorts of things. Em dash is compose (right alt for me) ---

En dash is compose --.

You can type other fun things like section symbol (compose So) and fractions like ⅐ with compose 17, degree symbol (compose oo) etc.

https://itsfoss.com/compose-key-gnome-linux/

On phones you merely long press hyphen to get the longer dash options.

For me I use en dashes a lot for ranges like 1–N

Well that was a demo but it didn't quite kick of the 'age'

Calling plutonium a bridge fuel to HALEU is such a crazy thing to say. Plutonium is derived from Uranium-238, which is 99.3% of natural uranium. HALEU is enriched U-235, which is 0.7%. There's no large-scale nuclear future running on HALEU. It's always either been plutonium derived from U-238 or U-233 derived from thorium.

I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.

It's not that impressive. IMHO. The thing they're demonstrating is that they have connections in the admin sufficient to get access to get stuff done. That can be valuable.

They used old TRISO fuel from General Atomics, not their own new fuel.

They used their connections to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to get priority access at LANL, who provided nuclear engineering services and an existing critical facility (including building, safeguards, instrumentation, controls, rigging hardware).

LANL operated the facility to bring it to cold critical.

This is a cool milestone for sure, but bringing legacy enriched uranium critical isn't really interesting from an engineering perspective. I think they just wanted to claim to be the first VC to do a critical assembly.

I like that Valar is trying to move fast. It's true that you can't really learn much about your reactor until you have a commercially-relevant prototype, and they're trying to get to that point really fast. Respect for that. This little criticality experiment is more of a stunt though, for sure.

BTW TerraPower, a VC-backed nuclear startup, was splitting far more atoms, at high temperature and power, in the Advanced Test Reactor 5 years ago testing new fuel they designed themselves. So while it may be true that this is the first VC-backed criticality experiment, it's not the first time VC-backed companies split the atom (which is how the Valar founder announced it).

I like the idea of battery powered ships for short haul ferries. I'm expecting nuclear-powered civilian ships like the Savannah, Otto Hahn, Mutsu, and all the Russian icebreakers to be the better solution for longer haul cargo, tanker, and cruise ships.

I'm right in the middle of those groups. I think they're mostly crazy and will be hit on the head with the Rickover memo when reactor performance and economics become real considerations, but also I think the industry has been pretty stagnant and needs some new excitement and to split a few atoms with weird and fun reactors.

Main focus of the industry by far should be deploying more AP1000s or ABWRs right now though.

Archive link: https://archive.is/Q3tQ0

The cruise missile is technically easier than the airplane because you don't need to shield the pilot or crew, which is the really hard part in the air because radiation shielding is heavy.

Project Pluto got quite far along in the US in the 1960s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qMuS5kaDBI

Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.

This was never an actual reactor design. Ford imagined a future where nuclear power could, maybe somehow, be miniaturized. It was a vision.

Even as early as 1956, textbooks said [1]: "The fantastic possibility has been envisaged of including in an automobile enough fissionable material, about the size of a pea, to last the life of the vehicle. In order to realize why this is not within the bounds of reality, it is necessary to understand something about the fission process."

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015003994194&vi...

I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?

I'm not trying to say they were stupid. I'm explaining my lived experience where I needed a lightweight linux server for an internal app and it worked great until a 100% Windows-based IT team policy required that Defender be installed on it, after which it became extremely slow and crashed regularly due to Defender-related issues in the logs.

In my example they literally demanded to run Windows Defender on a Linux server that I requested. There was no Linux experience on the IT team whatsoever.

Good choice! I've been solo boot Linux for years and absolutely love it.

A lot of the corporate IT workforce is heavily invested in Microsoft systems. It creates somewhat of a co-dependency.

I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.

Damn. I was hoping that confidential compute could allow nuclear reactor design work (export controlled, not classified) to go into the public cloud and avoid the govcloud high premium costs. But this kind of takes the wind out of the idea.

I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned

Maybe this article?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...

The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...

A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh

The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.

Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.

Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.

Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.