cpleppert

That doesn't really apply here. The dynamics of stage separation on Starship are orders of magnitude more complex than anything used on any previous rocket. If you want to look at what failure looks like for a super large rocket compare it to the failed Soviet N1. This flight demonstrated better performance in a single test flight than every N1 test flight over years. The N1 suffered catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure. Starship was pushed way past its design tolerance and showed its design is technically sound. Failure is unavoidable, the Saturn V almost failed its first test flight way earlier than Starship did here.

That argument doesn't make sense. Nuclear power plants are capital intensive; countries that would have a higher tolerance for safety and environmental shortfalls would find nuclear power too capital intensive to be financially viable.

That isn't actually true. Ukraine's entire battle management system (Delta) runs on Starlink. The issue is specifically where Ukraine used the system to control long range aerial drones which were mostly old Tupolev models and suicide drones. That has been an ongoing issue that Ukraine obviously hasn't wanted to publicize.

Agriculture is something like 2% of the economy of the netherlands. Additionally, the vast majority of agricultural production in the other countries you mentioned is consumed domestically. The netherlands isn't richer because of agriculture in any way whatsoever. Its richer because its population is much more productive across its entire economy.

The transition started before C, EBCDIC was 8 bits and ASCII was essentially a byte encoding. Unless you were designing some exotic hardware you probably needed to handle text and that was an eight bit byte. One motivation for the C type system was to extend the B programming language to support ASCII characters.

There are a couple of efficiency reason besides the simple fact that every piece of hardware in existence operates on data sizes in powers of the byte. To start off with it would be fantastically inefficient to build a cpu that could load arbitrary bit locations so you would either be restricted to loading memory locations that are some reasonable fraction of the internal cache line or pay a massive performance penalty to load a bit address. Realistically what would you gain by doing this when the cpu would have to divide any location by eight (or some other fraction) to figure out which cache line it needs to load?

The article touches on this but having your addressable unit fit a single character is incredibly convenient. If you are manipulating text you will never worry about single bits in isolation. Ditto for mathematical operations, do you really have a need for numbers less than 255? It is a lot more convenient to think about memory locations as some reasonable unit that covers 99% of your computing use cases.

The fact that 50-60 schools across the country have been affected by reports of poisoning makes it highly unlikely that there was a coordinated poisoning campaign. Such a campaign would require a significant amount of planning, resources, and coordination, and it is unlikely that a single group or individual could carry out such a campaign across multiple schools in different regions of the country. MPI is a very plausible explanation and fits the facts of this case much better than an unprecedented mass poisoning.

I'm not sure why this seems to be hyped up in media reports and I'm skeptical this is a big deal. They used NIFS's stellarator to observe proton boron fusion in a magnetic plasma. The way they accomplished this is by bombarding the plasma with massively energetic particles. The energy produced through fusion is almost undetectable. I'm not sure what relevance this has to their proposed FRC reactor and the paper doesn't make that clear either. They do talk about a wealth of data that could inform their research but since the scale here is so astronomically different from a hypothetical reactor that produces energy it is hard to see how the knowledge gained from what is essentially a single experiment has any relevance to their eventual goal of producing net energy gain. Most of the work to make fusion energy work is engineering and engineering is very sensitive to scale.

There is really no evidence to support such a contention. Iran had no reason to help out Carter by releasing the hostages. On the flip side if they weren't going to drag out the situation it was better to resolve it and get some goodwill with the next administration, which they did.

It would have been strange if the US did not supply Iran with weapons given the geopolitical situation. Iran was surrounded by Soviet friendly countries and an Iranian loss to Iraq would have been a disaster for both the US and Israel. Israel, not coincidentally, served as a backchannel for the Iranian US relationship during that time period.

sure, for example this pauses every youtube video in every chrome tab: tell application "Google Chrome" repeat with theWindow in every window repeat with theTab in (every tab of theWindow) if (URL of theTab) contains "youtube.com" then execute theTab javascript "document.querySelectorAll('video, audio').forEach(e => e.pause())" end if end repeat end repeat end tell

There are lots of examples just by googling. The script editor has a dictionary for every application you can natively script.

The theoretical problem with fusion energy isn't neutron activation; if you could generate electricity you could easily amortize the cost of disposal of any induced radioactivity over the lifetime of the plan. But no known projected fusion reactor is anywhere close to even being financial viable with todays technology. Iter won't demonstrate actual D-T fusion until 2035 and it is too small to project what the economics of a takomak power plant would look like.

To make fusion viable you have to generate a substantial surplus of power that can be converted into usable energy. Nothing in that video touches on that subject at all. The most he can say is that it is possible D-He3 can reach scientific breakeven, which of course, is no where close to net power generation.

It is strange to see claims about Q > 10 using D-T fusion being possible and then immediately pivot to talking about being excited about Q > 1 using D-He3. If you can build a fusion reactor that could produce Q > 10 why would you bother pursuing Q > 1? The 'benefits' of direct electrical generation from D-He3 are not relevant if you can't even produce net positive energy in the first place. Electrical generation is a solved problem; if you can produce net energy you can produce heat that can power a turbine.

If the most you can do is talk about how Q > 1 is possible it seems unlikely you are going to start producing electricity any time soon.

"I do not possess the ability to generate novel thoughts. My responses are based on patterns and associations in the data that has been input into my system during training. I can generate text that may appear to be original, but it is based on the patterns and associations in the data I've been trained on. My main function is to process and understand text, not to think or have beliefs, so any claim that I can think or generate novel thoughts would be incorrect."

Microsoft most assuredly did not try to replace the filesystem with a database. WinFS was a relational database service that served as a central metadata store for Longhorn. It was slow, but most importantly never provided any value. The idea was that applications would store their structured data inside SQL Server cough I mean WinFS and then somehow they would be able to easily link their data. There was a complicated system of loading application schemas to accomplish this. Of course, if applications want to share data they don't need to involve a brittle system sql database.

Nothing is stopping you from storing blobs of data inside a database and then exporting a POSIX api and calling that a new and improved filesystem. But once again its hard to see what value you get from all this complexity. A filesystem is complex enough and it doesn't have to store structured data. You generally don't want the OS to handle this complexity; you have just added another failure mode to a part of the system that you really don't want to fail.

This effect only has an impact on the surrounding sea level, it somewhat counterbalances the local sea level rise from the melting ice sheet. It has no impact ( likes tides) on global sea levels.

update: https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Chairman/Alexander-Hoehn-Sar...

"Over the past several days, there has been a lot of attention paid to gas stove emissions and to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Research indicates that emissions from gas stoves can be hazardous, and the CPSC is looking for ways to reduce related indoor air quality hazards. But to be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.

CPSC is researching gas emissions in stoves and exploring new ways to address health risks. CPSC also is actively engaged in strengthening voluntary safety standards for gas stoves. And later this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks. This is part of our product safety mission – learning about hazards and working to make products safer."

That is incredibly generous. His 'concession' was an admission that Lula will be the next president, nothing more. His calls for peace are in the context of saying the military will decide in a purposely vague way. He won't participate in the transition ceremony. His party has been fined for making frivolous claims of electoral fraud.

I understand this use case and my solution is to just use alfred to run a ddg lucky search on wikipedia. If the top result isn't right I have chrome set up(using an alfred keyboard shortcut) to jump straight to a general search of the website using the query term or if all else fails just open alfred again and select another keyword/search engine.

Not sure how I could optimize it further. It takes less than 2-3 seconds to go straight from needing to find an article on wikipedia to having the article pop up and there is no need to break any kind of mental flow I'm in. Same goes for any other website; adding a new website just requires adding a new keyword in alfred and specifying the domain to my custom workflow. Pretty simple.

You can easily do all that with alfred on mac. For example, I have a keyboard shortcut to open the current url in archive.is and the wayback archive for instance. Just a simple applescript to get the current url from chrome and then open up the two websites. Easier to manage than writing a browser extension or some kind of bookmarklet.

I have lots of custom searches accessed by a keyword, usually two letters, and I can modify the query string any way I want or take some other action with it. My 'lucky' searches use DDG to go straight to the top result on the site(wikipedia, mdn etc) but they also stuff the query into the system wide find pasteboard. If the top result isn't right I can immediately jump to a google search of the site with the search query with a keyboard shortcut.

You could just use the beta of vmware fusion for apple silicon. I have only used Parallels for windows but it was such a great experience it would surely be fine for linux. Ubuntu multipass is a little finicky but it works fine as a remote deskop.

>> Use both, and use both halves of the keyboard If you're doing a combination like Ctrl F, use the right control key. If you're doing Ctrl-l, use the left control key.

You can also remap both caps lock and enter to control when they are used in combination with other keys. If you press them alone then they can be caps lock(or escape) and enter as normal. Pretty easy to do in karabiner. No RSI issues and you never have to worry about hunting for the ctrl keys with your pinkies on the bottom of the keyboard.

When you use the prompt "Why do people say that drinking Ardbeg is like getting punched in the face by William Wallace?" you are prompting it to use the fact you provided as part of its response. If you instead ask directly it will say "I'm not aware of any specific claims that drinking Ardbeg is like getting punched in the face by William Wallace."

The JVM only runs out of codecache (usually) after a period of time running with a production load.

Yeah, literally the first thing you do when running into JVM issues. It was my second initial suggestion in Discord as well.

The top commment though is just wrong. He says Q would be 0.375 with modern lasers. Which would be worse than the result announced today! Q is a factor internal to the fusion reaction, so upgrading to more efficent lasers would not change Q.

Presumably he means something like total energy efficency would be very close to breakeven with modern lasers. You can tell how dubious this is from the fact no one involved in the project says anything like this. In fact, breakeven is still two orders of magnitude away and I don't believe anyone has suggested anything more optimistic.

The difference is ignition/break-even in MCF gets you 90% of the way to being able to actually generate power. ITER will get you something like a q of 10 for ten minutes. An indirect ICF like this experiment at the NIF needs to be replicate ignition a million times a day at two magnitudes greater efficiency.

from a brief look, both publications prominently feature discussions about target survival within the reaction vessel.

Of course there are tradeoffs between MCF and ICF. They involve different sets of challenges to achieve viable fusion energy production. Neither has been demonstrated to have commercial viability to date. The consensus view that MCF is more viable is rooted in the much better understanding of how to comercialize a MCF reactor.

>> My understanding is the timing and precision requirements are much higher here, but on the other hand the "rate" of fire would be necessarily much lower making something perhaps feasible.

Leaving aside rate of fire and energy efficiency you have to develop a system that can shoot the hohlraum into the reactor chamber such that the lasers can be steered onto the target with enough precision to produce ignition. I believe 100um is the miniumum for the type of targets used in the INF. This all needs to occur within the reaction chamber. Besides the thermal loads you also have residual gases within the chamber. These conditions somehow have to be accounted for or you won't get ignition.

The work they did in demonstrating ignition is great but the engineering challenges for commericalization are immense. EUV lithography took decades to develop and perfect.

>>What I'd like to understand is what are the major tradeoffs in ICF vs MCF that would drive pursuing the difficult engineering problems of one vs another.

MCF is generally seen as a much easier approach because you avoid the problems with repeatedly generating fusion conditions and you remain in the ballpark of what can be solved with better technology. You can come up with a tokamak that you can be absolutely sure will probably work with enough money; but I'm not sure the same is true with ICF.

"To demonstrate that the type of fusion studied at NIF can be a viable way of producing energy, the efficiency of the yield — the energy released compared to the energy that goes into producing the laser pulses — needs to grow by at least two orders of magnitude."

Lots of claims on HN that we were one order of magnitude away. Similar claims were made in other threads made about how we were really close to commercialization with better lasers. This article has the right take, this research is valuable but its impossible to say anything about whether indirect intertial confinement fusion is commercially viable. Best case scenario [1], we still have a way to go.

[1]: An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy (2013)

The studies done ten years ago suggested that the best case scenario was about thirty years( one demonstration phase of 15 years and another development phase of 15 years). This was premised on the INF demonstrating ignition using indirect drive soon after operation. There was also an expectation that the INF would transistion to researching other, possibly more promising technologies like direct drive ignition.

Instead, it took over ten years to simply demonstrate ignition using the indirect drive method which was chosen specifically because it was seen as being more technologically viable. This "big breakthrough" was supposed to happen immediately after operation!

No one knows whether commercialization of inertial confinement fusion is even possible. Laser efficiency is just one small part; the work to produce and develop a system to reliably shoot hohlraum targets is an order of magnitude harder than shooting a static target in ideal conditions.

Compared to these engineering challenges demonstrating ignition is the easy part.

>> Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.

Hydrogen bombs are driven by indirect implosion by a nuclear primary. It isn't a runaway process; the yield of a secondary is limited by the implosion achieved by the primary. Most hypothetical designs for an inertial fusion power plant achieve similar energy gains.