I'm not a specialist but here is what I think I know (I'm talking with the point of view of a Frenchman, who consumes most of his electricity from (fission) nuclear power plants):
1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues).
2/ Fission nuclear plants require a well functioning [state|government], and no war. A (conventional) strike on a nuclear power plant can have devastating and lasting consequences. Even a random terrorist group can do that.
3/ I've read that "Ultimately, researchers hope to adopt the protium–boron-11 reaction, because it does not directly produce neutrons, although side reactions can" (that's a wikipedia quote, but I've read that already from other sources).
So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Deuterium is also not renewable, even if it is more abundant than uranium.
The H1-B11 reaction would be a much better energy source than anything else, but for now nobody knows any method to do it. There is no chance to do it by heating, but only by accelerating ions, and it is not known how a high enough reaction rate could be obtained.
I'm curious, what are you considering for stating that deuterium is not renewable? AFAIK there's an essentially limitless supply in the form of HDO in the oceans[1] and there are cost effective methods[2] to isolate it.
If you are able to say that there is a limitless amount of deuterium in the oceans, than you can say the same about the amount of uranium in the oceans, even if the amount of dissolved uranium is about one thousand times less.
Both the amounts of deuterium and of uranium in the solar system are finite and smaller than of the abundant elements. Moreover, the natural processes that create deuterium and uranium within a normal stellar system are slower than those that destroy them, so there is no chance of their quantities ever increasing.
Unlike using other chemical elements to make some stuff, using deuterium or uranium for producing energy destroys them without any means to regenerate them, so it is by definition a non-renewable process.
The hydrogen (protium) in the Sun is also non-renewable, but its quantity is enormous in comparison with the amount of deuterium existing on Earth (and the amount of energy that the Sun produces per proton is greater than the amount of energy that can be produced per deuteron).
Like deuterium is extracted from sea water, uranium can also be extracted from sea water, where it is one of the most abundant metals, except for the alkali metals and the alkaline earth metals. However the energy required for extracting uranium is significantly higher, due to its much lower concentration than deuterium (though deuterium is difficult to separate due to its similarity with the lighter isotope of hydrogen, while for the uranium ions much more efficient chemical reactions would be possible, which would bind uranium ions without being affected by the other dissolved ions).
Then wind power is not renewable either! The saturation wind power potential of this planet (250 terawatts?), integrated from now until this planet ceases to exist, is a finite number—and it is actually a smaller number than this planet's deuterium resource.
> Deuterium is also not renewable, even if it is more abundant than uranium
Technology correct, in that after around a hundred trillion years even the red dwarf stars will have stopped burning hydrogen.
But last I checked as yet there is no known way to harness the only (and even then merely suspected) infinitely renewable energy source: the expansion of the universe.
The amount of deuterium contained in a planet is a very small fraction of its hydrogen content.
The amount of hydrogen contained in a medium-sized planet like Earth is extremely small in comparison with the amount of hydrogen contained in a star.
The amount of energy that can be produced by fusion per deuteron is smaller than the amount of energy that is produced in stars per proton.
With all these factors multiplied, the amount of energy that could be obtained from all the deuterium contained in Earth is many orders of magnitude smaller than the energy produced by the Sun or by any other star.
Moreover, the energy obtained from fusion could never exceed a very small fraction of the energy received by Earth from the Sun as light, otherwise it would lead to a catastrophic warming of the Earth.
Nuclear fusion reactors are not really useful for solving Earth's energy problems. They could have a crucial importance only for the exploration of the Solar System and for providing energy for human bases established on Moon, Mars or other outer planets.
For Earth the only problems worth solving are how to make better batteries, including very large capacity stationary batteries, how to make other large capacity energy storage devices, e.g. thermal devices, and how to improve the energy efficiency of the methods used to synthesize hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide and water.
Making hydrocarbons at large scale from carbon dioxide would be the best way to sequester carbon dioxide, offering the choice between just storing the carbon in safe products (paraffin like) and using a part of the synthesized hydrocarbons for generating energy in a carbon-neutral way.
On earth, there is an estimated 4.85×10e13 tonnes of deuterium; the energy density is 3.4x10e14 J/kg, giving a total yield of 1.649e31 joules. If you deleted the sun, this would be sufficient to maintain the current temperature of the Earth for ~9.5 million years: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.649×10%5E31+joules...
At "merely" the level of current human power consumption, this will last about 43 times longer than C3-photosynthesis, about 26 times longer than the oceans, about 5 times longer than before Andromeda merges with the Milky Way, and 6-3 times longer than when the Earth is currently expected to be absorbed into the outer envelope of the sun as it enters the Red Giant phase: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.649×10%5E31+joules...
Even if the sources I read giving those estimates are off by a factor of 10, deuterium alone, from earth alone, used as a total replacement for the sun, would still last longer than our species is likely to last before even natural evolution would have us speciate.
In the hypothetical future where we had a useful fusion reactor, the gas giants become harvestable, so the fact they're not on earth is unimportant. Likewise, on this timescale, every star in the nearest several galaxies — indeed, even absent novel technology and "merely"(!) massively scaling up what we've already invented, we already 'know'* how to get to places so far away that cosmic expansion is what would prevent a return trip.
As I said, it's technically correct that it is a finite resource. All I'm saying is that this is not a useful point on the scale at which we operate.
I expect it will be a useful point when we're star-lifting, but not now.
> Nuclear fusion reactors are not really useful for solving Earth's energy problems. They could have a crucial importance only for the exploration of the Solar System and for providing energy for human bases established on Moon, Mars or other outer planets.
I agree, however I also hope nobody makes a convenient cheap fusion reactor due to the proliferation impact of an affordable switchable source of neutron radiation.
> For Earth the only problems worth solving are how to make better batteries, including very large capacity stationary batteries, how to make other large capacity energy storage devices, e.g. thermal devices, and how to improve the energy efficiency of the methods used to synthesize hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide and water.
FWIW, I think that — if only we could cooperate better — a global power grid would be both cheaper and better than stationary batteries. Even just made from aluminium, never mind superconductors (and yes, I've done the maths). But we'd still need mobile batteries for transport, so that's fine.
The cheap abundance of PV power even today means I don't think we need to care much about making hydrogen electrolysis more joule-efficient.
> Making hydrocarbons at large scale from carbon dioxide would be the best way to sequester carbon dioxide, offering the choice between just storing the carbon in safe products (paraffin like) and using a part of the synthesized hydrocarbons for generating energy in a carbon-neutral way.
I suspect that carbon sequestration is unlikely to be a great win: there's a very narrow window close to zero loss/profit where on the loss side it's still cheap enough that people do it because it's a vote winner and on the profit side where it's not so profitable that people break photosynthesis a few hundred million years before natural processes do it.
* in the sense that Jules Verne "knew" how to get to the moon: the maths wasn't wrong, but the engineering was only good enough for a story
Do you have an opinion on using N2O (laughing gas) as an energy carrier?
2 molecules of N2O exothermically react to form 2 x N2 and 1 x O2 molecules, approximately the same composition as our atmosphere.
It is a very potent greenhouse gas, so quite disturbing on that front.
I've been making calculation for designing earth suits, where the suit replaces the home, internal showering, ventilation, heat recovery etc. Using N2O for heating looks rather promising because with fossil fuels one is forced to lose heat by inefficient heat exchange or forced to be exposed to the exhaust fumes; laughing gas decomposed is just warm atmosphere like air.
I have no opinions about most chemistry. I do know that the heaviest recreational users develop issues due to it being neurotoxic, so that's worth considering.
I don't know if your designs are technical or world-building for a story? If the latter, I'd suggest https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com as I've had good conversations there, if the former perhaps (but not as a recommendation because I'm not a chemist) https://chemistry.stackexchange.com would help?
1: Well if society could get at least some of their shit together we could do breeders. Alas, someone shot an RPG at Superphenix and that put a damper on a lot of things...
But it's not impossible. Japan seems to do most things decent from a 'security' standpoint, also interestingly for all of the other 'grey-market' stuff out there in the category of "shouldn't be radioactive but is" I have yet to find anything about AliExpress selling fissiable materials.
2: Yes and no and how much do you want to spend to improve the breach/damage ratio. i.e. PBRs have relatively low risk under a number of circumstances but have higher operating/etc costs.
I should also possibly question, what are the potential failure modes of 'not short timeframe fusion reactions'? I honestly have no clue whether they would quickly cease or if there are other potential side effects.
3: Agreed that neutron stuff can be solved in many ways, I do have some questions about maintaining that across various fusion designs. Big challenge is that we aren't 'there' yet.
> So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Agreed that Fusion is the ideal long term, hopefully my comments didn't cause thoughts otherwise. I think we need more funding into it, and maybe even research as to how to have other renewables (e.x. solar) help feed into the initial startup/restart process for plants. We have had decades without sufficient funding of research.
I will say however, especially in relation to my other point-comments, that other countries (re?)embracing fission in the meantime will likely still lead to discovery of better techniques to deal with 'shared' concerns between fission/fusion such as neutrons/weigner engergy/etc
Jules Vernes is a notorious misogynist and racist. Read "The Mysterious Island" for instance. He was a product of his time, but clearly not the best one on those grounds.
Also "People in Europe are white" is really something you just hear from people without any European historical culture, and/or people wanting to sell a racist ideology. You have the whole spectrum of colors in Europe, and that's not recent at all. Africa is 30km from Europe, Asia is connected to it, and people travel since before we were modern humans.
> "People in Europe are white" is really something you just hear from people without any European historical culture, and/or people wanting to sell a racist ideology
There's of course a lot of cross-communication with other continents, from the muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula to the Ottoman wars in eastern Europe, and the colonizing empires.
But the European history is very strongly predominantly white, and pretending otherwise is something you only hear from politically oriented people, unless you try to push ridiculous ideas like 'Italians are not white' as I've seen here and there
> European history is of course very strongly predominantly white
"White" ?
In the context of the thinking in Europe at the time of Verne .. what is "white"?
eg: The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (1899) - Ripley
Ripley classified Europeans into three distinct races: Teutonic [..] Mediterranean [..] Alpine [..]
Ripley's tripartite system of race put him at odds both with others on the topic of human difference, including those who insisted that there was only one European race, and those who insisted that there were at least ten European races (such as Joseph Deniker, whom Ripley saw as his chief rival).
You're talking about the general history of Europe, and the vision in our current culture, why are you trying to push an obsolete taxonomy "of the time" ?
> "People in Europe are white" is really something you just hear from people without any European historical culture, and/or people wanting to sell a racist ideology
That's clearly talking about current notions, and not "current in the times of Jules Vernes"
Your request for me to "read more carefully" is very much unwelcome : stand by your own writing instead of trying to shift the meaning
> That's clearly talking about current notions, and ...
written by somebody other than myself.
> Your request for me to "read more carefully" is
again restated. Please read more carefully, pay attention to who said what, and don't falsely take the wrong people to task over what other people said.
We all make mistakes, perhaps you can now recognise and acknowledge yours.
"White" is a fictional category, and it is an empty one at that. "White" and "Black" were invented in the Colony of Virginia to keep African and Irish/Scottish slaves apart and from uniting against their masters. To accomplish this end, "white" slaves were given the privilege of being whipped with their shirts on. This was enough to create a feeling of privilege among the "white" slaves and a feeling of resentment among the "black" slaves. Sound familiar?
Eventually, "Black American" actually became a real cultural identity, and in some sense an indigenous ethnic group that formed in the US among the descendants of African slaves (who, usually, also have some European ancestry). Nothing analogous occurred for "White American". There is no "White American" as an ethnic or cultural identity. It's a completely negative notion defined in terms of what it is not. This is why the whole "white boy" phenomenon we're seeing today is preposterously silly. It's not an identity. There is no "white culture". "Black" on its own is not an authentic identity either, unless it is short for "Black American. Black American culture has little to do with Africa, even if some elements of their culture have remote African inspiration or roots.
The "white boy" phenomenon is just a sad result of the loss of ethnic and religious identity. The US is a country especially prone to this issue. The first wave of European immigrants formed ethnic enclaves. With each passing generation, the likelihood of intermarriage, especially with members of the same religion, increased. Over time, ethnic identity is watered down to such a degree that the only remaining identity is religious identity. So, in the US, religious identity played a double role as both ethnic and religious identity. Now, as religious identity has eroded under the incessant pressures of liberal hyperindividualism, people are grasping at something that can given them a sense of identity. This is one reason for the rise of various ideologies, sexual and racial ideologies. So, in this case, the "white boy" is basically a kid with some kind of European ancestry who has no ethnic or religious identity who has latched onto this "white" label in an attempt to make up for having neither.
So, what Europeans had in common was a broadly Christian identity, not "whiteness", whatever that even means. Yes, the peoples of Europe tend to have less skin pigment, they tend to have different shaped noses, different phenotypes, but this is not a cultural or ethnic identity. Having blue eyes or brown eyes is not a cultural identity. These are the kinds of features that people latch onto when they don't have or have a weak ethnic identity.
Was Verne more, or less, misogynist and racist than his contemporaries? I was under the impression that both were common during his day. From the little Verne that I've read, I didn't have the impression that he had a particularly bad opinion of "the savages" he describes in his stories.
That's basically the concept of Turing Completeness. Any Turing complete system can run anything. It may be very slow, but it will run. ChatGPT could run on a 4004, all you need is time.
I've always interpreted the definition of storage as arbitrarily large, not specifically infinite. The universe, after all, is finite. The "well, acshually" arguments aren't interesting, because they're 100% abstract.
It is defined as arbitrarily large but not infinite. That's not because of physical concerns, but because some of the theorems don't work if the memory is actually infinite.
You're comparing an a priori concept with a posteriori one. It's like claiming the number five doesn't "acshually" exist. Like yea, it's a concept, concepts don't exist.
A universe isn't a turing machine because it can't run all the programs that can run on a turing machine. This isn't exactly controversial.
What's the difference between arbitrary large and infinite? Would you say the number of possible Turing computable functions is merely arbitrary large and not actually infinite?
When you're talking about something like neural networks on a 4004, the "well ackshually" argument does become very much relevant. The limitations of that kind of platform are hard enough that they do not approximate a Turing machine with respect to modern software.
Llama takes a lot more MIPS and a lot more RAM than linux. Linux is more complicated, but computers were running linux 30 years ago. In this case, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Ignoring things like AVX512 you're looking at about 100x more compute to do something serious with LLaMA.
However! If you just want to demo it working, then you could generate 4 tokens using TinyLLaMA 1.1B which takes 25,164,386,466 cycles. That's about the same cost as booting Linux. So you could do TinyLLaMA if you can do Linux.
Note also that the 4004 lacks a floating-point unit of any kind - not just a vector unit. I think people make 8-bit integer quantizations of LLMs, though, which would be the fastest versions to run on a 4004.
A lot of quants just upcast to floats. Some of them work on integer multiplication using pmaddubsw. But oof, it looks like the i4004 doesn't even have that.
What? A Turing machine can literally be built. The only problem is supplying the infinite tape, or splicing on more when it runs to the end of a finite tape.
Machines that address storage using fixed width pointers (and have no other kind of storage) cannot be Turing machines.
You don't want your telephone exchange to halt. That's why the engineering marvel Erlang. "Engineering" being the key word. The Halting problem isn't a real problem. Just pull the power cord.
You want every call handled in finite time. It's not that there is an unending computation in a telephone exchange, but a series of finite tasks. You can call it corecursion, coinduction or something else co-.
A computer with external connectivity to a tape machine capable of reading and writing a symbols and moving along the tape would qualify as a Turing machine, provided someone feeds it enough tape for any problem that's thrown at it.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Dmitry talks about compiling the kernel in years. While I haven't done that, I have built NetBSD-vax and NetBSD-mac68k natively on a VAXstation 4000/60 and on a Mac Quadra 610. It's on the scale of multiple months instead of years, but it's enough to give me a feel for it.
Location: Paris, FR
Remote: Yes, no, why not
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Technologies: C (I even know most of the standards, woo), C++, asm (x86, ARM, MIPS, 6502, whatever I can learn), embedded software, low-level security, Linux kernel and those things around and in drivers, mostly fluent in Python, Bash, keen interest in Rust.
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jelamoureux/
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NO banks, NO defense contractor or this kind of stuff.
So what, we don't have to send ICBMs on their happy way to Moscow to turn the Kremlin into fine dust.
We can just go and supply Ukraine with a shit ton of Abrams, Taurus or lift the usage restrictions that currently forbid Ukraine to strike targets deep in Moscow.
All of that is certainly better than just accepting Putin's escalations.
There's no need to guess when Russian war drones crash on Romanian soil. This kind of sovereignty violations alone would be enough for anyone to start a war, our politicians however don't have the balls to do anything about it.
And besides: that's the cost of doing "plausible deniability" missions like Russia has done for over a decade now - remember the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and "they're totally not Russian soldiers" or the time they shot down a passenger plane? Fuck around, find out, it's time to have some good old-fashioned revenge for all the bullshit Russia has pulled and gotten away with until now.
> There's no need to guess when Russian war drones crash on Romanian soil. This kind of sovereignty violations alone would be enough for anyone to start a war, our politicians however don't have the balls to do anything about it.
Does that guarantee this is safe to do?
>> We can just go and supply Ukraine with a shit ton of Abrams, Taurus or lift the usage restrictions that currently forbid Ukraine to strike targets deep in Moscow.
There are no guarantees or anything when it comes to Putin not reacting to something done against him, but it is a certainty that he will escalate if not pushed back, because that has been both his personal and his country's M.O. for decades.
At the end this is a risk we have to be willing to take, otherwise it will be the Baltics next that's up for grabs. Or maybe Hungary, that one won't even need soldiers the way Orban is going.
Pray tell what other paths do you think there are? Fold and let Europe be enslaved by a certain nuke-equipped Mafia? This is very clearly what we're looking at with this new attack here, and without consistent x10 responses the thugs will keep at it and gnaw more and more. The other paths is send all the diplomats back, neuter the sleepers, repay the attacks in kind.
And I recall hearing a month ago or more that Russia would likely try something, because they aren't allowed in the Olympics as Russia, because of the invasion of Ukraine. So they want to mar the Olympics out of saving face, or spite, or revenge, or whatever. (Sorry, I cannot cite a source...)
the incredible damage that western media has done to their citizens is this outsized sense of superiority. russia isn’t la côte d’iviore. you can try a 10x response but i doubt you’ll be here to tell us how it went.
Interesting statement.
What is the nature of the superiority that you think you're seeing exactly?
Witnessing a Russian youth kicking a downed man in the head was quite revelatory: indeed no one from Côte d'Ivoire would be that much of a savage beast.
It was surprisingly (or not) hard to find what this "Rabbit R1" device was (despite the `I assume by now that most people have heard of the Rabbit R1.`), so here is a paste from Wired:
"The promise was simple. Speak into the device and it'll complete tasks for you thanks to Rabbit's “large action models”—call an Uber, reserve dinner plans via OpenTable, play a song through Spotify, or order some food on DoorDash. Just speak and it will handle it, just like if you handed your smartphone to a personal assistant and asked them to do something for you."
I don't understand why an app on the phone wouldn't do that, but maybe I'm not hype enough.
You really have to watch the Steve Jobs-esque announcement video to understand what they were promising with this device, and understand how utterly it failed to deliver on those promises.
One thing brought up by the article is that for all their other sketchiness, they do provide a constant stream of software updates for existing devices. That makes it unlikely it was a pre-order scam.
It's like a cuckoo that has evolved to mimic Steve Jobs, just enough to feed on VC and beta product dollars. I'm sure it'll take off out of the nest, fat and happy, once its brood parasitism is complete.
On iOS the “problem” for a third-party app is that there is no mechanic by which it could always listen to your mic, and trigger actions based on keywords.
Only Siri would be able to do that on iOS.
Therefore, no third party can “become the platform” on iOS for voice assistants.
But who knows. Maybe EU will force Apple to open up for that at some point, like they forced Apple to open up for third party App Stores on iOS in EU.
You can continue to record audio in the background, but you can't use the API to just listen all the time, like "hey siri" does, and then open the app and act on it.
Honestly I don't understand how they got customers in the first place, the idea is so bad for a start that it really shows people are knowlingly buying stuff with the sole purpose of producing e-waste.
I don't understand the pleasure they get from this.
What's so bad about the idea? I like the idea, this is not well executed but I am looking forward Apple making something like it - maybe by just improving the WatchOS.
Everyone hallucinates stuff, you don't need to see the Virgin Mary to hallucinate. You hallucinate stuff every day, and you are not even aware of it. Even had a "déjà vu" ? Saw your black cat in a towel in a dark room ? Every day.
