That said, I think this take has aged poorly in light of recent history. For instance, Google was started as a small collaboration, but has since grown into an enormous company. Presumably, this growth was (at least initially) the natural result of finding that a couple people can only do so much. For another example, Sublime Text (a for profit text editor written by a small group of developers) is massively less popular than VS Code, which is the bloated work of a small army.
> For another example, Sublime Text (a for profit text editor written by a small group of developers) is massively less popular than VS Code, which is the bloated work of a small army.
Were you around in the Sublime 1/2 days? It used to be massively more popular than the alternatives, including Code, Brackets, Atom, etc. They fell behind because they cost 70 (then 80, now 100) USD and weren't as versatile or quickly iterative.
Is it? Every large company has a well compensated CTO whose job it is to think through these sorts of hypotheticals. But “nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft”, and so the monopoly continues…
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him"
The worst part is that very poor diversification / groupthink is exactly what creates financial bubbles and financial crises. We seem to be reaching that uncomfortable too-big-to-fail scale in computing / cyber security.
Other shoe will not drop because the liability for mishandling customer/user data is minimal. I don't expect a scenario where Microsoft (of even Microsoft's cloud division) folds after this. Bear Stearns actually collapsed after their fuckups.
The rise in student loan debt can alternatively be explained by increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people. In the past (e.g. 40 years ago corresponding to a graduation date ~20 years ago), more families were able to save enough to cover the true cost of 4 years of college. Now many families are living paycheck to paycheck, and cannot create an emergency fund, much less a college fund.
Stellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak.
The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.
For a few billion USD you could build a real power plant of this type. Sounds expensive, but consider how much money nuclear fission did cost initially, and how much money we burn on other stuff, then it's not unthinkable to have somebody rich chip in and make it happen. (Germany just gave $10bn subsidies for a domestic Intel factory.)
That's how research works. The first fission experiments couldn't power half a small country either.
When you listen to the guys from this original article then you'd know that for 10-20bn USD you could likely build a real power plant with this tech within 5 years. It's obviously not without risk, which is why nobody is doing it. But the technical feasibility is there.
They also point out that once the first-of-a-kind installation exists, subsequent models will be way cheaper and way better since you'd have learned a lot and streamlined the process.
But we choose to use public money for fossil subsidies instead, cause jobs, or something.
The US has spent (inflation adjusted) $34 billion on fusion as of the end of 2021. Assuming no real change it would be $35 billion as of the end of 2023.
Fusion has been "a decade away" since before the turn of the millennium.
To say we should just throw $10-20 billion at a power plant and hope something comes out is not a good idea.
We should wait until one of the many multi billion dollar research plants is able to get even 10% of a reasonable to target energy output before even thinking about that.
Otherwise we would likely just sign the death of fusion in the public eye. Could you imagine the backlash if a $40 billion dollar project couldn't even produce power after two decades? (Going off how public works costs and timelines have been going is the reason for higher values)
Worth noting that a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, AND an electron anti-neutrino, so that lepton number is conserved (electron is +1 and anti-neutrino is -1). This interaction conserves charge and baryon number as well.
You don't have to let the Turing machine run forever anymore than you have to actually fully write out every digit of PI. It's possible to determine strictly from the description of the Turing Machine that the value it outputs will converge to a specific number equal to the output of some other process, such the process of writing out 4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 + ...
The equivalence class of all such representations is the number we call PI.
So, I was thinking that the Turing machine itself is a description of the number, because a description of the machine uniquely determines the output. If you require the digits to be spelled out, then yeah, that's impossible.
But to your parent's point, the US outcome was comparable to other countries we'd consider peers, like the UK and France. I feel like this point, that other similar countries did poorly, is sometimes missed when talking about the US response.
The list puts the US at 1.8%. The minimum I’ve found is 0.2%. Most countries seem to hover around 1-2%. There are countries with 9+%. How did you come to your conclusion?
I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.
That said, I think this take has aged poorly in light of recent history. For instance, Google was started as a small collaboration, but has since grown into an enormous company. Presumably, this growth was (at least initially) the natural result of finding that a couple people can only do so much. For another example, Sublime Text (a for profit text editor written by a small group of developers) is massively less popular than VS Code, which is the bloated work of a small army.