I feel like this has been a bad year for this shit. The Boars Head had to recall 3500 tons of meat earlier this year, and 10 people died from listeria. Like, that's 17 million pounds or 7 million kg of meat that had to be thrown away. That's just from these two companies, so the number is probably much higher.

I hate that it's so hard to get these people to agree to capex. My current company runs a few datacenters, and we have some teams that use them for their base load. It saves a shitload of money! Like, I don't get why this is a concept that MBAs reject. You don't have to go all in on capex for your infrastructure, just find a nice mix of capex/opex. If you're afraid that you won't use the shit you bought later on, then you should probably make sure that the market is there for whatever you're selling before you dive in headfirst.

lmao fuck off Amazon. I already hate their stupid fucking AI because when I want to search reviews and the Q/A section for a word like "watt", it makes me wait 10-15 seconds while it tells me that it can't help me with that and that I need to give it more details.

I'm not trusting anyone or anything with my purchasing decisions that doesn't, say, reference the SDS for a product that's being cagey about exactly what the active ingredients are. I did that, and that's why I paid like $5 for a bag of citric acid powder instead of $20 on some citric acid descaling goo that comes in a pretty bottle. That's a very specific example though. I do some variation of that shit any time I buy something, so I'm sure as shit not going to let Amazon influence my fucking spondulix with AI hallucinations.

EDIT: Man, I need to deal with my anger towards bullshit AI usage because this shit isn't going anywhere and I spend way too much time being pissed.

No worries, I didn't think you were trying to mislead! I'm also very hopeful for fusion and I like to read about it. I don't know if magnetic confinement systems will be able to reach the temperatures and pressures required for ignition (versus those just for fusion) soon, but technological progress certainly has a tendency towards jumping forwards unexpectedly!

Ah, okay, that's what I was referring to with NIF. They absolutely have generated more power than they put in, but only in a way that is scientifically interesting. If you only consider the energy flowing into the hohlraum, then more energy was produced, which is crazy cool! They also achieved true ignition which is great. We've never been able to get things hot enough and squozed enough for long enough to be able to directly observe that in a controlled setting. The fact that they can now just do that means the they can experimentally probe where the boundaries are and find the cheapest way for us to get to ignition.

However, they got the energy to the hohlraum using lasers. Those lasers (and all of the equipment around them) required (I think) three orders of magnitude more power to generate the laser impulse that triggered fusion. A productive fusion reaction did occur, but it absolutely wasn't productive enough to make up for all the power required to generate the laser pulse. Making lasers that can output at the required power levels and frequencies without all of the waste (i.e. 2.5 MJ of electricity to laser results in 2 MJ laser output) is a Hard Problem™ and is probably impossible with our current understanding of physics.

When you made your comment, I wondered if someone had achieved breakeven using a tokamak or some other form of magnetic confinement setup. Inertial confinement fusion is great for research but not practical for power generation, whereas magnetic confinement fusion is probably where the future is.

ICF is really good at putting the squoze on stuff, because the things you want to fuse are all stuffed in a tiny hohlraum and you're zorching it with a shitload of giant friggin lasers. Magnetic confinement fusion used in tokamaks occurs much more gradually by magnetically heating and containing plasmas. The nice thing about tokamaks is that they just constantly generate heat. With modern superconducting magnets, the infrastructure efficiency is also pretty decent, giving them a chance at truly generating more power than they use when you take the entire reactor into consideration.

Jesus that's a lot of words. I should go do my damn job instead of distracting myself talking about fusion. Sorry for the brain dump.

Question for you, when you say that we've accomplished fusion, do you mean fusion that produces more power than took to generate it? Or simply the act of fusing atoms together in a reactor (vs the uncontained fusion present in thermonuclear bombs)? If it's the former, then like, holy shit, that's actually been accomplished‽ Like, I know NIF had their whole thing with breakeven fusion a couple of years ago, but that was only counting the energy that made it to the hohlraum, not all the energy that was lost powering the lasers and shit. When you factor all of that in (like you'd need to for realistic power generation) then it's very far away from breakeven generation. It's still an incredible breakthrough and will help us figure out fusion energy, but it's not a practical means of energy generation at this time. Did something else happen that I missed‽

If it's the latter, then we've actually been fusing atoms together in reactors since the 1950s. In fact, there's a community of people who build small fusion reactors as a hobby! I learned about this a few years ago when a 16 year old made the news by being the youngest person to build their own reactor. The main site I know of is https://www.fusor.net/

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the fandom actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the community actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

EDIT: as a demonstration, here's what happens when you use breezewiki with the Noita fandom page: https://noita.breezewiki.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki

Yeah, it's really not too bad. It's mostly boring. I brought headphones to my last room canal because I don't like the sound the tools make (there's some bone conduction going on, so the headphones let me drown that out) and that made the whole experience much nicer for me. I'm particularly sensitive to sounds, so sound has always been the worst part of any dental work for me.

This got me wondering what would happen, and ofc there's a relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/

which ultimately links to this from the NOAA: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

I liked how each of the sections ended with a different game that she's gotten running so far. It makes the article feel like a progressively bigger flex, which, of course, it is. Awesome to see this work progressing!

Fuckers. I don't know why you'd want to hack the IA, but they're dicks for doing so. I'm gonna throw some of my spondulix to the IA, and I'd encourage others to do so.