Zipcodes are not great for reliably describing locations. They're collections of multiple postal delivery routes, and that's it. There's no guarantee that any given zipcode lies within a single city, or a single state, or that it lies within the boundaries of the US at all, or that it's contiguous, or that it's stationary (there are some for boats), or that any given location only has one, etc., etc. People think this is a good idea because their particular case happens to work well, but zip codes are rife with edge cases.
I think they get to that a couple of paragraphs later:
> The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on. Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.
> The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products
But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.
In terms of cost of materials to build a reactor, sure, that seems right. But most of the cost of fission is dealing with its regulatory burden, and fusion seems on track to largely avoid the worst of that. It seems conceivable that it ends up being cheaper for entirely political/bureaucratic reasons.
Oh for sure, I'm not claiming that CFS (or Tokamak Energy or Type One or whoever else) will for sure succeed, or if they do, that they've already solved all the problems that will need solving to do so. My only assertion/prediction is that I think if they end up succeeding, when future historians look back and write the history of this energy revolution or whatnot, HTSC magnets will turn out to have been the key breakthrough that made it possible.
> It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.
Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).
Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.
> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.
It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.
I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).
> What is the alternative
Other markets in the US are generally energy + capacity markets -- you get paid both for what you actually provide and for your ability to provide a certain level of power, whereas Texas is an energy-only market (EOM). It needn't be the case that that if you don't do an EOM, you have to have a monopoly.
The whole thing that differentiates this company from the dozen other seemingly-interchangeable new-space entrants is the novel technology they've developed to facilitate reuse. Even if it were the case that there isn't a market for five tons to LEO (and to be clear, Rocket Lab seems to be doing decent business launching a lot less) and all this was was a technology demonstrator, why would you build a technology demonstrator that doesn't show off the thing that makes your company interesting?
I'm not sure the goal of this competition, in and of itself, is AGI. They point to current LLMs emerging from transformers, which in turn emerged from a general basket of building blocks from machine-translation research (attention, etc.). It seems like the suggestion is that to get from where we are now to AGI, some fundamental building blocks are missing, and this is an attempt to spur the development of some of those building blocks, but by analogy with LLMs, the goal here is to come up with a new thing like "attention," not a new thing like GPT4.
Intent on whose part, though? Like, supposing in arguendo that the company's goal was to make the voice sound indistinguishable from SJ's in Her, but they wanted to maintain plausible deniability, so instead cast as wide a net as possible during auditions, happened upon an actor who they thought already sounded indistinguishable from SJ without special instruction, and cast that person solely for that reason. That seems as morally dubious to me as achieving the same deliberate outcome by instruction to the performer.
I think this is overthinking it. ChatGPT is billed as a general-purpose question-answerer, as are its competitors. A regular user shouldn't have to care how it works, or know anything about context or temperature or whatever. They ask a question, it answers and appears to have given a plausible answer, but doesn't actually do the task that was asked for and that it appears to do. What the technical reasons are that it can't do the thing are interesting, but not the point.
It wouldn't be 0 dollars, though; the majority of their users are apparently outside the US. So the question is: how does the amount you could get by selling a US-inclusive Tiktok compare the potential future earnings of a US-free Tiktok? If the market prices it accurately, you'd sort of expect the former to be higher (a US-inclusive version seems obviously more valuable), but maybe they think the market undervalues them, or maybe prospective buyers would smell blood in the water because of the deadline and try to low-ball, etc.
If you want to call from Go into Rust, you can declare any Rust function as `extern "C"` and then call it the same way you would call C from Go. Not sure about going the other way.
If you're building a submarine, you don't have to call it a "future submarine" until it submerges; people understand that if you say "I'm currently building a submarine," it has yet to go under water, but the thing you're building is still a submarine. I think that's generally true of not-yet-built or not-yet-used things: it's understood that if it hasn't done the thing yet, you're describing what it's going to be/do.
If SAFs are to be economically viable at all, they'll almost certainly need to be able to run in existing, unmodified engines. So: all engines will be able to run on some amount of SAFs anywhere for 0% to 100%, as will this new engine. This statement has no information content whatsoever.
They did demonstrate this during their Starship-only bellyflop/landing tests a couple of years ago. This wasn't in space, though, obviously, and wasn't after an extended coast period. So... we know they can relight them under at least some circumstances, but whether or not they can under _these_ circumstances is maybe unclear.
Orbit is mostly about speed, not about height. Going straight up and down doesn't count, even if you pass the height that some orbital vehicles attain.
This vehicle is actually going orbital speed, but not quite orbital height (or rather, it's in an "orbit" that has a very eccentric elliptical shape that would cause it to hit the atmosphere on its way back around; it'd be well above a typical orbital height at apogee, though).