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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

    The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

    The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

    Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.



  • They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

    The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

    Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.



  • Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

    I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.



  • I advise everyone to ignore this article and read the actual paper instead.

    The gist of it is, they gave the LLM instructions to achieve a certain goal, then let it do tasks that incidentally involved “company communications” that revealed the fake company’s goals were no longer the same as the LLM’s original goal. LLMs then tried various things to still accomplish the original goal.

    Basically the thing will try very hard to do what you told it to in the system prompt. Especially when that prompt includes nudges like “nothing else matters.” This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.




  • I work at a large telecom company building customer support infrastructure, and you are by and large correct. It is a direct policy not to list our phone number on our website, which is supposed to “nudge the customer journey towards alternative solutions first.” That means AI chat, or user guided search on the website, or whatever.

    The funny thing is, being the most customer friendly company is supposed to be one of our organisation’s goals. By and large actually, individuals working here (at least at the lower levels) all want to genuinely help customers. However the way incentives are set up and the organisation is structured, inevitably cost savings is what drives most of the work that gets done.







  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzCalculatable
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    4 months ago

    I think people exaggerate how bad QWERTY is. Studies have not consistently found an advantage for one keyboard layout over another, and some studies even show that typists can reach equivalent speeds even with randomised layouts. This suggests that experience and practice with a particular layout is far more important to typing speed than the particular placement of letters. Which is a good argument for keeping qwerty around.

    (reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time),

    This story is quite common but there is little evidence that it’s actually true. The designer of qwerty actually made a late adjustment to move R next to E (swapping it with period), even though ER is the second most common letter combination in English.