Monday, May 12
Daily News Stuff 12 May 2025
Washington Post Hoc Edition
Washington Post Hoc Edition
Top Story
- The killer app for generative AI is coding, say people who know nothing about coding. (Fast Company)
"Our new spreadsheet performs calculations faster than ever before, and only gets half of them wrong."
- Fake NPM packages claiming to support the Cursor AI coding system infected 3200 users before they were taken down. (The Hacker News)
And it's going to get much, much worse.
Tech News
- Meanwhile an NPM package that previously did something useful suddenly contained a RAT instead. (Bleeping Computer)
So much worse.
- Sandisk has a new SSD controller designer to support 1PB drives. (Tom's Hardware)
128TB models are planned this year, with 256TB drives coming next year and 512GB in 2027. 1PB drives presumably will follow.
Do not send to know for whom the price tolls.
- The boyfriend of jailed Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has launched a new company that... Sounds exactly like Theranos. (The Daily Beast)
This will end well, I'm sure.
- A team of physicists at the University of Texas has solved a major problem in making nuclear fusion a viable energy source. (UTexas)
It is now only twenty years away.
- You don't own what you just bought, Nintendo edition. (Beta News)
If you violate the terms of your license agreement - which Nintendo can change after the fact - the company can brick your Switch 2.
- The Overwatch 2 team just unionised. (Kotaku) (archive site)
Aaaand it's dead.
Musical Interlude
Music is When the Winged Hussars Arrived by Sabaton, the story of the relief of the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna by the largest cavalry charge in history, led by John III Sobieski of Poland-Lithuania and the aforementioned Winged Hussars.
Video is from Babylon 5, featuring the lifting of the blockade of Centauri Prime by the new White Star fleet. Well, I think so; it's been a long time since I watched it so I may have the details a bit muddled.
Video is from Babylon 5, featuring the lifting of the blockade of Centauri Prime by the new White Star fleet. Well, I think so; it's been a long time since I watched it so I may have the details a bit muddled.
Disclaimer: I'm flying a White Star now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:35 PM
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1
The fusion result may be useful, but I've gone skeptical of fusion after consideration of the lifespan of the magnets. Which I may have underestimated. The twenty years original timeline was premised on expanded big government funding (which was cut instead), and advances in simulation technology may allow us to figure out this stuff more cheaply instead. That said, my evaluations are generally skewed by my flip flopping between extremes of optimism and pessimism.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 04:26 AM (rcPLc)
2
I need to read more about this simulation method, but I would be skeptical of saying that it is useful yet. They are apparently basically doing an AI model from the slower/higher quality simulation. That said, this paper seems to be a preliminary result, not a 'this is a proven simulation scheme'.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 01:35 PM (rcPLc)
3
Yeah, fusion is twenty years away the same way that the horizon is three miles away.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 13 2025 06:17 PM (PiXy!)
4
I saw an article this weekend that claimed a college student had built a "functional" fusion device for $2000 from off the shelf parts.
Wow, you'd think that'd be YUGE news, right? Well, it turns out he'd just been able to create plasma. So I guess, technically, his device was functional, in that it functioned.
Wow, you'd think that'd be YUGE news, right? Well, it turns out he'd just been able to create plasma. So I guess, technically, his device was functional, in that it functioned.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 14 2025 01:46 AM (yeIbg)
5
A Fusor? There are homemade ones and they actually work, but they're about as useful as a tapdancing whale when it comes to generating energy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 14 2025 10:50 AM (PiXy!)
6
I don't know if it even did that--all the article did was mention he created plasma. It was IFL Science-level "reporting."
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 15 2025 02:48 AM (SXtuF)
7
There are at least two problems in magnetic fusion, one of them electromagnetics simulation (and also network synthesis), and the other one plasma. The design concept is hot very high pressure plasma, to the point of sustained 'ignition'. Though, the practicalities is that a lot of people think that it can only be made to work in pulses. We have a lot of devices which can generate plasma. The issue is that it cools very fast, faster than originally expected, so the thermal energy lost to environment is so high you never reach ignition, and also are losing too much pumping energy in to ever make a profit. That makes electromagnetic design and test important, limiting the heat transfer. An issue is that you have physicists searching a very broad space, with design properties maybe similar to ones that make engineers start talking about 'black magic'. Another is, I am unclear if they are proposing to extract energy from these systems using heat engines, or what.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 15 2025 03:38 AM (rcPLc)
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