One thing about Marc's biography that I couldn't square: he was supposedly working for NCSA while an undergrad at UofI. My experience as an undergrad is that you could maybe get a guided tour of one of the labs. You may be able to get in the building if your professor worked there or something. The idea that a lab like NCSA would hire an undergrad for anything beyond menial work defies my experience.

Earlier I took it to be that he was such a genius that they decided to Doogie Howser him. But know that we know he's an idiot, that theory doesn't really stand up.

I'm disappointed. A true commitment to the bit would involve a shitcoin rugpull or some attempt to frontrun the news of a crisis you manufactured.

The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.

This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.

Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.

I assumed that the culture changed at some point between the 1960s when it was normal for a corner office to have a full liquor bar in it (according to mad men) and the 2000s.

After the 1980s I guess

It's been like this in America for decades. Even places with "beer on tap" the expectation is you don't drink until after the work day. If you were pulling the tab at lunch you'd get a talk from your boss and eventually HR

More Americanization of Europe?

At some point it becomes clear that openai should expect this to happen and so when they keep doing it, it is because they intend it to happen.

When the mobster says "it'd be a shame if something happened to this place" the law recognizes that as a threat due to the mob's history of making such statements before burning places out.

If it happens 50 times and they keep doing shocked pikachu face at some point they look like the toddler who tosses their sippy cup on the floor and shouts "oopse!"

I recall an example of when a Mexican worker in an LG plant lost her hands in a poorly-maintained stamping press. Theoretically Mexico has robust worker protection laws, but in reality the courts are corrupt and controlled by the maquiladoras.

So instead lawyers tried to sue LG in US court on her behalf. In fact they sued the actual TVs being imported by LG US that were made in her factory, the same way counterfeit goods are sued and arrested at the border by intellectual property owners.

The US judge dismissed the case arguing that the TVs were owned by LG US, who bought them in Mexico from LG Mexico. Both companies being owned by the same parent company is irrelevant to the law which saw them as completely separate entities and neither LG US nor the TVs it bought have any responsibility for the conditions in the Mexican factory.

Now if the drafters of NAFTA cared at all about worker conditions they could have easily made liability follow the goods across the border the same way they made copyrights and trademarks follow the goods across the border. They did not care about the workers and in fact they saw the mistreatment of workers as an advantage of the free trade deal.

There are about five companies who hire people with his background. They all go through boom and bust cycles together. When he graduated they were in a bust cycle and nobody was hiring new graduates, so he found a job in software. He was glad because the pay and working conditions are better, and at the time (a few years ago) it seemed like software engineering was a safe career with lots of employers, which turbine engineering was not.

All were working alongside me, a self-taught programmer making websites.

I've long thought that there's an oversupply of smart people in the world but for the field of software development, which was hiding that fact by soaking all of them up.

If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.

It seems like a lot of the recent "breakthroughs" come down to this: spending millions of dollars in compute to solve problems that essentially amount to recreational math problems

The fact that leadership is focused on extracting profits out of the enterprise is also not a show of strength. It's a demonstration that they're trying to drain whatever value is left in it.

This is pretty much true of any of the American "greats:" Boeing, Intel, GE, GM, Corning. They're producing (or have recently been producing) great profits because they're eating their own seed corn. Nobody expects them to still be the businesses they currently are in another few decades.

China has to import much of their raw materials. Wood from SEA and Russia, oil from the middle east and Russia, even coal, ore and beef cattle from Australia! They don't have the water supply, forests, mines or oil that exist in North America.

There is no good reason for them to be the manufacturing center of the globe and there were rational reasons why the US was the center of manufacturing in the globe in the 20th century.

The reason they became the global center of manufacturing was policy choices in China and the US at the turn of this century, and the reason why they remain the center of manufacturing is they developed a massive amount of capital and know-how in an era where the USA was actively destroying its own.

The point is that it wasn't technology it was policy, on the Chinese and American side, that drove the China Shock.

This was also what a lot of anti-globalization people were say at the time. The pro-globalization people were saying not only is it good but it's inevitable. There Is No Alternative.

The anti globalization people were saying if it's inevitable why does it need all these policy changes, trade agreements, and bigwig conferences?