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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.

    The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.





  • Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.




  • Putting "false" in a YAML file gives you a string, and just false on its own gives you a boolean, unless you tell the YAML library that it’s a string. Part of the point of YAML is that you don’t have to specify lots of stuff that’s redundant except when it would otherwise be ambiguous, and people misinterpret that as never having to specify anything ever.


  • Most of the problems can be totally avoided by telling the YAML loader what type you’re expecting instead of forcing it to guess (e.g. provide a schema or use typed getter functions). If it has to guess, it’s no surprise that some things don’t survive the string to inferred type to desired type journey, and this is something that isn’t seen as a dealbreaker in other contexts, e.g. the multitude of languages where the string "false" evaluates to true when converted to a boolean because it’s non-empty.



  • You’re not throttling between 0% output and 100% output, as that takes weeks or months, and instead throttling within a limited range at the upper end of the output power. Because a nuclear reactor puts out so much power compared to a combined cycle gas turbine, going down to 80% power has a comparable impact to totally shutting down a gas turbine. It doesn’t need to be instant to be used for dynamic load - throttling a gas turbine isn’t as it takes time for the heat exchanger to warm up or cool down after increasing or decreasing the fuel flow, and time for the first turbine to speed up or slow down after the flow of the Brayton-cycle coolant changes, and then more time for the second heat exchanger to heat up/cool down and more time for the Rankin-cycle turbine to speed up or slow down as the flow of steam changes, and only then is the new desired output power achieved.

    Wikipedia puts the average emission time for delayed neutrons at fifteen seconds, which while ludicrously slow compared to a bomb, is really fast compared to the day-night cycle that represents most dynamic load variance in a country with plenty of renewables or heavy industry that doesn’t operate at night time, so there’s plenty of time for the power output to respond as long as you’re restricting the range that it’s operating in.



  • The ones in service right now are mostly/all designed that way, but that’s a design decision rather than an inherent limitation. They cost basically the same to run whether they’re at maximum output or minimum, so they’re most cost-effective as base load and if you need responsive output, you can probably build something else for less money. If you ignore that and build one anyway, you only need fast motors on the control rods and the output can be changed as quickly as throttling gas turbines, but there’s no need for that if you know you’re just building for base load.


  • Lots of people die mining the materials for photovoltaics, even with emerging technologies that reduce rare earth usage, especially because the countries with a lot of rare earth mineral wealth mostly have terrible human rights, slavery and worker safety records. In principle, this could be reduced without technological changes, e.g. by refusing to buy rare earth metals unless they’re extracted in line with best practice and that can be proven (it’s typically cheaper to fake the evidence that your workers are happy, healthy and alive than keep them happy, healthy and alive), but then things get more expensive and photovoltaics are already not the cheapest.


  • Even when disasters like Chernobyl are included, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt than any of the alternatives. E.g. dams burst and people like building towns downstream of hydro plants. Even with wind where it’s basically only deadly due to accidents when installing and repairing turbines (e.g. people falling off, fires breaking out too abruptly to climb down), it happens often enough that it ends up more dangerous than nuclear. Burning gas, coal and biomass all work out much deadlier than renewables and nuclear, but if your risk tolerance doesn’t permit nuclear, it doesn’t permit electricity in any form.