honestjohn (u/honestjohn)

honestjohn commented on The 4-chan Go programmer dolthub.com/blog/2024-08-... · Posted by u/ingve

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it.

I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders.

It makes reading the code to figure out what it does exhausting, and a few levels in you start to wonder if you're even looking at the right area, and if it will ever get to the part where it actually computes something.

honestjohn · 2 years ago

Many software engineering adjacent courses, starting with AP Computer Science A, are heavy on the Java-style OOP. And you're never designing an actually complex system, just using all the tools to "properly" abstract things in a program that does very little. It's the right idea if applied right, but they don't get a sense of the scale.

The first place this bites a new SWE in the rear, the database. "Let's abstract this away in case we ever want to switch databases."

honestjohn commented on The Arrest of Pavel Durov Is a Reminder That Telegram Is Not Encrypted gizmodo.com/the-arrest-of... · Posted by u/rntn

attendant3446 · 2 years ago

They're describing their app in a way that will make regular users think it's actually secure. Call it what you will, false advertising, deliberately misleading - a lie is a lie.

Their website also used to say that they are forever free, no ads, and that they were going to open source all their code, including the server code. Now they have a free tier, but even they couldn't call it "forever free" anymore. I wouldn't trust anything they write there =)

honestjohn · 2 years ago

It's about as secure as any other non-E2EE chat or other kind of service, except it also has E2EE mode, which is limited to 1:1 chats for fair reasons. Plenty of other services advertise themselves as "secure," which doesn't mean a lot. So I don't see anything misleading there.

Aside from that, I don't trust Telegram or its CEO at all, partially because of what you said about open-sourcing (or not) and partially because of his ties to Russia and Azerbaijan.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

littlestymaar · 2 years ago

> Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.

Positive feedback loop isn't needed for a nuclear accident to happen. Sure it's what happened in Chornobyl, but not in TMI or Fukushima. And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.

Also it's not always entirely straightforward to keep the void coefficient negative at every point of the operating cycle, especially if things go wrong: PWR have a negative void coefficient most of the time but not 100% of the time: when the reactor is cold you put tons of boric acid into the water to counteract the reactivity and avoid divergence, but at this particular time the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron. Of course in regular events it doesn't matter because the reactor is off, but that's something that can also happen during an emergency situation where you inject a massive amount of boron in the water (there are scenarios where you do that).

But again, the reactor's power getting out of control isn't the biggest risk anyway, the biggest problem comes from the fact that residual power is still annoyingly high even when you've shut down your reactor and you need to deal with it. The fact that you can't just shut it down and everything's OK when something is wrong is the real pain of working with a nuclear reactor.

Source: I have a nuclear engineer specialized in immediate response to incidents and accidents at home.

And the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates. Antinuclear activists have their responsibilities in that, but even without them I suspect most states wouldn't be doing the right thing either: nuclear isn't a good fit for neoliberal thinking anyway.

honestjohn · 2 years ago

I know newer reactor designs are much safer than Chernobyl at least, but they haven't solved the problem of some people having inflated egos.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

littlestymaar · 2 years ago

> Pretty sure it's actually extremely interesting.

You missed the from an engineering perspective part at the begining of this sentence.

honestjohn · 2 years ago

The human element is just as much part of the engineering and design. The plants are designed for humans to operate.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

foxyv · 2 years ago

We aren't building these reactors in Iran. In fact, Iran maintains the capability to produce weapons using it's own reactors and centrifuges. It has it's own stockpiles of Uranium.

https://apnews.com/article/iaea-iran-nuclear-enrichment-stoc...

honestjohn · 2 years ago

This was a response to the comment about nuclear weapons proliferation being a cat out of the bag. It's not out of the bag yet. Iran has been "nearly there" for several years already, and that's only wrt the enriched uranium, not the actual weapons.

Another important example because they're at war, Ukraine. And in the vaguely possible event of an Asian Pacific war, Japan and Australia have no nukes, but that's more by choice.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

hinkley · 2 years ago

The article. Working a mile down is at the limits of our capabilities. In an emergency situation it’s nearly unobtanium. Like Kernighan’s Law for engineering.

honestjohn · 2 years ago

Yeah, it seems nuts. Nuclear submarines have proven our ability to operate a small reactor a km underwater, but under land is much harder.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

hinkley · 2 years ago

Has everyone forgotten when we had an oil well leaking .8 miles underwater and we couldn’t do shit to stop it?

honestjohn · 2 years ago

Are you talking about me or the article?

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

foxyv · 2 years ago

That cat has been out of the bag for half a century. There are currently over 11 thousand warheads in existence. Enough to turn every major city in the world into a smoke plume that will blanket the earth for years to come. In addition, countries don't really use commercial reactors for breeding weapons grade materials anymore. Usually they will provision reactors specifically for that job. Like the Los Alamos Savana River facility.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4510010-plutonium-pits-us....

Also, there are a lot more ways to produce weapons grade nuclear materials now than there were in the 1970s when most of these weapons were created. The invention of lasers, high temperature superconducting magnets, higher quality centrifuge materials, and better particle accelerators have made the creation of weapons grade material way easier.

In other words, when it comes to weapons proliferation, we are so utterly screwed. Only political change will ever reduce the number of weapons in existence. Commercial power production isn't even a factor.

honestjohn · 2 years ago

There aren't very many nuclear-weaponized countries in the world right now. Otherwise, the whole Iran Nuclear Deal issue would've been moot. Even Russia won't hand over nukes to Iran.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

GardenLetter27 · 2 years ago

Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.

There are many to choose from now.

The high cost of nuclear fission plants comes from deliberate government, petro-corporation and environmentalist attempts to kill it off (usually funded by petrostate interests like Russia, Qatar or oil corporations directly).

honestjohn · 2 years ago

Positive feedback loop isn't the only risk of nuclear power. Fukushima had a negative void coefficient too, right? Rather than pretending there's negligible risk, I'd rather say it's there but the alternatives are worse.

honestjohn commented on Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power newatlas.com/energy/under... · Posted by u/geox

honestjohn · 2 years ago

"A mile underground" and "cheap" don't seem to go together.