A solar flare is just one example of many possible causes. There are plenty of other ones. You didn’t touch on any of the others so let me explain - NASA reports on small satellite missions show that about 40% of satellites experience at least partial mission failure within their lifetime. Studies have shown the leading cause of satellite failure is propulsion systems, responsible for about half of all failures. This is not uncommon at all.

Most altitude ranges in LEO still have debris from decades ago, the exception being below 300km, which is basically still in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, debris strikes have regularly produced debris that are flung into higher orbits, so even collisions between satellites in this range are dangerous.

Edit: I also forgot to mention, the five day estimate (now three days actually) wasn’t for a close-call, it was for a debris-generating event.

Collisions aren’t theoretical, near misses are so common that there’s an entire department at NASA dedicated to detecting them and warning satellite owners to adjust course, I know because we were contacted about a possible collision involving our cubesat. Prior to megaconstellations being deployed if humanity stopped adjusting satellite orbits there would be a collision within a month, now there would be a collision within 5 days. It’s only a matter of time until both satellites on a collision course don’t have the ability to adjust course (engine failure or no propulsion/fuel/comms). In the event of a Carrington-style solar flare there’s a good chance a decent percentage of satellites would be knocked out, making this hypothetical into a reality. Further, we can only currently track objects down to about 10cm, but NASA estimates suggest about 500,000 objects exist between 1-10cm in size in LEO.

If there’s moisture in the filament it vaporises in the extruder, causing steam bubbles that expand and disrupt the laying down of plastic, usually causing inconsistent extrusion lines (which itself causes poor layer adhesion). Some of the filament may end up being heated in the extruder slightly longer than other bits depending on these steam bubbles, which can cause overheating issues like stringing and oozing, etc…

Not to mention that filament that has absorbed water tends to become more brittle, which can lead to the filament snapping off before reaching the extruder. As a result, a filament’s shelf-life is usually dictated by how quickly it absorbs moisture (and also whether UV from the sun weakens it at all, but that’s a lot easier to manage).

What’s your ambient humidity? It’s usually around 80% here and I can barely get my dryboxes down to 30%

AES-256 is fine actually. The best known quantum attack reduces key strength from 256 bits to 254.4 bits. The problem is that in order to use AES (which is a symmetric encryption scheme) you need to exchange keys using an asymmetric system like RSA, which is known to be weak to quantum attacks.

Another poster already mentioned that transuranics and other such byproducts tend to be very dense, so a swimming pool can in fact hold tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel. Also, ‘nuclear waste’ is a generic catch-all term that includes less radioactive material, compared to ‘spent fuel’ which is just the really ‘high-grade’ material.

The part about not needing enrichment is worth discussing, but we do have solutions to that already. There are entire classes of reactors dedicated to not producing weapons byproducts or needing enrichment using the same processes capable of generating weapons-grade material. The reason we see reactors that can make these materials so often is because many of the early reactor designs (many still in use today) were explicitly selected for use by the US government during the early days for their dual-use ability to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Examples of proliferation-safe designs include molten salts and integral fast reactors, but there’s an engineering experience chicken-and-egg problem - they don’t get built very often because we don’t have experience building them. A new design like this will face the same challenges.

TL;DR: Combining a particle accelerator and a nuclear reactor to turn Uranium-238 into Plutonium-239, which then fissions. The reactor itself is subcritical, so if the proton accelerator turns off then the reaction stops.

The main advantages of the system claim to be ‘increased efficiency of fuel use’ since the uranium doesn’t need to be enriched, the ability to burn long-lived nuclear waste, as well as the system being passively safe.

The first point strikes me as an odd thing to focus on, since all nuclear reactors are already very fuel efficient, and if you want maximum efficiency then breeder reactors exist already, which produce more fissile material than they consume - you can’t get much more efficient than that. Fast breeder reactors are also great for burning up nuclear waste too, but they never really took off because, well, there isn’t actually much nuclear waste to use, precisely because typical reactors are already very efficient: A reactor might consume one ton of fuel per year. You could fit all the spent nuclear fuel humanity has ever used into a single swimming pool. I mustn’t be too critical though - any attempt to close the fuel cycle is good, I just don’t think it’s a really pressing issue. Lastly, being passively safe is cool and all, but almost all new reactor designs are, and attaching a particle accelerator to a nuclear reactor sounds like an expensive way of doing it.

All of that being said, I’m always interested to hear about new reactor designs, so I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Bubbles are not an existential threat to society. We’ve had like four bubbles in the past 20 years.

This is how bubbles always go, see the Gartner hype cycle. People always overextend, try to apply new tools/tech into places that it doesn’t belong, and only then do people realise the limitations of technology. This is common in business, C-suites explicitly exploit the hype cycle to secure naive investor funding, but investors always become wise eventually - it’s a game to see how much money can be extracted from them before they become increasingly aware of the limitations of the technology. There will be niches where the tech actually settles, but it’s always much smaller than what’s promised. I’m a programmer, I’ve been listening to people say that LLMs are going to take my job for the past five years, and yet every time I’ve actually tried to apply an LLM directly to my work it’s failed in a pretty drastic manner. I find existing systems useful as a tool, but that’s about it.

Don’t forget this is all under the umbrella of the initial hypothetical where AI stalled at it’s current level. I don’t believe that existing LLMs systems will destroy the economy. They’re a tool that people are trying to fit into every hole, much like blockchain during the crypto bubble. We’ve already seen companies fire their customer service departments, try to replace them with LLMs, then have to go crawling back when that failed catastrophically.

If AI systems continue to improve, however? As I said previously, all bets are off.

Fine, you want me to be pedantic? When prompted with tokens that appear in an order that humans understand as a question that corresponds to some aspect of the universe as we understand it, the tokens predicted by the LLM correspond to an answer that humans agree is more representative than the tokens provided by the average human.

Tell me where in my initial comment I said they weren’t an economic threat. I never said they weren’t. I said they aren’t an existential economic threat. Please read my comment.

I don’t want to get into an argument of semantics, whatever your definition of ‘knowledge’ is, LLMs can recall a greater number of factoids than any individual human. That’s all I meant. Are they perfect? No, I never said that. They’re still far beyond the average human, however, hence superhuman.

I said that LLMs are not an existential threat to humanity, even economically. I never said that they wouldn’t threaten individual jobs, or cause a bubble. Please don’t strawman me. You and I are looking at completely different levels of effects, I’m looking at the big picture - is humanity or society as we know it going to continue to exist in 100 years (in this hypothetical where AI and/or LLMs stagnated)? If yes, then LLMs are not an existential threat. That’s what an existential threat means, after all.

Is AI causing en economic bubble? Sure, but like all bubbles they will burst when people realise that they have limited use due to their drawbacks. The world will then return to some semblance of normalcy. That’s a non-existential threat.

Now, if we’re talking about a world in which AI systems continue to evolve? All bets are off the table, which is why AI somehow stagnating to where it is now is the best case scenario.

Honestly? If AI systems stopped improving forever? That’s probably best case scenario. LLMs are already superhuman on a knowledge level, human-level in terms of speed (tokens per sec, etc), but subhuman in many other areas. This makes them useful for some tasks, but not so useful that they could cause any sort of existential threat to humanity (either in an economic sense or in a misalignment sense). If LLMs stagnate here then we have at least one tool in our AI toolbox that we’re pretty sure isn’t conscious/sentient/etc., which is useful since that makes them predictable on some level. Humans can deal with that.

Unfortunately, I see no reason why AI systems in general wouldn’t continue to improve. Even if LLMs do stagnate they’re only one tiny branch of a much larger tree, and we already have at least one example of an AI system that is conscious and sentient - a human. This means even if somehow the human brain was the only architecture ever capable of sentience (incredibly unlikely), we could always simulate/emulate a human brain to get human-level AGI. Simulate/emulate it faster? Superhuman AGI.

New Zealand.

Our laws make carrying anything with the intent to use it as a weapon (in self defence or not) a crime - whether it’s a gun, sword, pepper spray, cricket bat, screwdriver, or lollipop stick. This makes sure that when someone robs a corner store the owner gets jailed for having a baseball bat behind the counter. It’s absurd.

The law not only doesn’t equalise your chances, it actively forces you to be at a disadvantage when defending yourself, and by the time any police arrive the assailant is long gone. Most criminals don’t have guns (except for the multiple armed gangs of course), but plenty of them bring bladed weapons, there have been multiple cases of machete attacks.

I’m all for gun ownership for the purpose of property defence. Including strong legal defences for home and store owners repelling assailants.

I don’t think just anyone should be able to go and purchase a gun no questions asked, it should probably be tied to some kind of mandatory formal training, e.g. participation in army reserves. It should definitely be more difficult than getting a driver’s licence (but I also think a driver’s licence should be harder to get than it is now. The idea that you can go and sit a written test and then legally pilot a two ton steel box in areas constantly surrounded by very squishy people is kind of absurd to me).

Here’s the generation statistics of the BN-800 reactor I mentioned before: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=451 It’s been operating at about 70% of it’s rated capacity basically since it was first turned on, that’s large scale power generation. Breeder reactors have been in commercial use for decades (see also: Phenix and Superphenix).

The simple reason why breeder reactors aren’t the default is because most reactors don’t need to be breeders. The two main upsides of a breeder reactor is a) breeding of nuclear material, which as I said before was only ever a concern in the very early days of nuclear power. We have thousands of years’ worth of fuel available now. b) The reuse of nuclear waste for additional power generation. Of course you have to have nuclear waste to reuse first, which necessitates many other, non-breeder reactors already being in use, so breeder reactors are usually restricted to countries that already have significant investment into nuclear power, like France, Russia, China, etc… If you don’t need to breed more nuclear fuel, and you don’t have waste to reprocess you might as well keep it simple and build a regular LWR reactor.

The Wikipedia page for breeder reactors has a whole list you can even sort by output capacity. For example, the BN-800.

There have been plenty. For example, the CANDU series of reactors developed in the 1950s and 60s. Breeder reactors were quite popular during the early days of nuclear power, as it was initially thought that there was maybe only 100 years’ worth of (easily accessible) nuclear material on earth, rather than the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years’ worth we know of now, due to both more reserves being discovered and also easier methods of fuel enrichment being developed. The fact that breeder reactors have fallen out of favour due to abundant fuel reserves certainly says something.

Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume.

Not many people know the history of the treaty. It basically was signed under duress. Prior to the meeting where it was signed all but one of the Maori tribal leaders were against signing the treaty, even the Maori version. What was said at the signing was purposely never recorded, but considering the existential threat of the New Zealand Company (NZC) on the horizon (the primary reason a treaty was even being discussed), it is believed that the Maori leaders were basically given the choice of ‘sign this treaty and be a part of the British empire, or don’t and have no legal rights against the whims of the New Zealand Company’.

The New Zealand Company was a private British company with the goal of obtaining as much land as possible at any cost, and the Maori would have had zero legal protections unless they were part of the British empire. Without a treaty the NZC would have been able to push out the Maori entirely with no repercussions. The British people who brought the treaty to the Maori leaders knew this was coming, and wanted to avoid it.

Signing the treaty was a quick and dirty solution to the quickly approaching NZC and was responsible for preventing the worst of the damage, but it is a very flawed document. The translations were rushed, and vague. Basically everyone was against signing it, but they knew it was the least worst option available. It was never designed to be the core document underpinning a nation, merely a speed bump to stall the private annexation of New Zealand.

The MSP430 is just the chip I happen to use at work, if you’re not convinced you could try looking for an actual ultra low power chip, I found the STM32U0 at 70uA/MHz and the STM32U5 at 16uA/MHz in the first result.

Even ignoring selecting a more efficient micro, a smattering of tiny ceramic caps will buy you a few hundred microjoules for bursts. If you’re already operating at 2V you can get a 6V rated 100uF cap in a 1210 package - and that’s after considering the capacitance drop with DC biasing. Each one of those would buy you 200 microjoules, even just one ought to be plenty to wake up for a few tens of milliseconds every second to get a reading from some onboard peripheral (as an example) then go to sleep again.

For sure, you’re not going to be doing any heavy lifting and external peripherals could be tricky, but there are certainly embedded sensor use cases where this could be sufficient.