They keep saying that XXX will eliminate the need for people to code. Code generates, Dan Brikline demo to convert demos to code, Microsoft Visual C, now AI.

In 1982, I was working for someone who insisted on flow charts, which practically was code-level. But even then, you had coders also doing programming and system design. You can have systems pump out code from designs, but the code would be essential template-level code. But you still need the system to be designed, the code needs to be checked, and designs need to be checked.

He didn't really build a teleporter, he just put together the pieces.

We had to melt sand using a magnifying glass to make our own chips

My high school partnered with MIT in the late 70s because of busing in Boston.

As a result, we had 16 LA 36 decwriters,, 1 VT52, and a 2 Tektronix terminals hooked up to a PDP 11/34 running RSTS/e with 128k of ram. They also had a SOL 20.

The problem is not the facial recognition software. The problem is between the keyboard and the chair.

I think the police should use facial recognition software, if needed, as STEP 1 OF MANY!

Then, compare photos and physical characteristics. Then do something called detective work.

Even so in the parts of Alaska outside of the Arctic Circle there's summers where the sun rises at 3AM and sets at 9PM, then in the winter it's sunrise at 9AM with sunset at 3PM.

In Fairbanks at the winter solstice the sun rises at 10:58 and sets at about 14:40.

At the summer solstice it's 02:57 and 00:47. Even though the sun officially sets year round it never really gets dark between mid April and mid August because the night periods never leave the twilight stage.

That *should* mean there are more males at the bottom end where people really need help

More at the top and more at the bottom, and the effects on earnings are not symmetrical. Once somebody is cognitively deficient enough to be considered a ward of the state the amount of resources they require to survive remains more or less constant with diminishing IQ but on the other end of the curve income potential does not have an corresponding cap.

but there are no such differences in average IQ between males and females

I've seen claims to the contrary stating that there is a small difference in the average and a significant difference in standard deviation.

I watched a guy from Scandinavia doing a interview recently, and talking about these topics. One fact that blew me away was that on average men are overall contributors to the welfare state over their lives, and women, on average, receive 1.3 million (he said dollars - not sure what currency precisely) from the welfare state over their lifetime.

In Scandinavia you see sex-based differences in group averages and in the US those same measurements show both sex-based and race-based differences in group averages.

The economic gains occurred when the workforce was doubled by encouraging women to get jobs instead of families.

That makes balance sheets look good in the short term and only has the minor downside of extinction-level fertility rates and a long term outcome indistinguishable from genocide.

It's ... well, fascism.

"Fascism" is a completely meaningless term because there are two contradictory definitions of it in common use:

• "Everything I hate is fascism" (most common)
• "Everything I like is fascism" (less common)

There's a reason that 1-2 GW is the upper limit of electrical generation plants regardless of type. We could build 10 GW coal or natural gas power plants but don't because the limiting factor is distribution and grid stability, not the generators.

Building a 10 GW or even 100 GW nuclear reactor is no big deal. There are no special engineering challenges and reactors of that size would substantially more cost effective to build because construction and operation costs scale less than linearly.

The only problem is finding practical ways to consume all energy. Nobody wants a 100 GW point source of electricity on the grid because even if you build the transmission lines to distribute all that power one plant would be such a large fraction of the supply that if it went down you'd instantly get a blackout.

Traditionally we tried to keep neutron absorbers away from the reactions unless you want to halt the reactions.

One of the advantages of a liquid fuel design is that the two most significant fission product poisons (iodine and xenon) can easily be removed from the solution since they are gasses at those temperatures. This frees up a large fraction of the neutron budget which can then be used to transmute thorium into uranium.

What is likely a much larger concern is producing Pu-239.

A reactor burning pure U-233 would produce very little in the way of transuranics.

The thing about a liquid fuel reactor though is that since you don't need to disassemble it or even shut it down to add more fuel you have an unprecedented flexibility in terms of what you can burn. Within certain limits you can use almost any fuel mixture.

The most obvious way to scale up a MSR industry is to start out burning a traditional U-235 / U-238 fuel mix while you breed U-233 from thorium. Then once U-233 production is sufficient you can quit enriching to obtain U-235 and just replace it with U-233 while still using U-238 (natural unprocessed uranium) for the bulk of the fuel. If for example your MSR design can tolerate 10% U-233 (U-235) / 90% U-238 then you can scale up the industry ten times faster than if you tried to start out using 100% U-233 from the very beginning.

At some point in the future when you are no longer increasing the reactor count at a rate that exceeds the achievable breeding rate of U-233 you can start increasing the U-233 / U-238 ratio until eventually you no longer need U-238 at all.

Along the way you can decide how to allocate your spare neutron budget. When you no longer need to breed U-233 as rapidly as possible some of those spare neutrons can be used to dispose of problematic isotopes, decommissioned nuclear weapons, etc, but in the early stages you are running reactors that use a substantial amount of U-238 so they would produce as many transuranics as traditional reactors produce.