> Builders value getting the work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are making something—likely something with parts beyond the frontend—and are often eager to see it through to completion. This means Builders may prize that initial execution over other long-term factors.
> Crafters are more likely to value long-term factors like ease of maintainability, legibility, and accessibility, and may not consider the project finished until those have also been accounted for.
> In my view, the more you optimize for building quickly, the more you optimize for homogeneity.
> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.
> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.
> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.
Conclusion:
> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.
> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.
This article has one neat Google search trick I hadn't known about: `AROUND(#)`. But I am skeptical of much of the rest of it.
Searching for `“can anyone recommend”` to get unfiltered recommendations is an interesting hack, but I feel it's not too reliable. At reddit, you could ask this, and an unknown percentage of responses could be shills or bots.
I'm also skeptical of how much the suggested `@reddit` differs from just `reddit`. The description says it's for social media handles, but reddit is a platform, not an individual user's handle. I suspect google looks for the user's intent to see results from a particular site or social media platform and uses that signal to influence the ranking, and I doubt '@' has much of an effect on that process.
> The results Google omits tend to be less trafficked and less search-optimized, which frequently means they’re more substantive and written for readers rather than algorithms
Really? I call BS. Every time I've looked at the omitted results they've been very similar to ones I've already seen.
> We discovered simple adversarial strategies that beat superhuman Go AIs, and find that adding defenses helps but does not eliminate the problem. Our cyclic adversary beats the state-of-the-art KataGo AI more than 97% of the time at superhuman settings. This strategy is simple enough to be replicated by an amateur human player and transfers to other superhuman Go AIs.
Yes, this is a really fun idea and something that we want to do. Though these days we’re setting our sights higher than Nintendo…
A funny story though: a regular conference gimmick we have is “Man vs. Machine” where we have attendees race our fuzzer to the end of Mario level 1-1. We did this at the final year of Strange Loop, and the fuzzer was winning handily until not one, not two, but three different professional speedrunners walked by and destroyed us.
There have definitely been some applications of this sort of thing to speedrunning -- though far less sophisticated than the approach here, and usually only testing against a very small subset of the game. I've heard of some of this kind of work being done before on e.g. SM64.
I've also done something along these lines myself in Super Metroid. Mother Brain's neck moves in a conceptually simple but very chaotic pattern influenced by Samus's vertical movement, and there's a cutscene during the fight where the positioning of her neck can make a difference of about 7 seconds. The TAS fight used complicated movement to manipulate her neck position developed through much trial-and-error, while the best known human-viable manips were several seconds slower.
I wrote a program to search the state space for optimal movement patterns, and working with some speedrunners we were able to come up with a new human-viable manipulation that matched the previous TAS fight, as well as a new TAS manipulation that saved an additional 41 frames.
Do you have a citation for this? The most Gemini could say is: "While research has not identified a specific tsunami stone located at the Fukushima Daiichi site that was directly violated, the spirit of these ancient warnings was undeniably ignored." (https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...)
I don't know if there are "Tsunami stones" in the area but the nuclear power plant is built at sea level [1] so would most probably be below them.
The issue is the height of the seawalls that was not sufficient (and perhaps historical warnings, if any, were ignored):
"The subsequent destructive tsunami with waves of up to 14 metres (46 ft) that over-topped the station, which had seawalls" [1]
Edit: Regarding historical warnings:
"The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake occurred in exactly the same area as the 869 earthquake, fulfilling the earlier prediction and causing major flooding in the Sendai area." [2]
IIRC the issue was the emergency diesel generators being flooded, preventing them from powering the emergency cooling pumps, resulting in the meltdowns from residual heat in the reactor cores and spent fuel pools.
Various construction changes could have prevented this from happening:
- the whole power plan being built higher up or further inland
-> this would likely be quite a bit more expensive due to land availability & cooling water management when not on sea level & next to the sea
- the emergency generators being built higher up or protected from a tsunami by other means (watertight bunker ?)
-> of course this requires the plan cooling systems & the necessary wiring itself working after surviving a massive earthquake & being flooded
An inland power plant - while quite wasteful in an island country - would be protected from tsunamis & certainly doable. On the other hand, I do wonder how would high concrete cooling towers handle strong earthquakes ? A lot of small cooling towers might have ti be used, like in Palo Verde nuclear generating station in Arizona.
Otherwise a bizzare case could still happen, with a meltdown possibly happening due to your cooling towers falling over & their cooling capacity being lost.
Another option is designing fail safe reactors. CANDU reactors designs are over 60 years old now and were built fail safe so that if outside power to the core is cut off the system would safe itself by dropping control rods which are held up by electromagnets into the core.
A reactor scram isn't necessarily enough -- you still have decay heat to worry about. In the case of Fukushima, the fission chain reaction was stopped but without cooling pumps the decay heat was still too much.
It seems like you should build a water reservoir at a higher elevation than the core and then apply a similar principle where valves regulate the water stream, but if the valves lose power they fail open. The reservoir can be built so that there is always enough water to cool the core.
For light water reactors this basically just amounts to a large pool up a nearby hill or in a water tower.
That is easier said than done - modern reactors are in the 1000 MW+ electrical power range, which means about 3x as much heat needs to be generated to get this much electricity - say 3000 MW.
Even when you correctly shut down the chain reaction in the reactor (which correctly happened in the affected Fukushima powerplant) a significant amount of heat will still be generated in the reactor core for days or even weeks - even if it was just 1% of the 3 GW thermal load, that is still 30 MW. It will be the most intense immediately after shutdown and will then trail off slowly.
The mechanism for this is inherent to the fission reactors - you split heavier elements into lighter ones, releasing energy. But some of the new lighter elements are unstable and eventually split to something else, before finally splitting into a stable element. These decay chains can take quite some time to reach stable state for a lot of the core & will still release radiation (and a lot of heat) for the time being.
(There are IIRC also some processes where neutrons get captured by elements in the core & those get transmutated to other, possibly unstable elements, that then decay. That could also result add up the the decay heat in the core.)
And if you are not able to remove the heat quickly enough - the fuel elements do not care, they will just continue to heat up until they melt. :P
I am a bit skeptical you could have a big enough reservoir on hand to handle this in a passive manner. What on the other hand I could image could work (and what some more modern designs include IIRC) is a passive system with natural circulation. Eq. you basically have a special dry cooling tower through which you pass water from the core, it heats up air which caries the heat up, sucking in more air (chimney effect). The colder water is more dense, so it sinks down, sucking in more warm water. Old hot water heating worked like this in houses, without pumps.
If you build it just right, it should be able to handle the decay heat load without any moving parts or electricity until the core is safe.
Yea, it seems like you could design a cooling loop that runs just off the latent heat. Im sure somebody in reactor design has sketched it out.
Some napkin math based upon heat capacity of water and assuming a 20 degree celsius input and 80 degree celsius output and 30MW heat results in about 120 liters per second of water flow needed. That is about 10 million liters of water per day, or about 4 olympic sized swimming pools. I don’t know how long you need to keep cooling for, but 10 million liters of water per day seems not insane and within the realm of possibility.
If you allow the water to turn into superheated steam you can extract much larger amounts of heat off the reactor as well.
there are reactor designs that work that way, but most civilian power plants are pressurized water reactors. it is important that the water stays pressurized or you get a chernobyl
Fukushima was based on a Westinghouse BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) design, so pressurization was not that much of an issue - if enough of sufficiently cold water was provided, there would be no meltdown.
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