Tom James

I mean, it's all doable. We just have to build lots of solar, wind, and nuclear capacity; and stop using fossil fuels.

Learn algorithms - visually! An excellent collection of interactive algorithms organized by category. Check it out. algorithm-visualizer.org

Modern bio can only dream of tech as deep as citrus

40-50% of the nitrogen atoms in the human body ultimately come from synthetic nitrogen fertilisers (produced via the Haber-Bosch process).

The more I've read and listened to Irish history, the more I see Irish independence less as an inevitability and more as a huge blunder, born of astonishing arrogance, laziness, and stupidity among elite Brits. And much of the same spirit lives on in the British capital today.

Walmart air dropping me snacks like I’m a paratrooper in Bastogne.

"you have 1 hour to edit your post" you have one hour to shut the fuck up because i just typed and posted that shit flawlessly

🚨🇫🇷 NEW: The location of the French aircraft carrier, FS Charles de Gaulle, has been given away by a sailor using Strava whilst jogging on the ship deck [@lemondefr]

Got my horse to water. Now for the easy part

FPTP Defenders: Just admit you want a majoritarian electoral college that chooses the dictator please. This is at least coherent.

Oh no. Not middle-of-the-road parliaments that delicately reflect the nuances of the electorate's preferences!

I love goods. But sometimes services just hit

Pretty astonishing. In Texas, between 10:00 am and 4:00 p.m., 80-90% of electricity comes from carbon free sources. And storage is already a significant contributor in the early morning and evening

I keep hearing that developers write code too early in the whole "getting things done" process but my experience says the exact opposite. The only real way I've found to figure out requirements IS to start writing code and see what I bump into.

mainly macro: Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero rating: mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/public…

😬UK gas prices just hit highest level since 2022😬 At current prices… * New wind & solar from latest "AR7" auction would cut the bill for UK gas imports by £5.5bn/y * A single (1) home heat pump would cut bill for gas imports by more than £600/y

Kilopower, the little Martian reactor that could: A miracle of simplicity & sodium. NASA was given the brief to design a super-simple micro-reactor for future Martian settlement, and it did so brilliantly by doing it unconventionally. A normal Earthbound nuclear reactor is complex, with banks of pumps, water & steam injection pressurizers, control rod actuation, frequent movement of fuel during refuelling cycles, complex systems of valves, back-up emergency coolant and deluge systems, boron injection… it goes on & on & on. A terrestrial nuclear plant is a triumph of safety-conscious system engineering, but it’s a busy one, and Kilopower dispensed with all of this. The intention for the system is that you could set it up, get it started and just… forget about it, pretty much. It has a small, solid core with no moving pieces except for the control rod which is designed to be moved on startup and then kept in place, unmonitored, for a decade at a time. The small size & low power means that reactivity effects are dominated by thermal expansion and are extremely stable. Low power designs (less than 100 kiloWatts thermal energy) make thermal management and irradiation damage a non-issue that does not complicate system design. Very low power level designs (less than 10kW thermal) feature such low burnup reactivity that movement of the control rod becomes a ten-year interval. A literal ‘tin’ wedding anniversary, marked out by tweaks to the control rod. There’s a quirky Martian anniversary gift for you! Even at much higher power levels, the stability is such, and burnup so low, that control rod movement would be something you’d only have to do occasionally, every few months or annually. In essence this is a nuclear battery. In all cases, the reactor is designed to handle worst-case transients such as coolant loss passively without any need for control inputs, further simplifying the system. Truly, this is a zen ideal: Feng Shui engineering, where less is more and the system simplicity brings reliability and safety, all in one. Perfect for missions to space.

200 years ago, in 1826, Nicephore Niépce took the oldest surviving photograph in the world.

The Blair reforms, far from being the 'radical vandalism' that reactionaries portray them to be, were typical of Labour's ingrained constitutional timidity: marginal, cosmetic, piecemeal tinkerings, which were insufficient to address the UK's fundamental constitutional problems.

There's worry that people will stop using their brains with LLMs, but managing several AI agent threads in parallel has been some of the most cognitively intensive work I've done in years

My favorite thing bout Claude thus far is I have apparently put off learning React long enough that it doesn't matter.