Chris Barchak 🇫🇮🇺🇸🇬🇧

@PaulPaulpenhey @taraAFCx Not this week. Ticketed event and sold out.

@taraAFCx Tollington opens at 12 but maybe best to get there a little earlier

How early do you need to get to a pub around the Emirates tomorrow?!

Londonmaxxing

Tax almond milk to pay for data centers

@chunkyboyjames 1) have to is a union rule not a practical imperative. Remote control by a human operator is plausible 2) you may mean to present this as an unimaginably large sum of money but it’s dwarfed by £333b annual social spending. Managed decline is a choice, not inevitable.

@cbarchak 1) DLR still have to have a member of staff on board, who can drive the train in an emergency 2) the cost to automate the tube to the same level as the DLR, ie with a staff member STILL onboard, is an estimated £70bn It won’t happen in your lifetime, or the next generation.

It's time to make the tube fully autonomous, like the DLR

@tokengobbler It’s also that we can’t do without it for the length of time it would take us to complete. Hence years turn into decades.

@cbarchak I guess if technology were the barrier, the Tube would've been automated years ago. I suspect deployment in the physical world will be slower thanks to regulation + unions.

@tokengobbler The oblivious overconfidence is fascinating. AI and automation are transforming software development, law, medicine, music and advanced mathematics. But I’m certain they will never, ever come for the anointed door open button pushers.

@cbarchak Wtf are these comments lol

@pacer142 @SimonZev @ramthelinefeed @RMTunion Are the chief obstacles to GoA4 in London technological, operational, political or budgetary in your view? wsp.com/en-gb/insights…

@SimonZev @ramthelinefeed @RMTunion @cbarchak The GoA definitions appear to give the driver an obstacle detection role at GoA2 but not GoA3. However I'm not aware of the DLR having any form of advanced obstacle detection (e.g. radar) and it's much more likely to see such obstacles than the fully underground Vic Line.

@SmoggyBalboa That's a policy decision, not a real requirement

@cbarchak Also, the DLR doesn't nove without a qualified Driver on board.

@SmoggyBalboa Strikes are not cost-free either. cityam.com/tube-strikes-c…

@cbarchak Would cost billions more than paying the staff..

@6edc9144c4e24f9 @RMTunion I use it every day. I believe Londoners should be able to rely on it, and not be held hostage. I understand that hostage-takers don't agree.

@cbarchak @RMTunion The underground makes around 100 million a day, I believe. One of the best metros. 👍

@RMTunion Thanks for informing me. I didn't realise how successful you've been in wasting taxpayer money for the benefit of your members.

@cbarchak There is a fully qualified driver on every DLR train, like the tube

@truth_ai_jp @takaichi_sanae It chose London as its first overseas base, but then closed it again. ft.com/content/b3190d…

@takaichi_sanae a16zが初の海外拠点に、ロンドンでもシンガポールでもなく東京を選んだ。 これは外交じゃない。リターンで動く組織が「日本に勝ち筋を見た」という意思表示だ。 その構造と、スタートアップが今すぐ動くべき理由はこちら↓​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ x.com/truth_ai_jp/st…

本日、ベン・ホロウィッツ・共同創業者兼ゼネラルパートナーをはじめとする、アンドリーセン・ホロウィッツ（a16z）社の皆様にお越しいただき、今年夏に、米国内以外で初となる海外拠点を日本に設けることなどについて、御説明いただきました。 a16z社は、フェイスブック、インスタグラムなど多くのスタートアップを育成、支援した実績を有する世界最大級のベンチャー・キャピタルです。 高市内閣では、『日本成長戦略』の重要な柱として「新技術立国」を掲げ、スタートアップ・エコシステムの構築を目指しています。 また、「経済力」、「技術力」が、我が国の「外交力」、「防衛力」を決するという認識の下、１７の戦略分野の一つとして防衛産業を位置づけています。 そうした中で、米国において、産業分野のイノベーションをリードし、安全保障に貢献するスタートアップを見出し、育成してきたa16z社が、「唯一の海外拠点」を日本に開設し、日本への投資拡大、起業家の育成に乗り出すことは、高市内閣の成長戦略、安全保障戦略を進めていく上で実に心強いことです。 日本のスタートアップ・エコシステムのダイナミズムを取り入れながら、経済の自律性、技術の優位性や不可欠性を確立することで、「安全保障と経済成長の好循環」を実現していきます。

Lead Times The Manhattan Project started 13th August 1942, and the Trinity Test successfully completed on 16th July 1945 The entire Manhattan Project took 2 years, 11 months and 3 days Today, some 81 years later, with all the benefits of modern science and technology, with a population 2.5x larger and an economy 15x larger than they had in 1945, it takes 4 - 1/2 years to forge a single nuclear reactor pressure vessel Making 1 component takes 50% longer than the entire Manhattan Project took Why? Why does it now take 50% longer to make a single steel component than it took to complete the entire development of the nuclear technology spectrum, from raw yellow cake to full enrichment, and all the way to supercritical machines? People say we are in “a nuclear renaissance” Are we? I think the vibe has shifted and seeds are planted, but the renaissance is still ahead of us To clarify, I think legacy nuclear is not in a renaissance at all, I think the sector has forked. There is the old way, the half-way, and there is the new way The old way, big ole Gen III reactors, with their well understood (but totally unnecessary and obsolete) consequential risk profile. This is your grandfathers power plant, yes modern HSE law makes them excruciatingly expensive, but for another 5 years, we have lots of white haired folks who understand them well. This is the flip phone of nuclear energy. Not sure why the West would rebuild these, they’re expensive, demand active safety systems, and the people who understand them haven’t built anything in 30 years and are about to retire anyway. Gen III should gracefully retire, capitalism is going to force that outcome anyway The half-way… We have several so called SMR programs, reactors that are “easier to make”, that are somehow still centred around a component with a 4.5 year lead time. I’m not calling that a bust flush, but… ?? Is that what good looks like? Why weren’t SMR programs originally centred on breakthrough foundry methods? Why are we forging the RPV? China has kicked out much of the supply chain under the SMR strategy The new way… We now have microreactors emerging that are centred on isomodal sizes. These are what the SMR category should have been, they are actually small, unlike the SMR category where a 400MW SMR is 95% the size of 1,600MW reactors Micro reactors are 1 - 20MWe and most of them fit in a shipping container. The challenge for this category is the associated fixed costs around security and safeguarding. A critical nuclear reaction needs 24/7 armed guards under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty 1MW generates around $500k revenue at wholesale, or maybe up to $1.5m for off grid / premium baseload But security alone for a site might be $5m / yr so there is a floor on the minimum viable site Just stack lots of micros together and truck them in, I hear you say. We might see some of these nuke farms, but above a certain size maybe you should have built 1 big efficient reactor, instead of 40 small ones. But I suspect there is a market position for nuke farms There are high level energy and power market dynamics, and within the subsets there are dynamics within wind, solar, CCGT, and nuclear Nuclear is by far the most interesting and has the most potential Solar has 170% theoretical upside in the physics between the Shockley-Quiesser limit (where we are today) and the Landsberg limit (this is the gradual improvement from 33.7% to 93.3% efficiency) Nuclear energy physics has theoretical upside of 11,900% we currently burn up about 8MW-days/kg of the uranium atoms that we mine, when we could in theory burn up 950MW-days/kg of this uranium This is like buying a pint of beer, taking 1 sip, and then handing it back to the barman and buying another beer. Humans currently use uranium like Dwarkesh drinks Guinness If we use this stuff properly the economics are completely different. There is a way for us to deploy it at the scale needed, and this is going to happen.

You can double the economics of a fusion reactor by using a thin layer in the neutron blanket to transmute mercury into gold

@Frank_Stones How much of German oil imports as a whole does this represent? 3%

Russia just opened a second front in the Energy War. 🇷🇺 While the U.S. is bogged down in the Persian Gulf, Alexander Novak is weaponizing the Druzhba pipeline. Kazakh oil to Germany is being "diverted" starting May 1. This is the Great Diversion🧵

@jessegenet Cool but why “Contact us for quotation” rather than transparent pricing?

This is the display: visionect.com/shop/place-pla…

GIANT e-ink display LIVE in my house and actively removing the “mental load” of motherhood 😅 Turns out my household chaos just needed to be tamed by a display my team of @openclaw and @NousResearch Hermes agents manage for me 💅

It’s easy. All you need is NAND. 🎶

@tomhfh Poor refers to wealth, not income. I think you’ll find the median wealth in many European countries to be higher than the US, even if the average wealth is lower by a bit because of the effect of outliers. The exception is Switzerland which is higher wealth than US on both counts

Europoor is an entirely accurate phrase. America is simply in a different league.

Carlini, one of the world best AI security researchers: "I've found more bugs in the last few weeks with Mythos than in the rest of my entire life combined"