I worked in the IAC NYC HQ for a while (as Dir Engineering for The Daily Beast).
It was really nice walking into that space. Always been influenced by architecture in my engineering career and it was really nice to have that pedigree infused into my workspace just a little bit. It's just a little dose of delight every day.
I'm pretty sure the engineer at the nuclear plant I visited in elementary school drank a glass of water out of that pool to demonstrate how safe it was.
I hope I'm misremembering that but it's a pretty strong memory that totally locked in for me that that water is not necessarily dangerous.
Serious question, as daft as it might sound - do they have to chlorinate the water to stop stuff growing in it? I'd expect it'd be about "swimming pool" warm so just great for all sorts of manky algae growing.
The water is borated and heavily purified. You don’t want stuff growing inside, but at the same time you don’t want to have chlorinated water slowly corroding the metal components.
On the picture, the fuel rods are indeed protected by a huge quantity of water above them. But what happens below them ? They seem to be in direct contact with the ground...
Chlorinating the water would have adverse effects on material strength and longevity. Even irradiated and heated to 50c, I’ll bet there’s some extremophile bacteria in there somewhere.
Had a buddy on a nuclear sub drink water from the primary coolant loop when he joined the team.
While I do see this as a form of hazing which I am morally opposed to-
8oz (.237 liters) of primary coolant in a properly maintained pressurized water reactor might contain up to 13mrem of orally ingestible radiation, or approximately the radiation of a chest x-ray. (For comparison you get between 3-8 milirem on a 7 hour transatlantic flight)
Don’t make it your primary source of hydration and you’ll be ok. If the fuel is degraded or there is a leak (unlikely in properly maintained PWRs) the radiation dose is significantly higher.
That makes zero sense. Radiation is not a component of water; it is literally photons[0]. In the nanosecond after you fill the glass, all the radiation in it has left the volume.
I'd drink it. It's just extremely pure water, with a nuclear flashlight at the bottom of the pool - which no one could see, even if they had gamma-ray glasses on[1], because the water attenuates it so much.
[0] Or ions of hydrogen or helium, in the case of alpha and beta radiation.
[1] Which it turns out were way less cool than the Sea Monkeys(tm).
Radiation isn’t contained in the water as photons, but the coolant itself becomes radioactive through neutron activation. Even with intact fuel rods, oxygen in the water turns into N-16 with a half-life of about seven seconds, and trace metals like nickel and cobalt form isotopes such as Co-58 and Co-60. These emit strong gamma radiation while the reactor operates.
The primary coolant is not simply pure water; it contains boric acid, lithium hydroxide, dissolved hydrogen, and trace corrosion products like iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium. Under power level neutron flux, some of these elements become short- or medium-lived radionuclides. Once removed from the core, most of the activity decays within minutes, but during operation the water is measurably radioactive.
An eight-ounce sample taken from the loop at power would carry roughly the dose of a chest X-ray before it decayed away, due to these activated isotopes rather than residual photons [EPRI PWR Primary Water Chemistry Guidelines; NUREG-1437][0].
I was on site for the mid cycle outage of three mile island unit 1 around 2005. I did the data sync and transfer for the steam generator inspection, but got tutored by some old PHDs during the down time.
I mean, apparently the inventor of lead additive to gasoline used to pour the chemical over his hands to demonstrate how safe it was -- even though he knew it was actually quite toxic. So there are people who will knowingly give themselves small doses of poison to keep the money flowing.
Same. I have an M1 Max Studio and it's just laughing at the little workloads I throw at it (pro photo editing, music production, software dev, generally all at the same time).
It just never sweats AT ALL - it feels like a decade from obsolescence based on what I'm doing now.
It would have to be an order of magnitude faster for me to even notice at this point.
When they stop releasing security patches for that OS version 2 years later, it becomes more risky to connect the thing to a network. Or take in any data from the outside, really, whether it's via Bluetooth, or USB drive.
And then there's 3rd party software that will stop supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's dev tools make that difficult.
Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting that OS - no convenient iCloud support.
Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will become too out of date to use.
I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon. But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have that option?
I’ve got a 2010 MBP that’s still perfectly suitable, but without OS updates, I can’t get a browser that websites will load cleanly on, can’t use Xcode, bunch of the Apple services the company hooks you on don’t work, etc. Used OpenCore bootloader to extend its life into newer macOSes, but that’s getting hard to keep up with. What a (e)waste.
Hadn't thought of doing that - I'm not a natural Linux person myself and I'm repurposing it for an 11yo. But maybe it's not so different from their school Chromebook for what they need. Just removes some of the nice Apple family features and the apps they'd be inheriting, but that's what I get for not paying the tax with new hardware purchases.
I’ve got a “late 2008” MacBook Pro that connects to sites ok in Firefox. That seems to be the browser that does the best at long-term support for old Macs.
Both those machines will run the latest Ubuntu just fine, and the latest Chrome (or Firefox) on it.
Just copy the LiveCD image onto a USB stick, insert, boot holding down the Option key, and you can try it without actually installing it (i.e. leaving your MacOS untouched).
Sure. But my needs haven't exceeded that RAM. I just want to keep doing the things I was doing for years on it happily, but security updates, broken services and website bloat have intervened.
Just switch to linux and it should just work. There are distros that use very little ram and it stays updated. Noscript can help you block javascript on websites
A 15 year old device can be still as capable as a raspberry pi and those work fine now for modern computing
Depends if you use xcode or not...I still have my macbook 12inch, for work use, it is amazing, but I can't run the latest xcode, making it defunct for some of my uses. It would be fine running xcode weak as it is; i am sure. Liquid glass might have killed it tho.
Patches for old OS versions are unfortunately not 100% covering all security issues. Apple is often arguing that vulns can only be fixed in actively supported versions.
You're clearly running low-intensity tasks (pro photo editing, music production, software dev, generally all at the same time) instead of highly-demanding ones (1 jira tab)
Obsolescence comes when Apple conveniently "optimizes" a new architecture in the OS for a new chip... that conveniently, ironically, somehow severely de-optimizes things for the old chips... and suddenly that shiny new OS feels slow and sluggish and clunky and "damn I need to upgrade my computer!." They'll whitewash it not as planned obsolescence but optimization for new products. Doesn't have to be that way, shouldn't be that way, but its incredibly profitable.
Maybe by that time ARM linux on this platform will be excellent and we can migrate to it for old gear. I still have a 2011 MBP running Linux on my electronics workbench and it is just fine.
I don't know that amazon engineers should be expected to see e.g. a moving small steel cable under tension.
That and customers are required to select safe delivery drop zones.
I would like to see better "oh shit we're crashing let's try not to kill anyone" protection, e.g. research on improving controlled landings on damaged drones. Maybe refusal to deliver if there are any detected humans in the drop zone (which may well already exist).
It means Amazon’s approach to its “see and avoid” responsibility is fundamentally flawed in some way vs this being a one-off fluke with a broken sensor or other anomaly.
ok but also two drones crashing isn't "more" of a problem than one drone crashing really.
Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).
small steel cables take out human pilots too..
Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.
At the same time? If there's a crash there should be an automatic system which geofences off that area making it impossible for other drones to go near there, while the situation is assessed.
If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.
The systemic problem is that they didn't spend the engineer-week on it. It's only an engineer week. That pays for itself after avoiding a single drone crash to say nothing of avoiding a second lawsuit.
For commercial deliveries I would expect them to designate a landing zone guaranteed to be free of obstacles vertically. I'm guessing that installing radar detailed enough to see swinging cables is nearly impossible.
They are always pressurised during normal use. When they are depressurised because of a water main break or for maintenance (and they try to do this as little as possible), orders are given to flush the lines before drinking any of the water.
It was really nice walking into that space. Always been influenced by architecture in my engineering career and it was really nice to have that pedigree infused into my workspace just a little bit. It's just a little dose of delight every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_Building
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