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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.

    If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.








  • No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.

    In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.

    That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.

    For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.

    There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.








  • I grew up when the Internet was essentially a bunch of forum communities and 10k people was a lot of people. Something Awful felt massive with 300k registered users.

    You don’t need 150,000,000 people on a subreddit to have a good community.

    Communities are far better when you can recognize the names of people and remember then from previous interactions. On Reddit, you’ll probably never talk to the same person twice.

    You can’t have a community full of bots if there are only a few hundred people who all know each other.