Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
Doesn't mean they didn't apply something similar. They could have also come up independently with their own version, the speculation is not they copied it, rather that they have performance breakthroughs which perhaps is a result of work in same domain
Indeed. I still remember deploying GAE apps with Java WAR and Python Django as a kid 13 years ago. Then Heroku and now fly.io and Render. For me I went Docker and Kubernetes. Back then GAE has a really good free tier, so I used it to deploy a HTTP proxy to bypass school network
Can't comment on Bazel specifically, but having worked with both nx and turbo, the bottleneck was usually network and disk IOPS rarely compute.
Even fully cached outputs needs to fetched and read from a remote server[1]. A step n-1 outout fetched from remote cache server need to written to disk and then again read by step n[3] - all disk I/O and network bound operations.
10s may be achievable/realistic goal in the Java/C++ world where Bazel normally seen. In TS eco-system most people would be over the moon to get into ballpark of 1-2m for a decently large monorepo.
We should define Build more clearly here, if you mean running just transpile/compile steps or the full series of steps that includes tests (as the linear post here is talking about). It is hard to see even a small sub-set of a large suite of test that require a virtual DOM or a real browser can run in 10s or less.
[1] Typical for say managed CI setup .
[3] Common run-of-the-mill frontend + backend stacks in different languages etc.
If you don't need to rebuild anything, bazel can fetch only the final artifact (not the intermediates) from the remote cache.
Also, if you have persistent CI workers with a persistent bazel instance, you save on some network roundtrips, but that's obviously harder to set up and make bulletproof.
Typically you need the intermediates to compute if you need the next one , so you cannot skip to final until you have the intermediaries.
The final asset/artifact is rarely small either. even best optimized artifacts can be few hundred MB docker image or more commonly multiple image layers running GBs in size .
each step is a network pull then recompute cache if stale and keep going till end .
We solve it 2 ways in the Bazel ecosystem: for the intermediate artifacts, we only fetch the digest (hash + size) of the blobs to calculate the merkle tree forward. The blob itself can stay on the remote cache server.
For the bigger final artifacts, we support using Content Defined Chunking (rolling gear hashing) to only fetch the missing chunks between incremental builds. Binaries executable with stable layout benefits from this quite a lot.
We are definitely not done with all of the improvements here. But since all the major AI labs are using Bazel, we know that the tools can support “Agent Scale”. https://webazel.dev/
> calculate the merkle tree forward. he blob itself can stay on the remote cache server.
Not sure how that would work with building say a docker image, reproducible builds are pretty hard problem to solve, and caching intermediate layers is not always simple or even doable, we typically still need to publish to a registry which is not the cache server.
The Bazel ecosystem builds container images not by using Dockerfile, which contains non-reproducible primitives such as RUN and others. We do it by actually constructing the file trees and tarballs manually, then using them to compose the JSON manifest and indices. This is done via smaller hermetic and reproducible Bazel actions and thus enables the ecosystem to scale way beyond what alternative BuildKit-based solutions can.
Just like solving math or programming in a general sense is much harder than a specific solution , so is passing a broader law.
We don’t complain about switch cases in code when there is two or three switches we start refactoring once it starts to proliferate.
The law is no different , passing a wider ban would not get the votes easily or quickly and the interested parties the onion industry have no reason to push for it neither does the lawmaker acting on their interests.
If said small markets also had exceptions passed seeing the onion one there could have been case to be broad.
It would premature optimization to otherwise, based on just need for elegance , code or law has to work first even if dirty .
I think implication being organizations with 40,000+ employees and even more consultants and contractors plus a lot of budget are also using LLMs to draft public facing content instead of paying for content writers or even just proof readers .
It points to friction rather than cost economics. Same reason we are always surprised why multi billion dollar product companies with millions of install base prefer electron instead of a native app.
This does not imply that the organization is not paying for content writers or proof readers. It does suggest that they are not getting the value of paying for content writers or proof readers.
There are more possible game combinations than atoms in the universe, even those generation of valid game states are as you say pre-defined. that is why models cannot go this route and therefore are poor at chess
Isn’t this exactly how AlphaZero was trained? The rules are known and well defined so the training process can generate games without any outside data.
The only reason LLMs are this bad at chess is because the labs don’t care about chess performance so they’re not going out of their way to train the models for it. The ability they do have is from what chess information happens to be in the training data, plus whatever general reasoning abilities they may be able to apply.
> People who are good at it rely more on experience and deep domain expertise
People are good are 1900 or 2100 above and the top ones who spend decades in the field i.e. deep expertise are well in the 2200-2700 range.
A 1100 player is none of these things, they are purely relying on strategic reasoning there is a good chance they cannot name a single opening or articulate clearly why a move was appropriate. 1100 is quite low bar.
1100 at online speed chess or something, could be. I'm not that deep in the chess world but everyone I know that can make 1100 in official rating can name a dozen openings and most of the known tactics, and is pretty good at applying at least one opening.
1100 lichess/chess.com does not represent real elo. I'm around 1400 online, I would still be unranked in the real world. The fact that I easily beat any model publicly available is not a great look for AGI.
Swag packages like these are a token of appreciation not a reward.
The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
Most people who find a dropped wallet will return it without evaluating the market value of your compromised identity or the contents of the wallet .
Grateful owners may buy you a beer that doesn’t make them cheap , not everything is evaluated in purely money terms, and that is a good thing ?
> The front page post in HN here is worth far more than few thousand dollars , don’t think either organization is operating under purely financial transactional nature .
not always, especially if its just someone independent. iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
That actually supports the point that people aren't acting under purely financial motivations. If the guy was purely following financial motivations, surely he would have chosen to sell the vulnerabilities to the shadier side of things. Instead, he dumped them publicly, burning their value while amplifying the "fuck you" factor to Microsoft.
Ignoring reports, or just fixing the vulnerability without acknowledging the work put in by a researcher, is rude and invites rudeness in return.
Microsoft runs a bug bounty program. NightmareEclipse (that’s the researcher’s handle) allegedly participated and Microsoft did not honor their part of the bug bounty program terms.
This is a completely different situation - a company evaluates the security of a prospective vendor prior to entering a business agreement.
> iirc there was a guy here not too long ago who started dropping Windows 0days because Microsoft couldn't be assed to process his bug reports
Did that ever actually happen? I remember him threatening to start dropping 0days and getting a lot of press coverage for it. When I tried to look it up I didn’t find anything at the time.
“Nightmare Eclipse released these zero-day exploits as part of an ongoing dispute with Microsoft over the company's bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure practices. […] Since April, the anonymous security researcher has disclosed a long list of zero-day flaws, including ShieldBreak, LegacyHive, RoguePlanet, BlueHammer, RedSun, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and UnDefend, targeting Microsoft Defender, BitLocker, and other Windows components.”
Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.
Companies are 100% people. The fact that companies, their CEOs, and employees are not treated like people is exactly reason why humanity is in the shitshow show it is right now.
"and can't empathize with you" - I don't really understand why such a perception of companies has been regurgitated and reinforced so much in US public, to the point where it's a blank excuse from ever expecting such a thing from a company. It's not true that it can't. The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
I agree that this notion that companies make these decisions is bad, bad on the grounds that it's people working for those companies that make the decisions, they hide themselves away, but the company itself isn't doing anything - is always a human making the decision
I think the point is that companies are purely legal entities, and as such, cannot feel, much less empathize, simply by virtue of them not being living things
That's nonsense. "Companies" are not something non-human, they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings. Without these living-being humans, there would simply be no "company".
Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing.
Yes, they are not humans. They are not even living creatures. They are mostly-legal entities mostly for the purpose of contracting with humans or other legal entities.
> they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings
This is usually true, but it is orthogonal to whether the company (a legal entity) itself is a biologically living creature, which is the only thing capable of feeling*. To put a point on it: my lawnmower is also run by humans, but it does not have empathy for any grass or people that gets in its way. It mostly just goes where it is steered. A company is like that, except with less touching grass.
* — unless you want to argue semantics about what "feeling" means, even though the discussion is about "feeling" and "empathy" in the way humans experience it, and how that form of "empathy" does not exist for a nonliving legal entity which may or may not employ any actual humans
I think the only misleading part of this situation is your naive and self-centered definition of "trust", and the assumption that so many others think similarly enough that they need to be warned.
I trust a business to fulfill their obligations as stated in writing for the money paid. I do not trust them in any other way. Nobody should "trust" or depend on undefined behavior. Common sense can only ever be as common as you expect.
> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and [another thing, which is not the same thing as the first thing but merely similar or related]
>Wallets usually belong to real people with lives.
So does data ? it belongs to real people.
I would imagine baseten's customers and eventually their end-users[1] were also grateful that their data was not compromised here and the disclosure was responsible.
[1] There is a pretty good chance you and I could be using services who are using baseten
First, you're being petty and just fighting fire with fire. Second, most of this research is fairly trivial.
What you're instead encouraging is a race to the bottom. You're not going to kill off the companies you hate by withholding information. You don't even have that power anyway because by its very nature, security research is not secret. You're really just encouraging pessimistic groupthink and bad faith. This is why businesses can't be more open about their flaws. It's not that they're stupid and incompetent, but that the pitchforks come out. These are the seeds of dystopia.
They would have eventually figured it out, but as an unfortunate incident with an outsized effect. As much as you wish it to be true, even the worst of these incidents will not kill their business. As much as you hate these businesses, their financial momentum will eventually cause the public to depend on them more. There's more at stake here than anyone's personal gain. It's naive to think otherwise.
You're just manifesting broken windows and ignoring litter thinking you're fighting the man. This is straight up ghetto punk ass behavior wearing a white collar.
> I'm saying serve yourself, not them. if you have say, a 0 day on your hands, do what serves you best. is that "ghetto punk ass behavior"?
Yes.
If you have say, managed to find an overlooked passage into an ostensibly high security building, "doing what serves you best" such as selling the information to some thugs, is in fact that kind of behavior.
for real security bugs, like, you can literally sell them to brokers who sell them to governments. would selling stuff to the CIA be ghetto?
morally, it depends. but after seeing so many posts of e.g. Google cheapskating on bug reports, it really makes no sense to me to participate in such a broken system.
this case however is quite different as it was a B2B encounter and during vendor vetting
like to me it just seems like a fair deal, if Google wants their bugs patched (which they can definitely afford to do) they'd just pay properly for serious bugs and so on, and everybody would be happy. it's not some kind of thing where they can't do anything about.
maybe you can understand the angle I'm coming from?
This was a potential customer reporting a result of an audit of a tool they are evaluating. This is frequent and normal activity in enterprise deals. Most of the time such reports are not critical vulnerabilities it would things like tenant configuration -what business would like versus what CISO will accept or risk acceptance of the product they are buying with monitoring or other prescription on access restrictions or a DPA and so on.
It would be novel business model to spend ton of money in getting a prospect to late-deal stage where they are ready to do a security audio for you just so that part is "free" .
Most companies wouldn't disclose(to the public) even if it was serious , that is not their job, they will report to internal teams and re-review on fix. Strix.ai has a benefit in doing so as they sell a scanning tool for this purpose so we get to hear of this.
Repetition at the start or end (i.e. Anaphora/Epistrophe) are not used lightly in prose or verse, they serve a rhetorical purpose - usually add rhythm or strengthen the theme.
The type of repetition Claude uses is what Fowler[1] called "elegant variations" and discouraged in modern style guides for a good reason - people find it really annoying.
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
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