The thought of a nuclear reactor running on Windows is terrifying.
They’re going to build it in 2026 but it’ll still somehow be running on XP.
“What operating system is that running?”
“Uh… vista.”
“We’re all going to die!”
If they make it Windows ME then we ARE ALL DEAD!
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Even Microsoft does not trust Windows on Azure 🤣
Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there’s very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they’re able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Fuck that. Take all the government grants and subsidies that would surely exist, and then use it for their own good/profit/power hoarding? No thanks.
Putting billionaires in control of our nuclear power infrastructure after “building” them with mostly taxpayer money, when it’s all said and done, is an absolutely bone chilling thought. Terrifying.
I don’t know why you think government subsidies exist - so impoverished single moms can build power plants? No. They’re pork for billionaires by design, to get them off their asses and steer them into directions we want to go. Like venture capital, they are also high risk. Our federal budget can support some level of this and it’s frankly needed to drive change in new or stalled industries where the motive for immediate profit isn’t strong enough to overcome the cold start problem. If your hatred of billionaires keeps you from making smart energy choices to address climate change, then your priorities are wrong.
The picture they show is from terrapower, the company Bill Gates funded, which is a thorium reactor. Thorium liquid salt reactors are still difficult because of the metallurgy. I believe they were supposed to fit the small modular concept though.
They’ll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX
They should run Arch, btw
More stable than Windows I guess
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
But… Developers!.. /s
A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I’ve read of
Windows NT or 2000. Not 98.
Ah yes you’re correct, Windows 98 is (was?) the British nuclear submarines
Now THAT is wild as hell.
Could be worse, could be running MacOS. Surely nothing bad can happen while the entire system freezes for no reason for 15 minutes or more without any possible input from the user. It will always fix it self… (hopefully before the reactor achieves a run away meltdown chain.)
What are you running? I’ve never had an issue like that at all
Reminds me of that time the technodork ran his minecraft reactor with opencomputers and lost his base because the computer blue screened. Almost as funny as that time the entire city lit up because they were using raw radio signals to control their reactor and a nearby thunderstrike instructed the reactor to drop all the fuel and go supercritical. This is why you add realism to video games, it leads to hilarious stuff like this.
EDIT: That was actually the same server where they sabotaged the entire electrical grid to blow up everyone’s base as a send-off and mine was the only one standing at the end because I was the only one who bothered to set up a surge protector under OHSA (Omega Haxors? Safety!? AHAHAHAH!) it just so happened that the system designed to save the grid from my many exploits just so happened to work in reverse.
A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.
This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
I’d play that, the fact that you’d include this content sounds dope
I just like element-based levels in video games. Even water levels. Some even can present some time-based challenges, like saving a nuclear reactor from meltdown, or retrieving something from an area like that.
I wanna play your game lol
deleted by creator
Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.
There’s no shortage of modern reactor designs. We have amazing stuff designed and even prototyped and proven - low waste, safely-failing reactors that basically can’t melt down. All we really lack is funding and regulatory clearance to build more.
Cortana, can you design a nuclear reactor to train you better?
Yes daddy
Searching “Design a nuclear reactor to train you better” on Bing…
This is part of their plan to reduce carbon emissions.
This is what corporations mean when they say “reduce carbon emissions”
You say that like it’s a bad thing
It is, because corporate greenwashing will tell you that they reduced their emissions when all they did was scale up production using green energy. Their actual emissions didn’t go down they just went down relative to their growth.
I thought this was a generic nuclear bad response, but in that case I definitely agree.
I thought this crazy energy consumption shit would cool off a bit after assholes stopped bitcoin mining.
Glad AI stepped up so we can generate bad art and prose while buttfucking the planet
The planet will be alright. It will be lush green in a few million years when humans no longer exist.
The current ecosystem, though… yeah. Buttfucked.
Humans will exist. We will live in the sea and we will have flippers. Our brains will be smaller, but we will eat lots of fish.
Bold of you to assume we’ll still have fish after global warming, oil spills and micro plastics do their thing.
In that case, we’re all amoebas.
That doesn’t sound crass enough to grasp the full extend of the development. AI will take all of the energy. E v e r y t h I n g.
There won’t be a planet once there is a Dyson sphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
I’ll be dead by then.
And in the end, the planet will be gone with or without AI. The sun will consume it at some point.
Ok, hear me out: crypto, based on “proof of training an AI”
If it takes so much power, it must be secure, and this way it wouldn’t be “totally wasted”…
Proof is a Turing test?
I’m not sure if you’re serious, but just in case: that wouldn’t work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you’re not doing that, you may earn crypto by “mining”, but you can’t spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.
mining is really just verifying transactions
Not correct.
Mining is a “proof of work”, in the case of Bitcoin it’s competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.
Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block’s hash meets the mining requirements.
The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).
The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of “proof of work”, as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).
I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.
I don’t really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don’t see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can’t send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn’t be a blockchain).
Proof of work need not be useless. E.g. https://primecoin.io/
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I’m not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
The transaction verification is separate to the work.
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I’m not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
They actually do. Training an AI involves changing some values in the model in an attempt for it to better fit an optimization function. It takes many tries to find a set of values that perform better, but a single try to confirm it does.
Both sides require much more computing power than for a single hash, but the difficulty imbalance is still there, and verifiers could change “how much better fit” the next model needs to be, just like they do by changing difficulty requirements right now.
True. The next iteration doesn’t need to be optimal, just an improvement in the loss function.
Not sure how they would decide when to stop.
Huh, neat. Thanks for the info!
training AI instead of finding blocks
There is no “finding blocks” in Bitcoin, it isn’t Minecraft. Miners work on “finding a better hash”, for whatever block they want to propose. The two actions, creating a block, and working on finding a hash, are separate.
In a “proof of training an AI” blockchain, there would still be a hash linking one block to the previous one, just the proof for accepting a new block would no longer be looking for another (useless) hash.
deleted by creator
Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It’s all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.
Yeah, it’s treating the symptoms… not the cause.
requires an intensive carbon footprint
Maybe we should focus on the collapsing ecosystem then instead of training AI datasets.
Nuclear power means they can do both.
Hear me out:
What if we used that nuclear power only to fix the environment?
Ok, find someone willing to pay for one for that purpose.
Microsoft isn’t ‘we’
You’re free to invest in nuclear power for that purpose if you want.
Microsoft is investing in nuclear power to run their AI projects. They likely wouldn’t be investing in nuclear power if they didn’t have projects that needed it like this.
And the U.S. government wouldn’t have invested in all of the development that went into the Apollo program if they didn’t want to beat the Russians, but we still all benefitted from the science and the research and the development.
So we finally get thorium power, but its only used to make celebrity porn for incels.
Nice!
Honestly getting Thorium power AND never having Incels leave their home or interact with society again sounds like a win-win.
We already know how well Microsoft optimizes code, so this comes as no surprise.
deleted by creator
Yea this entire clickbait can be summarized as “company looks to spend less on high capacity power”
And you just need to find good non science fiction way to deal with nuclear waste.
And some ethical ways of aquiring uranium.
With all that calculated in, I am certain how much cheaper it is.
Rare lemming reasonable take
Building and maintaining one isn’t really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That’s the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how’s a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
If they’re actually using a new type nuclear reactor, the small portable ones, then the waste is both incredibly small and recyclable. Nuclear technology has come a long way since the decades old reactors, we just haven’t built very many new ones to showcase that.
It’s a shame we aren’t seemingly taking them into consideration in the whole energy transition crisis we are in.
But rather let’s just keep sending people into hazardous coal mines while ignoring nuclear energy until the solution to all our problems magically comes to us.
The solutions are there, but 💫capitalism💫
What do you mean by this, nuclear of all things is supposed to be the solution? Maybe fusion some day, but definitely not fission. But that’s fine, because we already have a perfectly capable and renewable solution, and that is called wind and solar. The sun is doing fusion every day for us and irradiates the surface of the Earth so much that we could support many multiples of our civilisation.
I’m not trying to say nuclear is the definitive solution, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Progress is progress, we don’t have to find the final solution in one go.
Solution already magically arrived. It’s called nuclear
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I’ve seen any actual quantity mentioned, it’s tiny.
deleted by creator
As noted elsewhere, these don’t create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn’t just say “and then we’ll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!” Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called “reprocessing” that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying “y’all will figure out a way to dispose of these things”.
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
Weird thing is, I’d trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown…
They’ll ship it to India/Thailand
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn’t actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it’ll pose a threat, after it’s been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it’s the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
Governments can barely figure that out,
Governments aren’t exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that “other entities can’t figure it out, why should they do it?”
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
Right, let’s welcome throwing millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium, I mean that’s such a nice thing, we need much more of it! It’s not like we already have perfectly renewable solutions to providing power…
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of “work pod” and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It’d be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
It’s called meth.
I mean you could have the AI make interesting scenarios for them!
deleted by creator
this is the matrix
NO, this is Patrick
That’s the joke. The Wachowskis both ended up being trans sometime after they made The Matrix.
This is lemmy but it’s cool you can access it from matrix.
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
That’s just energy conversion. Loss is expected.
This is what happens when you don’t teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school…
deleted by creator
This seems kind of ideal though, computers provide a near constant load (relatively speaking) that combines very well with nuclear energy.
Perhaps we should be asking why we haven’t already been doing this for the past decade?
Because it costs less money
to push the cost tofor taxpayers to subsidize it than owning itCorrection
Tell me you know nothing about data centers without telling me.
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Or you get an overlord ai that isn’t dependent on the larger power grid so it doesn’t have any reason not to launch the nukes. You know they’re going to harden these things.
This comment was a joke right? “Launch the nukes”? What nukes?!? Do you not know the difference between nuclear power generation and nuclear bombs?
Yes. It’s just a joke about Skynet and AM. People are really quick to jump to dogpile without realizing it’s a joke. The idea wasn’t that it would use its reactor as a weapon, but it would access the military’s weapons. Without needing outside power, it have no reason not to.
Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can’t make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An efficient allocation isn’t necessarily equitable.
And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.
I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
I guess history does repeat itself. Next you’ll be telling me that 640GB of RAM is enough.
Someone let me know when personal computers need TB of RAM
Windows 13 isn’t that far away.
Will the LLMs be useful for dating?
LLM stole your girl
with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
Fusion won’t be ready by then
Energy should be public
energy, water, food and housing should not be used for profit. Everything else is fair game.
Nah, not everything else. You can add healthcare to the list.
The irony is very funny considering your username :)
Agreed! Idk why that didn’t come to mind.
And healthcare. You know, all the stuff to keep us alive.
But there’s so much profit to be made in things required to survive.
There isn’t a price point at which I’ll choose to quit using food and water.
Max Planck seems to have learned from the Fraunhofer mp3 thing and is getting their hands dirty with commercialising Stellerators. “In the 2030s”, right now they’re drafting, maybe simulating. Awfully short on details right now if you understand anything about fusion.
