Today is the first day of winter in the old calendar, and is Samhain (summer's end) in the Celtic calendar, which actually began last night but continues today.
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US bets on thorium molten salt technology to turn nuclear waste into reactor fuel. Well, I guess thorium is stil being considered, along with High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). Let's start building these reactors, already!
California-based nuclear technology developer Radiant announced that the US Department of Energy (DOE) has approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for its Kaleidos microreactor.Radiant used HALEU in the form of TRISO fuel (TRi-structural ISOtropic particle fuel).
The approval brings the reactor closer to full-power testing at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), where Radiant plans to evaluate its performance under operating conditions.
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Why isn't this in the mainstream news?. Can you reverse coronary plaque? The answer is yes, and the key is to lower lipid levels more aggressively, such as with a statin + ezetimibe, which decreases cholesterol reabsorption in the enterohepatic circulation. Paper here.
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Consumer Rights Wiki has this article: Proton senior management prioritizes AI over security. I disagree. AI coding assistants can uncover security flaws better than humans can. I can vouch for that first-hand. Claude 5.5 Opus was much better than Claude 4.8 Opus in detecting security issues and brining them to my attention. Gemini Argon is even better, and pointed out security issues that Claude never brought up. It helps to have one model evaluate the output of another model.
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A nice problem to have, actually. Anthropic’s IPO Date Could Cost Its Employees A Year Of Tax Life. Anthropic employees may be credited with a lot of wealth suddenly, according to the IRS, but without access to that money to pay off the capital gains tax. I remember when some Microsoft employees were caught by this during the end of the dotcom era. It's not a happy situation knowing that you have a lot of money but will have to give away a large chunk of that to Uncle Sam. It's even worse if you get wealthy in a state like Washington or California. Let's hope Anthropic takes this into account and does the right thing.
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The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping. Putting a shared policy token in your robots.txt file might deter scraping by cooperative robots. No guarantee, of course.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will restrict their AI crawlers from accessing a site if they encounter the shared token. Meta communications head Andy Stone also signaled support for the new setting, but doesn’t say whether the company will honor it.
That's the problem – it's all on the honor system.
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Polymarket got hacked again. Just before the elections, too.
The cause of this latest security incident, according to the WSJ, is a flaw in DebugBear, a third-party website performance monitoring and debugging tool that Polymarket uses.
The need better pen-testing, that's for sure.
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Health Insurance Costs Are Already Spiking. Oregon’s New Obamacare Website Will Tack On a Bit More. A few of the commenters don't seem to understand that the socialist model of healthcare was never going to be stable. One thinks that the Republicans "gutted the parts of the ACA that would have kept the original legislation sustainable". No, only continued federal subsidies kept it from being completely unaffordable. And then Oregon imported a lot more "customers". The costs will be borne by those who still have the means to pay something. Get used to it. Nothing is free.
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Where have Portland’s children gone? Number of young kids down by a third. No mystery there. I suspect that parents have moved to where their kids can get better quality education. And away from the cultural decay.
A Redditor was surprised to learn that Seattle's population growth was not from new births, but by immigration. International migration, to be specific. Seattle Times would have you believe that most of the immigrants are Asian techies that work for companies like Microsoft. But although the top countries of origin are supposedly:
The top languages spoken in the public schools are:
Meanwhile, Seattle is offering six months of free rent to help fill empty storefronts. The program is Seattle Restored, and to apply you must satisfy:
Equity: Is the business Woman and/or Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC) owned, and/or does the project serve women/BIPOC communities?And Seattle's renter protections effort failed miserably, as a $39 million 254-unit apartment complex meant to serve lower-income residents and provide affordable housing failed and went into receivership.
And Yahoo!News reports Backlash grows over Seattle mayor's 'same old' homeless drug strategy. The strategy is to keep NGOs employed.
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I had to laugh at this: Redditor wants help to determine how Trump accounts for kids are bad. It came from Trump, so it must be bad, right? 🤔 Saving money starting very early can be the pathway to financial comfort in later years. It's what the rich do, and Trump wants to set kids up for this kind of advantage. But the TDS is strong in some people. Must resist!
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