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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: December 4th, 2024

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  • I totally agree. I’m not sure what career you’re looking to launch into, but it definitely makes more sense to just meet expectations at your current job and save your energy for whatever studying or networking or whatever you need to do to get to where you want to be. Your time here is short; your spare time is shorter; your fully able-bodied spare time is already running short. Take a Saturday off and do that hike you’ve been putting off or visit that city and walk around or whatever. Fun activities will be a lot more draining and require more time to recover from when you’re older and your knees and back have more wear and tear from the labor you’re doing now.

    I think it’s getting more and more common to see stores running a skeleton crew. Your store will probably downsize through attrition. They’ll just expect the same amount of same quality work to be done with a reduction. Don’t speed up. Tell others not to speed up either. This is not a temporary hurdle to get past, it’s a test run to see if it can be the new normal. And when it fails, they’ll still try to avoid hiring and just throw a few extra hours at the part time people. I hope that they can understand that their availability needs to be pretty firm and they don’t give an inch on that. I had a conversation with somebody like a month ago about encroachment on their work schedule and it was really helpful for them to hear me tell them that their availability is their availability and that “the hours outside of that are not for sale.” Your time is your time, and what you do with it is your business and nobody else’s.





  • I don’t know of any piston that can initiate a fusion reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to be possible. But I think that such a thing would take teams of top researchers decades to figure out with any sort of reliability.

    Regarding the rankine cycle, the diagram would need to be much more detailed. From what I am understanding of your diagram, no it couldn’t work that way. I don’t know a lot about fusion, but from my experience in fission nuclear power plants and combined cycle natural gas plants, I can make some assumptions about what to expect from a rankine cycle plant regardless of fuel source. You would need to ensure that only superheated (dry) steam is ever touching the steam turbine blades, and there is a ton of essential equipment that does exactly that. There are a ton of resources out there to learn more about this, and I’d recommend searching “rankine cycle explained” on YouTube to get started. General overview stuff might touch on things like drums and reheaters and condensers and vacuum pumps, but every little piece like that could use its own deep dive, really. It’s fascinating stuff.

    Overall, I think there is already a general understanding of how to make a fusion rankine cycle power plant work, and it’s now just a matter of getting a sustainable reaction and then finding the optimal design and operation to safely and reliably maximize the extraction of that thermal energy to perform work. Should this be more like a BWR or a PWR plant? What do refuel outages look like? What sort of preventive maintenance will be required? What sort of hazards will workers be exposed to, and how can we mitigate that?

    I’d love to see commercial fusion reactor plants in my lifetime, but I don’t think I’ll see it. We’re pretty close to seeing fission SMR plants really get going. As much as I hate AI shit, their data centers are power hungry af which has pushed these companies to think about providing their own on-site power to relieve strain from the grid, and these SMRs are kinda perfect for this. If we could see that scaled up or at least batched into array designs, we buy a lot of time to figure out fusion while shifting to a greener energy solution or at least replace the existing and very much aging fission plants we already have. And maybe SMRs can teach us something about fusion along the way.

    Stay curious :)


  • So you mean more like a power plant? Are you thinking like brayton cycle, rankine cycle, or both (combined cycle)?

    I don’t know much about fusion, but a big part of how a brayton works at that scale is air. For a jet engine the combustion expands, spinning the turbine or afterwards, and this spins the axially connected compressor section which sucks and squeezes air prior to the combustion chamber. A piston engine would be less continuous, so might be better suited? But in any case, this relies on whether fusion moves a shitload of air like a combustion engine does, (and like I said idk if it does,) and if it does then I guess it could be possible so long as pressures and temperatures stayed within metallurgical limits. I also don’t know how economical it could be, but let’s pretend that this is entirely exploratory and costs don’t matter. I’m not gonna shit on your idea because the truth is that I don’t know and you could be predicting a breakthrough idea 100 or 50 or 20 years ahead. Is fusion something that can quickly explode like in a piston engine in the first place or would it be better to run continuously through a turbine? Is that even possible? Idk.

    Regarding the rankine cycle, that’s the assumed application of fusion power. It’s just the newest, best idea for how to boil water to superheated steam to spin turbines and condense back to feedwater. I only even bring this up because you specifically mentioned a steam generator, and that really only makes sense if you’re utilizing the rankine cycle. Combined cycle would be using that piston/turbine engine thing from earlier but recycle the exhaust heat to a HRSG which loops to a steam turbine and condenser and back. But you need a large volume of fairly continuous hot exhaust flow for this, so it’s wholly dependent on that thing I said I don’t know lol.

    We need some input from people who know something about fusion. I don’t really know how we would control fusion while throwing a shitload of air into it and getting an even bigger shitload of air out the other end. Without that input, idk how anything other than rankine could be managed.







  • I know you said first person and I’m gonna mention a third person one that’s fun, so I’m sorry if first person was truly a necessary piece of this for some reason…

    Warhammer 40k Space Marines 2 came out pretty recently and it kinda feels like it’s 80-20 Gears Of War and Doom. You can play co-op for both the main campaign and a separate side mission kind of thing, and the side thing is highly replayable because you level shit up as you go and then you can play on higher difficulties to get more loot. But they can spoil the story if you do a bunch of the missions ahead of the story chapters since you’re kinda playing out the B squad adventures concurrently with the A squad missions. There’s also a pvp mode, and a horde mode is coming too.

    It’s far from perfect. Load times are very long. The lore is tedious if you don’t care, but it’s honestly so fun that I don’t care that I don’t care about the lore. The devs are very much actively working on the game, bringing frequent updates and fixes, plus just straight up rolling out free additional content when ready. And there is crossplay if one of you is on console and the other is PC or something.

    The party is 3 player, but if you just want 1 on 1 time with your friend, you can set your party to private and have a bot play your 3rd and he will heal you when you go down and help with the fight somewhat. This is especially nice while you’re learning the game.



  • Thanks for doing the legwork. That was a good read. It makes a lot of sense now that I see real numbers. It even makes sense that he’s pretty confrontational to establish that he won’t put up with it. Real teacher energy there lol, and I think I’ve heard him say that he was a teacher earlier in his life.

    I’m glad I didn’t just outright believe that claim about plants. I was trying to be open minded if there were any credible bits of evidence to prove otherwise, but I really didn’t have any reason to believe he used plants until I saw that accusation. How fucking silly to say such a thing with absolutely nothing to back it up and keep saying “look it up.” Well you looked it up and found a reasonable explanation from the man himself lol. Thanks :)