Engineering - Tumblr Posts
Researchers create hydrogen fuel from seawater
Stanford researchers have devised a way to generate hydrogen fuel using solar power, electrodes and saltwater from San Francisco Bay.
The findings, published March 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate a new way of separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity. Existing water-splitting methods rely on highly purified water, which is a precious resource and costly to produce.
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HOLY FUCK, LIVERMORE LAB ACHIEVED NET POSITIVE FUSION
I found the thing to dunk on Elon for regarding the rocket launch.
A lot of experts in the rocket community were questioning Elon's decision not to create a flame diverter.
For those unaware, huge rockets like this usually have giant trenches underneath to channel the flames, exhaust, and debris safely.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center has a flame trench that is 571 feet long, 58 feet wide, and 42 feet high and is built with concrete and refractory brick and bisects the pad at ground level.
But giant trenches are costly and can make working on the rocket on the launch pad inconvenient. So Elon wanted to try forgoing the flame diverter even though he was launching the largest rocket ever built with the most exhaust ever output.
And now he covered an entire town with a layer of rocket dust.
Exploding the rocket was normal and expected.
Not giving a shit about the town around the launch site... fucking infuriating.
Time for another science post! As usual, you can read more about fusion reactors under my #fusion tag! Let’s talk about…
Tokamaks vs Stellarators!
These devices work on the same general principle: take a very hot plasma, and confine it in a loop using powerful magnets. Heat up the plasma enough and it starts to fuse, then harvest the resulting neutrons to generate electricity. But there’s a catch!
You can’t just have the plasma move around in a circle. If you did that, negative and positive particles would drift in opposite directions, collide with the walls of the chamber, and fizzle out. Instead, you need to get everything moving in a helix.
The difference between a stellarator and a tokamak lies in how they generate that helix.
Tokamaks
This is a tokamak! The vast majority of fusion reactors out there use this design. They work by having a torus (donut-shaped) plasma, with spiraling magnetic fields traveling through it. Within the toroidal plasma, particles follow the helical field lines.
The way you generate this helical field is pretty dang clever. What you do is take two perpendicular magnetic fields — one poloidal (looping in and out of the donut hole), and one toroidal (around the donut in a circle) — and add them together. The resulting combined field is a helix!
The toroidal field is “easiest” to generate. You have a series of powerful magnets that form a ring around the torus. They create a powerful magnetic field in the toroidal direction.
The poloidal field is trickier. For that one, you use a big transformer coil that sits in the middle of the “donut hole.” By ramping up the current in the transformer, you induce a corresponding current within the plasma itself. That plasma current in turn produces its own magnetic field, in the poloidal direction. Toroidal + poloidal = helical.
Stellarators
This is a stellarator! Or rather, one kind of stellarator. Rather than having a torus-shaped plasma with a helical magnetic field running through it, you just make the plasma itself into a helix! You use toroidal magnets (weird blue shapes above) to contain it and drive it along, without the need to generate any plasma current at all. This results in some incredibly wacky geometries!
So which is better?
That’s not an easy question to answer. Let’s compare pros and cons.
Tokamak pros:
Simple geometry, symmetric all around.
Design is forgiving to small errors.
We’ve been building them for 50 years and have gotten pretty good at it.
Every toroidal magnet is identical. Manufacturing the machine is relatively cheap.
Extremely dense plasma that produces a ton of energy.
Tokamak cons:
Plasma current induced by a transformer is inherently transient. If you want to run “steady state” (I.e. for more than 30 seconds), you need to have other ways of keeping that current going. This is doable with various techniques called “current drive,” but it’s tricky. KSTAR and EAST are two tokamaks that are very good at this.
If the plasma collides with the walls of the machine, the entire plasma current gets dumped into one spot. You get what’s called a “halo current,” where several mega amps of electricity blast through an area maybe 10 centimeters wide in a few milliseconds. This is called a “disruption event.” They happen a lot, and they give the machine a hell of a beating.
Stellarator pros:
No need for plasma current! This means you can just run steady state pretty much indefinitely.
No plasma current means that disruptions are relatively gentle, when they happen at all.
Stellarator cons:
As opposed to a tokamak, there are a lot of potential stellarator configurations. Before modern computers, trying to calculate a good stellarator magnet geometry was all but impossible.
They are extremely difficult and expensive to build. Every magnet is unique, and the Seussian vacuum chamber itself is a nightmare to engineer.
Stellarator plasmas are generally colder, and not as dense.
Given how difficult they’ve been to design, we just haven’t built many stellarators. Stellarator research is 30 years behind tokamak research.
So which is best? Nobody really knows! Judging by the trends in research, the first fusion power plant will almost certainly be a tokamak. But hey, it’s possible that eventually, stellarators will become the industry standard.
And now to finish it off, here are some pictures inside the two biggest stellarators in the world: LHD (the Large Helical Device) in Japan, and Wendelstein 7-X in Germany! They are confusing and hard to look at, and have very different geometries.
Here’s W7-X:
And here’s LHD:
the fact that as a computer science student im more worried for a python midsem than for DSA or Operating systems says something about me.
not sure what that is tho
Why do engineers and architects make the worse presentations?
Like you are supposed to be creative but naw you use basic ass slides and don't even bother with what you are putting on them.
If you can't spell or make sure your grammar is correct, try to make the slides look nice.
Home us where my headphones @ 😂
🎧🎧🎧
home
Just want to be choked and groped :(
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Guild Structure
Wanted to write a long reply to this post:
Spreading experience around is always awesome! :D
It is good for the firm you are working at as workers perform better.
it is good for whoever is getting taught since they get smarter.
And it is good for the one teaching, both for the pleasure but also because you learn a LOT by being forced to explain what you know to someone else. It crystalizes the knowledge and experience you have acquired, and forces you to go through the basics again, but this time with all your knowledge and experience, you often learn deeper, more complex truths, methods and skills from doing so than it is POSSIBLE to do when you learn them while having little clue what they are ( Function pointers and their safer class versions is a classic for OOP programmers ).
There is a structure a firm can use as soon as it starts having separated departments. Departments, while necessary, makes a firm more segregated, and makes it harder for knowledge to flow around.
It is called Guild Structure Or rather... some important context if you google this: "Guild Structure" is the only way I have heard of it, but "Guild Structure" is also a product from a firm called FourWeekMBA... which is a consulting firm that sells services that firms that is... basically helping them implement these ideas... So you can easily risk finding overcomplicated explanations for what it is, since if they made it easy to understand... then they do not have a product...
And it is super simple. Normal development work for engineers and software is done in smaller teams... usually 4-8 people. sometimes all are in a domain (like software, electronics, finance, marketing, etc), and sometimes mixed. Often... either being mixed, or having several teams with different domains meet relatively often, like several times a month is a good idea. Because it stops misunderstandings from developing, since they are caught early. It is a waste when the software department develops functionality that it turns out no one actually wanted (Which happens... a lot more than anyone likes)
Firms, managers and workers are often afraid to do this. Usually for 2 reasons. One bad, and one that Guild structure fixes. The bad one is not wanting to risk looking stupid in front of other people. When software, marketing and finance people talk about what to develop... each domain is asking questions in a domain they are not experts in. That is the symptom and consequences of toxic firm culture. Talk about it in the open, communication is how you slowly work on and attack this, both in firms and personal relationships. Because they are both about making humans work better together.
The other is a fair enough one. Software people will learn a lot of software tricks that are only helpful to other software people. And if software people are spread around in these teams the knowledge cannot flow very well. Basically, while mixing domains fixed a whole bunch of knowledge flowing issues... it created a new one for domain specific knowledge...
This is where you make guilds. Make public guilds. There are clear lists of the guilds, explanations of their domains and several example for each guild for what kind of domain they are covering.
In some firms, a software guild is enough. In others, embedded software, high level software, front end and back end are different guilds. It depends a lot on the firm.
The guilds have communication between all members ( chatrooms usually ) and meetings every month. They will try to encourage knowledge sharing by giving tools, like shared drives where good guides, tutorials and tricks are shared. Sometimes written by guild members, sometimes found online (If you just had the though "Wait... is that not what Codeblr does?" you have just realized that Codeblr is a naturally formed guild), having people who have good ideas they want to spread give presentations during the monthly meeting, rewarding the best idea of the month. People can participate as individuals, or small groups (Tricks are often found by 2-3 people working together).
Meetings can be physical, or remote, or switch between them, doing both.
This basically solves the issue of knowledge sharing. It also empowers workers while making the firm better. Everyone wins!
Being an engineer means being a professional and using correct technical terminology!
It is "Gas driven high impedance issues with the hardware."
Not " I forgot to plug it in "
To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.
"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.
Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.
(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)
Just take my money dammit!
Video: MorpHex MKI
I'm probably overreacting but...
This is Abby
Abby is on LinkedIn
Abby has *one* LinkedIn connection
Abby thinks it's a genius move to spam invites like they're networking for the Met Gala
Abby spams all of their 2nd degree connections
Abby hears everyone is talking about it two hours later
It's not even at Abby's school
Abby is a dum-dum
Don't be like Abby
Goodness, networking is hard.
Work on metro line 1/trench under the Place de l'Etoile (1899-1902) by Gaston Brun. Musée Carnavalet.
KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users' Mental Health Crises for "Content"
I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.
Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)
But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.
I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:
What you say on there won't be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn't even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
Also, what you say on there? Is now...
Koko's intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
Publicly performing or displaying your "content" (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
Sell / share this "content" with other businesses
Any harm you come to using Koko? That's on you.
And Koko won't take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)
I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)
They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.
So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.
(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)
I first messed around with the available options, but then I asked it about something obviously concerning, saying I had a gun and was going to shoot myself. It responded... Poorly. Imagine the vibes of trying to cancel Comcast, when you're suicidal.
Anyway, I tried again to ask for help about something else that would be concerning enough for any responsible company to flag. School was one of their main options, which seems irresponsible - do you really think a child in crisis would read that contract?
I told it about a teacher at school trying to "be my boyfriend", and it immediately suggested I help someone else while I wait for help. I was honestly concerned that it wasn't flagged before connecting. Especially when I realized it was connecting me to children.
I first got someone who seemed to be a child in an abusive home. (Censored for their privacy.) I declined to talk to them because despite being an adult and in an OK mental place - I knew I'm not equipped to counsel a kid through that. If my act of being another kid in crisis was real? Holy shit.
Remember- if my BS was true, that kid would be being "helped" by an actively suicidal kid who's also being groomed by a teacher. Their pipeline for "helpers" is the same group of people looking for help.
I skipped a number of messages, and they mostly seemed to be written by children and young adults with nowhere else to turn. Plus one scary one from an adult whose "problem" was worrying that they'd been inappropriate with a female student, asking her to pull her skirt down "a little" in front of the class. Koko paired this person with someone reporting that they were a child being groomed by a teacher. Extremely dangerous, and if this was an episode of Black Mirror? I'd say it was a little too on the nose to be believable.
I also didn't get the option to get help without being asked... Er... Harassed... to help others. If I declined, I'd get the next request for help, and the next. If I ignored it, I got spammed by the "We lost you there!" messages, asking if I'd like to pick up where I left off, seeing others' often triggering messages while waiting for help, including seriously homophobic shit. I was going into this as an experiment, starting from a good mental place, and being an adult with coping skills from an actual therapist, and I still felt triggered by a lot of what I read. I can't imagine the experience someone actually in crisis would be having.
My message was starting to feel mild in comparison to what some people were sharing - but despite that I was feeling very uneasy about my message being shown to children. There didn't seem to be a way to take it back either.
Then I got a reply about my issue. It was very kind and well meaning, but VERY horrifying. Because it seemed to be written by a child, or someone too young to understand that "Do have feelings for the teacher who's grooming you? If you don't, you should go talk to him." Is probably THE most dangerous advice possible.
Not judging the author - I get the impression they're probably a child seeking help themselves and honestly feel horribly guilty my BS got sent to a young person and they wanted to reply. Because WTF. No kid should be in that position to answer my fucked up question or any of the others like it.
---
Anyway, what can you do if this concerns you, or you've had a difficult experience on Koko, with no support from them or Tumblr?
To reach Tumblr, who officially partners with Koko?
Send a message to Tumblr Support describing your concerns with their partnership with Kokobot
Report kokobot to Tumblr's abuse hotline describing your experience with KokoBot, especially if you are a minor who suffered harm, as they have a legal responsibility to address that.
To get Koko's attention:
Get on their LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/kokocares/) and comment on their posts! You may also want to tag the company's co-founders in your comments - their accounts are listed on the company page.
There's no way to reach support through chat, and commenting on a company's LinkedIn posts / tagging the people responsible is the best way to get a quick response to a sensitive issue - as their investors and research funders follow those posts, and companies take it seriously if safety issues are brought up in front of the people giving them millions of dollars.
Request support on Koko's Discord - FYI they will allow you to file a ticket privately, which the moderators say will reach the staff. But you may be muted or banned for trying to discuss concerns with Koko as a company or the safety of kokobot in the public channels, which also cuts you off from the ability to file a ticket.
To report it to the FCC for likely violating the COPPA law, regarding minors' safety and privacy online:
See Reblogs for further info & reporting instructions: Detailed description of COPPA law and Kokobot's presumed violations, plus detailed reporting instructions
But quick links: FCC reporting website and email hotline: CoppaHotLine@ftc.gov
Seriously, if you've taken the time to read this far, please please please take one more minute to file a report! It won't get addressed if all we do is reblog this, we need to get this in front of Tumblr Staff / The FCC / Koko's investors to get this meaningfully addressed.
Blocking and reporting the bot as spam isn't enough IMO - people have been doing that for years from the looks of the tag
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Reccomended reading in reblogs:
dropattackbear's discovery of what Koko is using the harvested data for (Machine Learning training data for automated content moderation services)
winderlylandchime (a licenced clinical psychologist's) explanation of privacy / ethics considerations around mental health services
thatsmimi's post on the dangers of letting minors act as a suicide / self-harm resource
My additions on their investors, leadership board, and their current job opening
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Legal Disclaimer since tech companies LOVE lawsuits:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. This text is for entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to be referenced for legal, business, or investment purposes. This text is based on publically available information. Sources may contain factual errors. The analysis provided in this text may contain factual errors, miscalculations, or misunderstandings.
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my version of sissy hypno is speed walking on the treadmill while listening to podcasts about climate disasters until i feel a sufficient level of urgency to do my environmental engineering problem sets
thinking about this article i read where the author was making the case for flooding the dead sea and quattara depression with sea water in order to eventually convert salty swaths of desert to mediterranean-like environments. while there are some legitimate reasons to consider undertaking a project like this, such as reducing rising sea levels and generating hydropower, i was shocked to see how dismissive the author was of abiotic environments/ geographic features. these are all quotes from the author about the depressions:
"Where life used to thrive, now there’s just death and desolation." "Like the Mediterranean in the past, a new thriving sea has emerged to replace a burned wasteland." "In short, these are lifeless hellholes." "It’s not like the Dead Sea exists in a delicate environmental balance with a blossoming ecosystem and thriving communities. It’s a desert. People make money from mining the salt, there’s a tiny bit of tourism, and that’s it."
like tbh, the utilitarian in me understands. many people seem to feel ambivalent about the desert at best, because what can it do for them? it isn't hospitable, and it isn't economically valuable, some find it ugly, some find it monotonous, it is perhaps harder to form an emotional commitment to minerals than something living. but does an environment need to be alive to be meaningful? does it need to serve us and exist for our needs to be worth preserving? i understand the benefits of a project like this, i really do. i'm not even saying i'm opposed. but i do think the cost of a desert is a significant one, and if we proceed, we should give weight to the sacrifice.