Puzzling out the power supply to Urals atom plants.

THE DECRYPTION OF A PICTURE, by Henry S. Lowenhaupt

One day in August 1958 Charles V. Reeves showed me a picture of the Sverdlovsk Central Dispatching Office of the Urals Electric Power System which he had found in the July issue of Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Look magazine (Figure 1a). He remarked that at the Boston Edison Company he had controlled electric power generation and flow in the Boston metropolitan area from just such a dispatching station. //

[Source: Studies in Intelligence. Volume II. Issue: Summer. Year: 1967]

Dear Dr. Zoomie – I was watching The Man in the High Castle and there was a bit about weapons-grade uranium posing a health risk to people around it. Is this true? //

The short version is that uranium – even highly enriched uranium – is simply not very radioactive. I can confirm this from personal measurements – I’ve made radiation dose rate measurements on depleted uranium, natural uranium, and enriched uranium and none of them are very radioactive. Here’s why: //

. It takes about 100 rem to cause radiation sickness, about 400 rem to give someone a 50% chance of death (without medical treatment), and nearly 1000 rem to be fatal. With a dose rate of 1 R/hr at a distance of 1 meter this part’s easy – it’ll take 25 hours of exposure to cause a change in blood cell counts, 400 hours to give a 50% risk of death, and 1000 hours to cause death. At a speed of 60 mph it takes about 50 hours to cross the US – not even enough time to develop radiation sickness. And that’s for a person sitting for that whole time at a distance of 1 meter from the uranium...

Urenco is an international supplier of enrichment services and fuel cycle products for the civil nuclear industry, serving utility customers worldwide who provide low carbon electricity through nuclear generation. //

SWU stands for Separative Work Unit. It is the standard measure of the effort required to separate U235 and U238.

Choose your relevant calculator from the list below. Enter the known quantities before pressing the calculate button to see the result.

DDopson Ars Tribunus Militum
22y
1,933
Subscriptor
Doc12 said:
If someone has access to industrial centrifuges then HALEU seems like a convenience rather than a necessity. Could use un-enriched uranium in your centrifuges and would just take longer to get to the end point?
Yes, quite a bit longer. If you are a nation-state that can build an industrial scale centrifuge operation, then any reactor fuel is a proliferation risk. It takes several times more effort to concentrate to 5% than from 5% to 90%.

There's a concept called Separation Work Units (SWUs) that can be used to quantify how much centrifuge time is needed to separate x kg of uranium at y% enrichment into an enriched stream at z% enrichment and a tailings stream with <<y% enrichment. And there's a calculator here. https://www.urenco.com/swu-calculator

Let's say you want to produce 1 kg of 90% enriched U235.

Starting from 176 kg of natural uranium, it takes 227 SWUs of effort if you are exhausting tailings at 0.2%. Or if you exhaust tailings at 0.5% it only takes 154 SWU, but then you need a whopping 424 kg of natural Uranium feedstock. Either way, it's a lot of work.

Starting with 20 kg of 5% enriched reactor fuel, drained down to 0.5% tailings, is 48 SWU. Or if you can afford be wasteful of 5% enriched reactor fuel, 30 kg + 30 SWU gets you to the same place with 2% tailings, something that only makes sense if you've stolen the reactor fuel rather than enriching it from natural uranium.

Starting with 5 kg of 20% enriched HALEU drops the separation effort to 12 SWU, assuming 2% tailings. Or if you stole a lot of it, and only need to extract half the U235 content, 10% tailings is 7.4 SWU per kg of weapons-grade HEU.

The key point is that the greatest investment of separation work comes in the early enrichment stages where vast quantities of natural uranium are concentrated into relatively smaller quantities of moderately enriched uranium. It takes several times more effort to concentrate to 5% than from 5% to 90%.

So this risk isn't unique to HALEU. Regular reactor fuel is almost as problematic. //

DDopson Ars Tribunus Militum
22y
1,933
Subscriptor

clewis said:
Timed to the µs? I'll just use a Raspberry π and a real time operating system. If we need ns, I might have to buy some speciality expansion boards.

While modern technology has rendered trivial some aspects of the problem that were much harder in the pre-transistor era, it's still not quite as simple as that. You need high quality explosive initiators that will trigger detonation with a predictable lag, versus all of the default solutions have unacceptably high variability such that one side goes before the other, creating an asymmetric implosion. The solution is often found by driving enormous currents through wires or foil embedded in relatively sensitive explosives, and in 1945, achieving such a rapid current rise was a major challenge. Today, someone developing similar high-precision initiators would benefit tremendously from the plethora of off-the-shelf power electronics (much more important even than the Raspberry pi), but it's still something that a real engineer needs to spend some time testing very carefully or your weapon will dramatically underperform it's designed yield. //

DDopson Ars Tribunus Militum
22y
1,933
Subscriptor

Wickwick said:
Sandia National Labs has (at least) one group which specializes in analyzing the risk of improvised industrial goods for explosive yield. Many years ago I helped adapt some lab equipment so it could be used in a cloud of muriatic acid as if someone had detonated a railcar full of the stuff. Just last year at a conference I was speaking to one of their researchers about the threats posed by things like diesel tankers, LNG ships, etc. None of those things are viewed particularly highly on the threat matrix compared to something like ANFO (Beirut port explosion). Fuels have a lot of stored chemical energy, but you can't couple that to the environment in a manner that creates a large explosion without having an oxidizer intimately mixed in. Achieving the near-nuclear-level blast of a massive fuel-air burst bomb is a non-trivial engineering feat. //

+1, and note that weaponized fuel-air bombs don't just use any old fuel laying about. They have a specifically engineered mix of a highly volatile liquid with a wide detonation range (better tolerance for uneven dispersion), such as ethylene oxide, with a powder like aluminum, which boosts the energy release per unit of oxygen consumed.

Poorly dispersed commercial fuels badly underachieve their on-paper energetic value.

The US is still regulating some enriched uranium based on an analysis from the 1950s. //

High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.

This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.

“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper. //

Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.

“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago. //

According to his team, an amount between 700–1,000 kg of HALEU is enough to build a bomb with a 15-kiloton yield—roughly as powerful as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Building one of these bombs would be a matter of days or weeks for a rogue country or a terrorist group.

Somewhere along the way, we dropped the original Los Alamos fine print mentioning quantities and tied our security requirements to enrichment levels only. //

Lyman’s team proposes to get back to the Los Alamos study findings and simply classify HALEU as a Category I material in cases when it’s being used in an amount large enough to build a nuclear weapon. “The point of our article is to highlight that pretending HALEU is not weapons-usable could lead to very serious gaps in security if these reactors really become viable and exported to all sorts of places,” Lyman says. //

SFC Ars Centurion
14y
359
Subscriptor++
So you need 1,000Kg to build a bomb. Let's say an armed foreign adversary managed to attack one of these facilities. Exactly how long is it going to take them to both break into the area where the fissile material is being used, get it out of where it's at, and into something to transport it. That is roughly #2,200 lbs we're talking about. Could you do that with a normal moving van? Absolutely. But can you do it in under an hour, without killing everyone involved via radiation poisoning? I'm skeptical. //

GottaSaySomething Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,342
Ed: I totally missed the point. The point of the article is selling it to "iffy" states where you can't control what happens to it. Not it being stolen from the producing country's reactors. //

Quisquis Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
12y
6,846
Heads up for the discussion:

1 ton of uranium is only about two cubic feet. //

Pueo Ars Scholae Palatinae
10y
1,005

jandrese said:
I think it's more of a case where terrorists also get centrifuges...

HALEU still poses more of a risk if we're worried about covert enrichment because by the time you're at 20% you've already done about 90% of the separative work necessary to reach weapons grade uranium. This means you have only 10% of the signal or 10% of the time available to catch the covert enrichment of HALEU vs the cover enrichment of natural uranium. //

Atterus Ars Tribunus Militum
6y
1,663
Time to end the technological dark ages caused by nuclear fears. Nearly every issue surrounding the tech is the result of government meddling and red tape along with lying about providing a place to store what little waste there COULD be if reprocessing was allowed. All due to unfounded fear mongering largely based on a shitty film, braindead communist planners in Russia, and a journalist that thought it was scandalous concrete had elevated radioactivity... decades of stagnation as a result. //

Nick31 Seniorius Lurkius
7y
6
I was interested in this, until I saw that the only source was from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the same group who specializes in fear-mongering and hysteria with their ridiculous "Doomsday Clock." In this case they seem to be using their hypothetical disaster scenarios to ask for the last thing the nuclear power industry needs: more government regulations.

The unanimous court in Vullo held that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had sufficiently alleged a First Amendment claim against the New York superintendent of financial services. While the vindication of free speech rights is the top-line takeaway from Thursday’s 9-0 decision, there is much more to glean from the 20-page opinion and two concurrences. Here are five key points.

1. The Decision Focused Solely on Government Coercion //

2. Some Great Language for Lovers of Free Speech //

“The Constitution does not distinguish between ‘comply or I’ll prosecute’ and ‘comply and I’ll look the other way,’” the Supreme Court explained, stressing whether something is “analyzed as a threat or as an inducement,” is irrelevant—“the conclusion is the same,” namely the communications are “coercive” and thus violate the First Amendment.

This judicial gloss to “coercion” provides a fulsome protection of free speech rights by allowing “coercion” to be established by either “a threat” or “an inducement.” The court’s unanimous opinion includes additional broad language further protecting American rights to freedom of speech. //

3. The Disinformation Industry Are The Baddies at Protecting Democracy

In ruling in favor of the NRA, the Supreme Court stressed that “at the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.” That passage provides an important reminder to Americans of the value of diverse viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas and a warning that suppressing disfavored speech is inherently destructive to a sustained democracy.

The trend of China-based companies in Indiana has developed through centralized planning with the help of a CCP-linked nonprofit. //

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), an unelected upgrade to the traditional commerce department, helps select and develop businesses in Indiana. The IEDC has set up many China-owned companies in the state, including 25 currently operational, according to the IEDC general counsel.

The trend of China-based companies in Indiana has not developed organically but through centralized planning with the help of a Chinese Communist Party-linked nonprofit. A contract on the IEDC’s website shows that it has been paying the America China Society of Indiana (ACSI) to facilitate deals with China-owned businesses. The contract outlines IEDC’s interest in “identifying and creating a pipeline of [foreign direct investment] prospects in China” and preparing trip itineraries, among other tasks.

While most news outlets are focused on Roaring Kitty, the jobs report, or Hunter Biden, the most consequential news item of the year may be unfolding before our very eyes in our hemisphere. The Russians are coming. But so, too, are the Chinese and Iranians. In fact, they’re already here.

We’re not talking about the border so the right isn’t covering it. We’re not talking about Trump, so the mainstream media isn’t covering it. We’re talking about the war coming to South America designed to distract the United States.

To understand the significance of this, we must first recognize the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape at the expense of a distracted and weakened United States. An emboldened Russia, China, and Iran have coordinated internally to bypass international sanctions, while externally, they have provoked conflict on a growing number of fronts. //

American oil companies are actively exploring the oil-rich Essequibo region of Guyana. Venezuela is preparing to invade it. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Quds Forces are in Venezuela already, along with both Russian and Chinese military advisors. The Venezuelans have been using Iranian coast guard vessels to patrol the river border with Guyana.

Russia, China, and Iran are in Venezuela, helping them prepare an invasion of an American and British ally to seize American-backed oil fields. The only thing Joe Biden is doing is letting Venezuela sell oil to fund the invasion.

Again, and you must note this objective fact, notwithstanding those old denominations that long ago started in the United States as egalitarian with male and female pastoral roles, every single denomination that has decided to abandon traditional male pastoral roles for men and women has ultimately moved from embracing just female pastors to also embracing gay ordination and gay marriage.

You can say that will never happen to you, but that is what they all said. Look at the PCUSA, ELCA, United Church of Christ, Episcopalians, and now the United Methodist Church. If your church thinks contemporary times mean updating the role of pastor to women, it won’t be long before those same contemporary times mean updating even more.

There is no greater example before you now than the United Methodist Church where the majority of congregants rejected gay ordination and marriage. But progressives promoted themselves within, taking over leadership roles, and ultimately, despite a majority against them, took over and forced a schism.

Our current nuclear regulatory system is resulting in millions of premature deaths and effectively halting any progress on global warming. It must be changed. But to what?

The GKG proposes that nuclear power be regulated by a variant of the same system by which we regulate other hazardous but beneficial activities. We call that system Underwriter Certification (UCert).

This slide deck is the second of two part presentation on UCert. It outlines how Underwriter Certification would be implemented; and explains why it is feasible. All it takes is the political will.

Our current nuclear regulatory system is resulting in millions of premature deaths and effectively halting any progress on global warming. It must be changed. But to what?

The GKG proposes that nuclear power be regulated by a variant of the same system by which we regulate other hazardous but beneficial activities. We call that system Underwriter Certification (UCert).

This slide deck is the first of two part presentation on UCert. It attempts to explain why we must scrap the current regulatory system in which there is an enormous chasm between an omnipotent regulator's incentives and societal welfare.

This article is the 10th installment of the VICI Report, a comprehensive multi-part series exploring the sophisticated use of technology in political operations. This series aims to uncover the processes, mechanisms, tools, and technologies used by Democrats to master our political processes and to develop strategies that answer and ultimately defeat their manipulations in 2024 and beyond.

Read the previous article in this series, The Tech Takeover, which discusses how the systematizing effect of technology has fundamentally transformed political mechanics, or start from the beginning of our series.

History and current society are exceptionally harsh on conservative leaders. Because conservatism often finds itself on the side of rules and law, the leaders end up like a parent who always has to say no. Modern liberalism is rooted in essentially telling everyone yes, every time. Liberal leaders’ loyalty is to the whims of the crowd. Conservativism is loyal to moral law. Conservatives are willing to draw a line, whether people are offended or not, and it usually doesn’t go over well.

Things change in a crisis, though. //

In a crisis the people want leaders who have something else as their anchor – something above the noise of the crowd – something called conviction.

Netanyahu may be many things. He may be overbearing, he may sometimes come on too strong, and he may sometimes drift amiss in his zeal. But one thing that cannot said of him is that he does not love his country enough to do the hard things for them. He is willing to be hated to do what he believes is right. He has endured criticism on literally every side. He has been immovable when the whole world was against him, literally. //

Whether it be days, weeks, months, or years that Netanyahu has left in office, eventually, the next leader will come. They will have their chance to leave their legacy and make decisions that chart the course for the nation of Israel. We will elect our own president at the end of this year. Whatever the course may be, for both of our nations, let us hope that we are led by strong men or women of courage and moral fortitude, for it is a pitiful thing for a great nation to be led by a coward.

How do we know that Biden's forces would shrug off his orders and refuse to act out his will? Because it already did happen in Texas. Texas was ordered by the Supreme Court to do as Biden says and take down the measures they set up to stop illegal immigration into the country, to which the Texas National Guard indicated they were in a "Come and take it" kind of mood and Biden's Border Patrol union refused to take things further knowing that it would escalate things to a very dangerous point.

As I said then, if Biden can't even count on his own border patrol to act against open defiance from a state's national guard, what chance does he have of having a military that would obey his command to assault their fellow Americans? Sure, there'd probably be a couple of thousand willing to get bloody, but even they would lose their taste for it once they found out how overwhelmingly outnumbered and unpopular they were.

Biden wouldn't have any F-15s because he'd likely have no one to fly them. //

Mongo FKA ya think?
4 hours ago
I never imagined an American president would actually talk about killing American citizens with the American military. Joe Biden is a demonic scumbag. //

kamief
4 hours ago
Can you just imagine if Trump said something like that?
Headline news on every alphabet network, 24/7 none stop.
Problem is nobody besides the most die in the wool of us has an idea in hell that the puppet said this.
What gets me more nervous is the closer the election gets the more desperate the rats seem to get.
I would put nothing past the rat bastards, even starting a civil war. The right would be blamed. Every killing they would show on the news would be the fault of the right. No matter what.
At that point I think these wise words come into play. Then all hell breaks loose.

“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. TRUE TERROR will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”

– Author Unknown //

Robert A Hahn
3 hours ago
The Viet Cong had no F-14s. The Taliban didn't even have biplanes. It is just very difficult to beat committed, sneaky people in their own country.

Alternative historical fiction is a popular genre in America, where readers explore possibilities such as Napoleon deciding not to invade Russia or a Confederate victory in the Civil War, pondering the hypothetical impact on world history. In honor of Maritime Day 2024, let's consider what would have happened if the United States had fought the Second World War without a strong Merchant Marine and the tens of thousands of courageous mariners who delivered crucial supplies, troops, and weapons across dangerous waters.

It's clear: we would have lost the war or failed to achieve a decisive victory.

During WWII, an estimated 250,000 mariners served, and nearly 10,000 gave their lives, resulting in a higher per capita casualty rate than any of the armed services. Over 700 Merchant Marine ships were sunk by enemy attacks, and hundreds of mariners were held as prisoners of war.

FDR recognized the indispensable role of the Merchant Marine, which he considered the "fourth arm of defense" on par with the navy, army, and air force.
As we observe current global instability and brutal Eurasian conflicts, who will be the visionary leader and advocate who ensures the readiness of our Merchant Marine for the challenges ahead? Its current state is far from adequate. //

The distinction between admirals, generals, and media commentators who freely opine on strategy and theory neglects or casually assumes away the hard reality of logistics. Lately, the strategists have not fared well in deterring conflicts, and the logistic shortcomings in Ukraine and the Middle East are glaring. While those deficiencies are apparent, they pale in comparison to a potential war in the Pacific.

Policymakers properly acknowledge China as the pacing threat, but so few seriously consider the critical importance of logistics and the availability of highly trained and militarily obligated maritime personnel. Decades of war in the Middle East have conditioned us to the luxury of uncontested sea and airspace. We enjoyed large support bases close to combat operations. Our fleet had uninterrupted access to intact and secure port facilities. //

The People's Liberation Army knows that sealift is key to our success. While many debate the vulnerability of our aircraft carriers, they gloss over that our combat power will be short-lived without robust sealift and persistent combat logistics in a war at sea.

Regrettably, we are no longer a true maritime nation; we are now a naval nation.

China, now a bona fide maritime nation, has made significant investments in its merchant fleet and can call on over 5,000 merchant vessels during war. The US has around 80. We must expand our commercial fleet to align with our strategic interests. That means acquiring more ships and enhancing our ability to build, maintain, and quickly repair them. Above all, we cannot prevail without a significant number of merchant marine officers who are ready and obligated to serve the nation when called upon.

We don't know why an announcement of a border change with Lithuania and Finland appeared on the Defense Ministry website with a press release in TASS, but we can rest assured it was, and is, very real. Neither do we know why Russia changed the boundary markers in the Narva River without consultation. These actions are setting the groundwork to gauge a NATO reaction to Russia seizing territory in Finland and the Baltic States. If NATO responds cautiously with Jake Sullivan crapping his drawers over Putin's moods, the next step will be "little green men," followed by Russian troops stepping in to defend Russian minorities in Latvia, Estonia, and on Svalbard Archipelago in Norway.

As I've said many times, you have to pay attention to what your enemies are telling you. Putin has repeatedly said that he does not accept the borders created by the dissolution of the Evil Empire or the end of the Romanov dynasty, for that matter. You don't just wake up one morning and pretend that international borders can be changed at a whim. Putin could conceivably think of a minor land grab against Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland as an act that could fracture NATO and not bring on a larger conflict. That's how he decided to invade Ukraine.

The prosecution team destroyed exculpatory evidence supporting one of the most basic defenses available to President Trump in response to the politically motivated charges in this case. The Special Counsel’s Office has wrongfully alleged that President Trump was aware of the contents of boxes in August 2022, where those boxes were packed by others in the White House and moved to Florida in January 2021. The fact that the allegedly classified documents were buried in boxes and comingled with President Trump’s personal effects from his first term in office strongly supported the defense argument that he lacked knowledge and culpable criminal intent with respect to the documents at issue. Any proximity between allegedly classified documents and other dated materials from years before the move, such as letters and newspapers, would have further strengthened this argument. The prosecution team’s instructions to agents who executed the raid essentially acknowledged these propositions, and directed the agents to take care to document the location of both seized items and potentially privileged materials.

However, the agents disregarded those instructions. The government was more interested in staging—and leaking—manipulated photographs to the press than preserving key exculpatory evidence that has now been lost forever. Trump, ECF No. 48-1.2 The agents did not maintain the order of the documents, and they did not take photographs that would have served as alternative evidence of the documents’ sequence in each box. In July 2023, the agents disclosed this fact during a meeting with prosecutors from the Special Counsel’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (“USAO-SDFL”). But the Office did not timely disclose the notes from that meeting for almost a full year. Indeed, they persisted in that suppression, notwithstanding that the notes were responsive to an October 2023 discovery request from President Trump, while urging the Court to rush to trial based on false assurances that they were in compliance with their discovery obligations.

In hearings during March and April 2024, the Special Counsel’s Office misrepresented to the Court that the pre-raid sequence of the documents was intact. Only after an evidence inspection by counsel for President Trump’s co-defendants revealed the extent of the problem did the Office disclose in a May 3, 2024 filing that the documents were not intact as had been claimed previously. Vague language in that submission and corresponding additional discovery demands from President Trump caused these due process violations to further unravel.

AcuAMP AC current switch, fixed core, 0-100A sensing range, 0.5A non-adjustable trip point, solid state switch, N.O. output, 0.15A @ 120 VAC/VDC output rating.

Something as big, complex, and interactive as a major city, if it is going to be livable, requires predictability and control. The citizens of our cities have to know that every morning they will be able to go to work unimpeded, to do their jobs, to go home again; they have to know that their children are safe walking or riding the bus to school, that they can go to a store without worrying about a flash mob showing up to loot the place. //

And while I am and always will be an advocate of minimal government, this is one of the government's few truly legitimate roles: To protect the liberty and property of the citizens. In that, the government of these cities has failed. //

the blame can only be placed on the elected officials in those cities, the ones who make policy - and, yes, on the voters who elected them.

In 1919, in his poem "The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats wrote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What price common sense? • June 11, 2024 7:30 AM

@Levi B.

“Those who are not familiar with the term “bit-squatting” should look that up”

Are you sure you want to go down that rabbit hole?

It’s an instant of a general class of problems that are never going to go away.

And why in

“Web servers would usually have error-correcting (ECC) memory, in which case they’re unlikely to create such links themselves.”

The key word is “unlikely” or more formally “low probability”.

Because it’s down to the fundamentals of the universe and the failings of logic and reason as we formally use them. Which in turn has been why since at least as early as the ancient Greeks through to 20th Century, some of those thinking about it in it’s various guises have gone mad and some committed suicide.

To understand why you need to understand why things like “Error Correcting Codes”(ECC) will never by 100% effective and deterministic encryption systems especially stream ciphers will always be vulnerable. //

No matter what you do all error checking systems have both false positive and false negative results. All you can do is tailor the system to that of the more probable errors.

But there are other underlying issues, bit flips happen in memory by deterministic processes that apparently happen by chance. Back in the early 1970’s when putting computers into space became a reality it was known that computers were effected by radiation. Initially it was assumed it had to be of sufficient energy to be ‘ionizing’ but later any EM radiation such as the antenna of a hand held two way radio would do with low energy CMOS chips.

This was due to metastability. In practice the logic gates we use are very high gain analog amplifiers that are designed to “crash into the rails”. Some logic such as ECL was actually kept linear to get speed advantages but these days it’s all a bit murky.

The point is as the level at a simple logic gate input changes it goes through a transition region where the relationship between the gate input and output is indeterminate. Thus an inverter in effect might or might not invert or even oscillate with the input in the transition zone.

I won’t go into the reasons behind it but it’s down to two basic issues. Firstly the universe is full of noise, secondly it’s full of quantum effects. The two can be difficult to differentiate in even very long term measurements and engineers tend to try to lump it all under a first approximation of a Gaussian distribution as “Addative White Gaussian Noise”(AWGN) that has nice properties such as averaging predictably to zero with time and “the root of the mean squared”. However the universe tends not to play that way when you get up close, so instead “Phase Noise in a measurement window” is often used with Allan Deviation. //

There are things we can not know because they are unpredictable or beyond or ability to measure.

But also beyond a deterministic system to calculate.

Computers only know “natural numbers” or “unsigned integers” within a finite range. Everything else is approximated or as others would say “faked”. Between every natural number there are other numbers some can be found as ratios of natural numbers and others can not. What drove philosophers and mathematicians mad was the realisation of the likes of “root two”, pi and that there was an infinity of such numbers we could never know. Another issue was the spaces caused by integer multiplication the smaller all the integers the smaller the spaces between the multiples. Eventually it was realised that there was an advantage to this in that it scaled. The result in computers is floating point numbers. They work well for many things but not with addition and subtraction of small values with large values.

As has been mentioned LLM’s are in reality no different from “Digital Signal Processing”(DSP) systems in their fundamental algorithms. One of which is “Multiply and ADd”(MAD) using integers. These have issues in that values disappear or can not be calculated. With continuous signals they can be integrated in with little distortion. In LLM’s they can cause errors that are part of what has been called “Hallucinations”. That is where something with meaning to a human such as the name of a Pokemon trading card character “Solidgoldmagikarp” gets mapped to an entirely unrelated word “distribute”, thus mayhem resulted on GPT-3.5 and much hilarity once widely known.