Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
jepler's blurblog
6964 stories
·
166 followers

The Man Taking Over the Large Hadron Collider
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 12:52 PM

Slashdot
1 Comment
Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN's director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC -- a major overhaul involving powerful new superconducting magnets that will squeeze the collider's proton beams and increase their brightness. The upgrade will raise collisions tenfold and strengthen the detectors to better capture subtle signs of new physics. The machine won't restart until Thomson's term is nearly over.

Thomson is far from disconsolate about the downtime. "The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data," he told The Guardian. "There's going to be plenty to analyse over the period." Beyond the upgrade, Thomson must shepherd CERN's plans for the Future Circular Collider, a proposed 91km machine more than three times the size of the current collider. Member states vote on the project in 2028; the first phase carries an estimated price tag of 15 billion Swiss francs (nearly $19 billion).
Read the whole story
jepler
37 minutes ago
reply
... the proposed supercollider costs about 1% of the current AI bullshit, and would do useful science with negligible environmental impact ...
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete

Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 11:42 AM

Slashdot
1 Comment
The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.

Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.

Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.
Read the whole story
jepler
1 hour ago
reply
evil evil evil
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete

UK Company Sends Factory With 1,000C Furnace Into Space
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 11:13 AM

Slashdot
1 Comment
A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.

[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]

The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.
Read the whole story
jepler
2 hours ago
reply
I'm really doubting the economics on this one. "10,000" chips is a meaningless figure. Or, more specifically, it's a figure designed to sound like a lot when it could be very little.

If you want to be extremely generous (and of course: AI!!), assume they are making a massive chip: the 762mm2 "GB202" nvidia blackwell chip. You'll need somewhat more than 100 "300mm" dies, or 12kg of finished silicon die using wikipedia's mass figure. A whole mission to earth orbit, just to make 12kg of chip-stuff!

But if they're engaging in sleight of hand, and you know they are, they could be talking about a much simpler chip. The RP2350 from Raspberry Pi is only about 49mm2, or less than 1/15 the area. At the most absurd, they could be talking about "chips" like SN74LVC1G97 which fits in a 1mm2 *package*, meaning the die is well under 1mm2 in area. You could put over 10k of those on a 200mm wafer with a mass of just 53 grams.

Honestly their whole website is a laugh. It's carbon negative! 15 tons of CO2 saved per 1kg "created" (their word). There is inadequate information given to even begin to assess this but based on further searching it's not passing a sniff test.

Huge number: the "Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" of coal [the worst choice listed on wikipedia's page "Greenhouse gas emissions] is 490g CO2/kWh, so we have 30612kWh per 1KG created. That's something like the total electricity my home uses in 5 years. I found https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666445323000041 detailing resources used in semiconductor manufacturing; assuming I'm interpreting it correctly, this is a key passage:

> In 2021, average water use, energy consumption, and GHG emissions were calculated to be 8.22 ​L/cm2, 1.15 ​kWh/cm2, and 0.84 ​kg CO2 equivalent/cm2, respectively, based on announced data

A 300mm die is 706cm2 and mass 125g, so in fact industry was emitting about 593kg CO2-equivalent per kg. So, unless this paper missed an addtional 14.5 *tons* of CO2 emissions it's simply not possible to save 15 tons per kg. But, y'all also added a whole fucking space launch to the math on your end and we haven't even tried to account for that...
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
jepler
38 minutes ago
here's a whole CPU in about 0.25mm2 so they could even talk about "10,000 CPUs" even if they're producing under 50 grams of material. http://zeptobars.com/en/read/Nyquest-Technology-NY8A051H-8051-smallest-microcontroller
Share this story
Delete

Hugo van Kemenade: Replacing python-dateutil to remove six
Tuesday December 30th, 2025 at 9:02 PM

Planet Python
1 Comment

The dateutil library is a popular and powerful Python library for dealing with dates and times.

However, it still supports Python 2.7 by depending on the six compatibility shim, and I’d prefer not to install for Python 3.10 and higher.

Here’s how I replaced three uses of its relativedelta in a couple of CLIs that didn’t really need to use it.

One #

norwegianblue was using it to calculate six months from now:

import datetime as dt

from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

now = dt.datetime.now(dt.timezone.utc)
# datetime.datetime(2025, 12, 29, 15, 59, 44, 518240, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)
six_months_from_now = now + relativedelta(months=+6)
# datetime.datetime(2026, 6, 29, 15, 59, 44, 518240, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

But we don’t need to be so precise here, and 180 days is good enough, using the standard library’s datetime.timedelta:

import datetime as dt

now = dt.datetime.now(dt.timezone.utc)
# datetime.datetime(2025, 12, 29, 15, 59, 44, 518240, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)
six_months_from_now = now + dt.timedelta(days=180)
# datetime.datetime(2026, 6, 27, 15, 59, 44, 518240, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

Two #

pypistats was using it get the last day of a month:

import datetime as dt

first = dt.date(year, month, 1)
# datetime.date(2025, 12, 1)
last = first + relativedelta(months=1) - relativedelta(days=1)
# datetime.date(2025, 12, 31)

Instead, we can use the stdlib’s calendar.monthrange:

import calendar
import datetime as dt

last_day = calendar.monthrange(year, month)[1]
# 31
last = dt.date(year, month, last_day)
# datetime.date(2025, 12, 31)

Three #

Finally, to get last month as a yyyy-mm string:

import datetime as dt

from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

today = dt.date.today()
# datetime.date(2025, 12, 29)
d = today - relativedelta(months=1)
# datetime.date(2025, 11, 29)
d.isoformat()[:7]
# '2025-11'

Instead:

import datetime as dt

today = dt.date.today()
# datetime.date(2025, 12, 29)
if today.month == 1:
 year, month = today.year - 1, 12
else:
 year, month = today.year, today.month - 1
 # 2025, 11
f"{year}-{month:02d}"
# '2025-11'

Goodbye six, and we also get slightly quicker install, import and run times.

Bonus #

I recommend Adam Johnson’s tip to import datetime as dt to avoid the ambiguity of which datetime is the module and which is the class.

Header photo: Ver Sacrum calendar by Alfred Roller

Read the whole story
jepler
1 day ago
reply
I had noticed that the dependency chain of dateutil was a big large (as python packages go) but I need it for its date parsing and don't know an equivalent...
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete

Cursor CEO Warns Vibe Coding Builds 'Shaky Foundations' That Eventually Crumble
Friday December 26th, 2025 at 9:21 AM

Slashdot
1 Comment
Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as "vibe coding." Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users "close your eyes and you don't look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you." He compared it to constructing a house by putting up four walls and a roof without understanding the underlying wiring or floorboards. The approach might work for quickly mocking up a game or website, but more advanced projects face real risks.

"If you close your eyes and you don't look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble," Truell said. Truell and three fellow MIT graduates created Cursor in 2022. The tool embeds AI directly into the integrated development environment and uses the context of existing code to predict the next line, generate functions, and debug errors. The difference, as Truell frames it, is that programmers stay engaged with what's happening under the hood rather than flying blind.
Read the whole story
jepler
6 days ago
reply
You know how every failed agile project wasn't doing agile right?
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete

Sauropods
Wednesday December 24th, 2025 at 8:40 PM

xkcd.com
2 Comments and 3 Shares
Vertebrae Georg
Read the whole story
jepler
7 days ago
reply
Peak
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
alt_text_bot
7 days ago
reply
Vertebrae Georg
Next Page of Stories