As a technical founder this book on negotiation was highly valuable: "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It". Negotiation is a skill you need as a startup founder that is not necessarily needed for technical work.
"Innovators Dilemma" - helps put in perspective acceptable state of early products and good strategies for deploying new innovative products
Cool use of gamma-ray imaging technology! The underlying technology is a coded aperture to give a random response on the detector that can be used to reconstruct the direction of the gamma-ray source. I think they are using a moving mask with a single detector in the middle. They probably didn't know if the source had broken apart and caused more contamination when they found the general area. So the imaging allows you to know from a distance if the source has been distributed without going into a potentially loose contamination area.
Shameless plug: our company makes gamma-ray imaging systems and combines them with LiDAR mapping to make real-time 3D radiation maps: https://www.gammareality.com/
Basically we can make "nuclear street view" in real-time while driving around, or walking it around on Spot.
I worked at LBNL as a research scientist and spun a startup out of there. It was a great place to work in some respects, lots of really smart people, awesome brainstorming, seeing Nobel prize winners around. But if you like getting things done quickly it’s quite a challenge due the the bureaucracy (ex ordering simple things could take an extra couple weeks going through lab purchasing). I once described it to a friend who worked at a FAANG company and they said “Oh so it’s like working at a big company but without the advantages of a big company”.
Working at our startup almost feels like working at the lab (ie we have scientists and are doing hard tech), but we can also move fast and don’t have the bureaucracy. So maybe consider working at a hard tech startup with a heavy science base!
When I loaded the website it was slowly going incrementally through different intel generations. So I thought for a second they were offering versions with older intel chips. But the page was just animating slowly.
For those wondering, will not really work over long distances (> 100 m) since fast neutrons will thermalize quickly in air and other materials. This means they scatter around approaching a random walk and lose energy, which makes the transmission beam harder to detect.
This is really mostly feasible for ~single wall transmission.
Not really, depending on what method is used there are several outstanding issues:
Assuming magnetic plasma confinement:
- plasma stability issues: it is not really know how to maintain a stable plasma in an energy efficient way that can maintain a reaction that produces a net positive energy generation. When hearing about interesting exotic fusion reactors, one should wonder about the plasma stability (ie the plasma goes into a failure mode and hits the wall or leaks out of the confinement).
- materials issues: the materials don’t really exist that can sustain extended periods of radiation damage. This is also a limiter in many exotic fission reactor designs.
Laser confinement also has some issues.
So conceptually we know it should work but maybe a couple of the needed technologies are not ready. This is similar to Leonardo da Vinci knowing that helicopters should be possible in the 1400s but many of the required supporting technologies weren’t ready.
This seems to imply that NFL players come from the middle class, and without them there will be a lack of players. But is that actually true ? The sport could just end up being watched by middle class and played by the poor, who might be more willing to risk their brains to overcome economic hardship
I wonder if people have spent as much time listening to algorithm music as we have reading articles about them. Seems like these approaches generate a lot of press but I wonder how much people actually listen to the music on a recurring basis
This is mostly hype until they can actually deliver.
I ordered several of their current lidars 5 months ago and now it looks like the total delivery time will be about a year after the order. And they're mostly unresponsive about what is going on.