Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor.
SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process.
ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC.
It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX).
Yeah, large-scale systems are often boring in my experience, because the scale limits what features you can add to make things better. Each and every decision has to take scale into account, and it's tricky to try experimenting.
I think it has to do with the kind of engineer you are. Some engineers love iterating and improving such systems to be more efficient, more scalable, etc. But it can be limiting due to the slower release cycles, hyper focus on availability, and other necessary constraints.
I remember we migrated 2+ million LoC to being formatted by Black at Dropbox.
Our Livegrep instance with a custom Git blame implementation always crashed at the commit made to do the migration :-) We had to pause our merge queue because we didn't want to run into conflicts, and I remember the `git push` ended up taking a while.
I've been following PlanetScale for a few years and interviewed their CTO Sugu last week: https://www.softwareatscale.dev/p/software-at-scale-29-sugu-..., if anyone's interested to hear their story of building Vitess for YouTube and some details on PlanetScale behind the scenes.
This resonates well. I have a hobby software podcast (https://softwareatscale.dev/) and the most common question I get asked is around how I'm planning to monetize it. I've had unsolicited offers from acquaintances to partner up to set up merch deals (?) and even NFTs to sell episodes.
Version skew is only an issue when there's cross service communication. One service deployed on two different codepaths (in this case, using a different library implementation) is completely fine.
I've been thinking about this with my software podcast too! (https://softwareatscale.dev). Was thinking of posting something similar here.
You already have more downloads than I do, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt.
- My written articles have done well and drove a bunch of signups to my newsletter. That introduces people to the podcast (substack lets me do combined newsletter/podcast). People are more likely to share and read articles, and the really interested ones tend to listen to the show as well.
- I use Descript to make YouTube clips of the show, and link to the full episode, where people can listen to episodes. I've found that a successful YouTube video doesn't drive that many sign ups/subscribers to the show, but drives subscribers on YouTube.
- Some influential guests on the show drive a "pop" when they retweet their episode.
- It took about 3-4 months to show up on Google when you search for "Software at Scale", but that drives some organic traffic.
- I get some of my new subscribers for the podcast by posting in relevant subreddits like r/programming. It's a struggle :-)
Vanta (YC W17) | Software Engineer | Full-time | San Francisco / New York | https://vanta.com
Vanta simplifies the complex, time-consuming, and tedious process of becoming SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 compliant. So startups can focus on growing their businesses.
Vanta provides automated and continuous security monitoring. This helps companies sail through audits like SOC2 while actually ensuring that customer data stays safe. We run read-only checks against tools like AWS and SaaS tools like GitHub, as well as periodic configuration checks against company workstations and servers using an agent. There's tons of technical challenges due to the growing number of diverse customers and product complexity as we serve both CTOs and auditors.
Tech stack: NodeJS, React, GraphQL, AWS.
If you're interested in making companies more secure, and helping them unlock deals faster, reach out!
It was really sad to see Motif shut down. That service was awesome. It's made me wary of trying new services for this, since their shutdown led to a bunch of shuttling around of portfolios from different, much worse services (Folio, finally Interactive Brokers).
Not to throw shade on Sequoia, but the statement "We recently experienced a cybersecurity incident" reminds me of Euphemisms by George Carlin (https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc)
MCF: Magnetic Confinement Fusion
CFS is Commonwealth Fusion Systems - https://cfs.energy/
Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor.
SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process.
ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC.
It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX).
And yes, ARC is named after the Iron Man reactor.