So, crisis averted. Well, explosion averted. It turns out that the endless spray of water kept the temperature down just enough to 1) cause a crack in the tank that relieved pressure, which 2) in turn helped the methyl methacrylate cure and solidify.
Most of the fifty-thousand evacuees have been allowed to return home...well, 34,000 have been allowed to return, while around 16,000 remain on prolly-best-to-stay-away orders.
What got me thinking was when they said they don't know what caused the runaway temperature spike that caused the venting on Thursday that led to this wild crisis in the first place. They don't know, and that makes sense. If watching HBO's Chernobyl as often as I have (what can I say---I like bad-vibe programming) has taught me anything, it's that it takes some time to properly investigate these things once the fallout is finally mitigated.
What caused the crisis in the first place?
A different conversation I had added to the tapestry within which I view these things nowadays. The other day I took both kids to swim, and I was talking to the mom of one of Cass's buddies and swim-classmates. She was relaying a conversation she had had with her mother. Her mom is a teacher in the nursing program at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and she was lamenting the fact that her students pretty much all relied on ChatGPT, or other large-language-models from other AI programmers, to get their work done. And with an exasperated, distance-staring glare she said with a sigh, "In a couple year's time...you may have to be concerned about your nurse in the ER or operating room."
Articles are rampant about a growing crisis in higher education, where students have en masse moved away from doing their own work and use LLMs to write their papers, or organize their research at the very least. An AITA entry on Reddit a while back was from a girl who's law-school boyfriend would take every question from every assignment and put them into ChatGPT, then copy and paste the response without even reading it.
Now...that's pretty bleak.
While I don't think the crisis was caused by a person who had LLMs do their work for them and then got a job that they were unprepared for and who was actually watching reels on their phone instead of the temperature gauges---and I don't think that---it was a startling reminder that THAT BLEAK REALITY WILL HAPPEN SOMEDAY.
In Pripyat at the Chernobyl plant it was arrogance mixed with hubris and ignorance. But they also had someone at the helm who had 25 years experience in nuclear facilities. That longterm experience may have added to the arrogance, but we're all pretty sure that Anatoly Dyatlov actually did lots of work in nuclear power plants, and didn't have AI do all his work for him.
Just another attack on intellectualism: the propensity to value the completion of the work to get the document over what you may learn from the substance of your studies. Once it becomes more about the document, it's easy to find ways around exerting the needed effort and just get the document at all costs. It becomes very easy to justify just doing the easy stuff and skipping challenges at every turn. Mike Judge's Idiocracy unfolding in real time.
At least in Orange County they still had some hard-working smarties up to the task of round-the-clock working to keep a tank from exploding and obliterating a suburban neighborhood in Garden Grove.
At some point, though?
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