You cannot use a centrifuge to separate solid iron.
Using a centrifuge with liquid iron would create a gradient of concentration of the heavier elements dissolved in it, but that would not be enough to separate them.
All that could be done with a centrifuge with liquid iron would be to obtain an iron alloy enriched in heavy elements. However, I doubt that it would be possible to make a centrifuge for liquid iron that would have a lifetime sufficient to process quantities of the order of one million tons of iron. I do not think that until now anyone has ever tried to make a centrifuge that could work with a liquid metal at such a temperature. Most materials lose their strength at such temperatures, so the risk of breakage for the centrifuge would be extremely high, a risk that is increased by how heavy iron is.
It is also not clear if such an enrichment of the heavy elements would bring a sufficient simplification to further processing steps to make it worthwhile.
Iron and platinum have different melting points. If you melt the alloy, then spin it to concentrate the platinum, couldn't you coax the platinum to separate out as solid clumps by adjusting the temperature?
Alternatively, there are differences in magnetic properties that could be exploited...
This isn't my field, so I'm just spitballing. I bet if you can get the cost of launch and interplanetary transit to be low enough for people to really start tinkering with asteroid mining though, someone will crack the metallurgy issues...
Different melting points are easy to exploit only when metals do not mix in liquid state.
Even when metals do not mix in solid state, but they mix in liquid state, that usually cannot be used for separation, because the liquid solution will become solid at a temperature different from the melting temperatures of the components and lower than them, and the solid alloy will consist of the component metals intimately mixed at the level of microscopic crystals, so you cannot separate them (this is called an eutectic alloy, like the lead-tin alloy used for soldering, where by solidifying it you do not obtain separate lead and tin, but just a non-separable alloy, and by remelting the solid alloy you obtain a liquid solution, where again, the metals cannot be separated).
If the metals also mix when solid, the solid metal is a solid solution that does not melt at any of the melting temperatures of its components, but at an intermediate temperature, and the metals cannot be separated regardless whether the alloy is solid or liquid.
Here, in asteroid cores, the precious metals are present in a very small proportion, so they form either a liquid solution when molten or a solid solution when solidified.
The melting temperatures of platinum et al. do not matter, the melting temperature of the alloy is slightly lower than that of iron, corresponding to that of an iron-nickel alloy. The other alloying elements are in quantities small enough that they have negligible influence on the melting temperature.
In conclusion, differences in melting points can only very seldom be exploited for metal separation and they cannot be used for the iron alloys of planetary or asteroid cores.
You can exploit only either the difference in boiling points or the differences in chemical reactivity with acids or oxidizing agents.
It's even worse, actually. This attack seems to be done by a regular quadcopter, so suddenly you have to be worried about your $100M aircraft being destroyed by a $500 drone if your base security isn't absolutely perfect.
The US has plenty of bases in the area, but considering the ease of an attack and the general anti-US sentiment of the region, projecting power into the Middle East is going to become an awful lot more difficult...
V-weapons were also an encounterable weapon which could strike from beyond range. Massive boondoggle though, just a very expensive expensive way to deliver very few explosives; waste of industrial output.
Of course they can. They might be too lazy or ignorant to do so, but it's not really any harder to learn to install Linux than it is to learn to make mashed potatoes once you're motivated to bother -- and billions of people have managed to do the latter just fine.
Normal people are absolutely capable of following basic directions like: "download this file", "insert a USB stick", "run this program", "reboot your computer", "double click the install icon", "click the 'Continue' button (or similar) following the on-screen prompts".
That all sounds really difficult compared to going to the Apple store , and buying a Neo.
Not to mention Linux is great, things start going wrong. Cool, you found a DE you like, it's on X11. Another application you want to use only works on Wayland.
Ohh, you want to use a Bluetooth headset, your DE might randomly crash upon connect.
The best thing about Linux is you can customize it. The worst thing about Linux is you can customize it. We have no single answer as to what distro a new user should try.
Ubuntu might not support your wifi card. Ok, so you try Arch. A bad update bricks your system.
I love Linux, but I've spent countless hours to understand and use it. Some people might prefer to buy a Neo and then go play with their cat, etc.
First, how about Philippine National Bank? Compare snapshots of their front page, https://www.pnb.com.ph/, on web.archive.org, and see that they have completely removed the link to their Internet Banking system. Only Mobile Banking remains.
Also, Metrobank threatens to make it impossible to log into their online banking website without the mobile app installed. This is already officially the case for their corporate banking, but it's just TOTP with a non-extractable (on a non-rooted phone) seed and some anti-root checks under the hood.
Finally, the following mobile wallets and "digital banks" are app-only: GCash, Maya, GoTyme Bank. The first two are the only ways to pay for water here, other than going to a kiosk where someone else would use their GCash account to process your payment.
> $120K isn't going to cover the fully loaded costs of an SRE who can set up and run that.
> Hiring 1 person to run the infrastructure means that 1 person is on-call 24/7 forever.
> If there's an issue with the server while they're sick or on vacation, you just stop and wait.
Very much depends on what you're doing, of course, but "you just stop and wait" for sickness/vacation sometimes is actually good enough uptime -- especially if it keeps costs down. I've had that role before... That said, it's usually better to have two or three people who know the systems though (even if they're not full time dedicated to them) to reduce the bus factor.
So the entire business was happy to go offline for 2/3 weeks whenever their infra person fancied going off on their summer holiday?
By doing this, you're guaranteeing a bus factor of below 1. I can't think of any business that wouldn't see that as being a completely unacceptable risk.
I never understand the drive to stay away from cloud services for small scale operations. It’s not your money that’s being spent on the cloud, but it is your free time being asked to be on call when you encourage your company to self-host!
Bus factor 1 is rarely enough for "entire business". But if the GPUs are for training models, and their users are the data scientists that are also on holiday around the same times - that might indeed be good enough policy.
Ouch, that is indeed a risk one must be wary of. Can be a "works for the company but sucks for employees". Which can also drain the company of skilled people, a poor trade in most cases.
> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users.
There is no way that number is an accurate reflection of the number of actual human users of their service. I could believe they have 8-900m bot/fraud accounts in their databases, maybe, but not real users.
I suspect I am one of those 1bn users by their metric. I have an account, and I sometimes query it. I also query Claude and Gemini. I have zero loyalty, if I run out of tokens on one, I will just pick up the conversation on another provider. Perhaps I am using them wrong, but the amount of babysitting I have to do anyway, I don't find it that tedious to stay on the same topic during a swap.
There's no way I would spend $200 a month on any of them, not even $20 considering how few 'tokens' you get. I can see how these tools would be useful to my workflow, but I cannot use them as they are priced 100x too high for me to be reliable.
I have a feeling that would be true for the vast majority of these AI tool users. I really am not sure how these companies are supposed to become profitable. But SV is a bit insane that way.
i used to use them that way until I got a IDE with AI and is way better for my development than copying and pasting into the chat. It can have the whole project as context,plan features with me, etc. I use it a lot in a way that I cant see why I would go to programming without it right now. It takes time to adjust to it to learn how it works and all but it's worth it
The price of electricity where I am in California is pretty cheap for the energy itself -- I pay about $20/mo for generation -- but the cost for electricity delivery is absolutely fucking insane. It costs me $90 for "delivery" of that $20 worth of electricity.
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