Cited on HN 6 times, 2023–2024, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN cites it as a skeptical rebuttal to Helion's promises, usually in threads on fusion power and Helion's Microsoft deal.
A short, humorous critique of Helion Energy's fusion approach, framed as a response to a Real Engineering video. It covers low reactivity, neutron production, bremsstrahlung losses and diagnostics.
“check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise” (HN, 2023)
Video by the same author, mentioned elsewhere here in the replies, dismantling Helion’s claims. [this video] As I said elsewhere, Helion interviews made me feel bad about ITER’s chances, and this guy’s video made me feel bad about Helion’s chances. Just because someone is explaining a con to you doesn’t mean they aren’t also conning you.
You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. However when it comes to startups dealing with biology or physics you’re literally battling the laws of nature. You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV (nano diamonds for cancer detection? Gut Micro biome sequencing?) and it’s looking like similar story with fusion. In this case if you want real reasons why Helion looks suspect check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise: [this video] I won’t get my life against someone figuring out fusion in the next two decades but I wouldn’t bet money towards it either.
I just realized it's THAT Helion. Their fusion experiments are not without controversy. Here's a video on explaining how it works: [link] And here's a video explaining what's wrong with the scheme: [this video] But the TLDW version is that environment required for fusing He3 with deuterium also leads to deuterium fusing with itself, a reaction that creates neutron radiation that irradiates its environment.
There are probably a lot of optimizations in the silicone and software to find. It's not necessarily obvious what corners can get cut or where, the tradeoffs of tapping out new chips is worth it. Yet Another Matrix Multiplication Chip is not going to set the world on fire. Nvidia has that market pretty well captured. But perhaps it turns out that subnets can be trained independently or swapped with semantically equivalent but qualitatively different ones. The routing network would effectively "Standardize" and could in principle be well enough understood to "hand optimize" the routing network into hardware. Or maybe back propagation has some novel physical analogue that can be exploited in scales we can access. The real question is if Altman is capable of finding the right path in the notoriously dead end filled field of chip design. His backing of helion [1] didn't bode well in my view. But with enough R&D maybe he will flail into something useful trillions is enough for a lot of flailing. [1] [this video] Edit: more derisive link
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