Anthropic explains why Claude blackmailed a fictional exec when threatened with deactivation - Business Insider

Many automakers have opted to add an electric motor (or two) and a high-voltage battery pack to form a hybrid power train to make an internal-combustion engine more fuel-efficient, but you can go the route of cylinder deactivation. As the name suggests, cylinder deactivation temporarily shuts down some cylinders when the engine does not need its full power output, which helps with fuel efficiency and thereby reduces carbon-dioxide emissions. You'll usually find cylinder deactivation tech in larger engines, such as Chevrolet's 5.3-liter EcoTec V8, although some four-cylinder engines also use it — Volkswagen's 1.5-liter TSI Evo 2 and Mazda's 2.5-liter Skyactiv-G come to mind. But while the idea of shutting down cylinders to save on fuel and cut emissions sounds great on paper, things aren't so cut-and-dry in real life. Cylinder deactivation adds mechanical and electronic complexity to an engine. Depending on the design, a cylinder deactivation system may rely on oil-pressure-controlled valve lifters and specialized valve mechanisms to switch cylinders on and off.

If you’ve ever pulled a fistful of leaves out of a pool pump basket, you already understand the only thing that went wrong at Africa’s only nuclear plant in August. Stuff gets sucked toward the pump, stuff piles up on the screen, the flow drops, and eventually the pump quits. Now swap the pool for the South Atlantic, swap the leaves for a mass of dead sardines, and swap your pump for one that’s keeping a 930-megawatt reactor cool. That’s pretty much what happened at Koeberg, which sits on the coast about 17 miles north of Cape Town. On Friday, August 21, Eskom, the state utility that runs the place, cut Unit 1 back to 50 percent. A cooling pump had shut itself off because the seawater intake was packed with what Eskom called “marine material,” which turned out to be fish. Lots of fish.

A company selling analog farming tools is fuelling the rural right-to-repair movement Reprinted with permission from Be Giant, a non-profit, non-partisan media outlet reporting on the people, places, ideas and breakthroughs shaping Canada's future. Sign up for their weekly newsletter.

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