Inferthermic

It's supposed to be the thin end of the wedge, the crowbar that pries open a better life for anyone who doesn't have a family name or an offshore trust fund. But the mechanical engineering department at UCSB is not the place for that kind of dream. It is, in fact, the place that exists to grind the dream out of you, to sandblast your ambition down until all that's left is a pile of GPA calculations and the hope that you might someday work at Boeing. If you survive Voss, you get to do more of the same, only in a cubicle with less sunlight. Alex stares at the "supplementary problem set" and wonders what, exactly, it is supposed to supplement. His soul? His will to live? The first problem asks him to model the enthalpy change in a Rankine cycle as the working fluid passes through a series of turbines. The second problem is twelve subparts of the same, only with more impossible numbers and a bonus question about "real-world inefficiencies." He can feel the life draining out of him by the second. He closes the PDF and opens his secret browser tab, the one where he keeps the real work. The first thing he sees is a forum post about a new transformer architecture, one that claims to reduce context window size by 78% with minimal impact on accuracy.