6,611 karma · joined June 17, 2020
Makes me wonder if free divers could possibly already cheat by swallowing air, perhaps even pure O2, before dives, to slightly increase maximum time submerged through gut gas exchange. Althought this probably would mess with buyoancy a bit.
The purpose probably is keeping human speech understandable through the often noise-filled channel of ambient sound. Human speech with no redundancy would have a hard time fighting the noise floor.
Is it possible to just improve the original SSE extensions in a logical backward compatible way? Similar to what AMD did to x86, widening it to x86-64, dooming Intel efforts to push the incompatible Itanium architecture?
Probably to tighten vendor lock-in.
It's not just that making it a bad product. Those are minor annoyances when compared with it trying to keep your data hostage in opaque formats[1] and exfiltrating your data to the cloud[2].
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...
[2] https://superuser.com/questions/1903431/how-to-stop-excel-36...
Perhaps you can just assume a radius where the electron self-repulsion energy equals its own mass, by m = E/(c^2).
[1] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2023/06/08/freeman-dysons-gr...
I think that would be very viable with fridges, that represent a large share of electricity consumption among the poorest. Before electricity, people powered fridges by constantly buying ice blocks. They were just isolated boxes where food was stored together with the blocks. Perhaps it's just necessary to go back at the roots, and make fridges that take energy from solar panels and generate a lot of ice by day, and uses it to keep cold at night, with no need for batteries.
If we painted the roofs on all of them white, by how much would the temperature of the planet drop?
Perhaps this and also filling onedrive free space with random noise, to waste MS some storage in addition to CPU/GPU cycles.
They still have to this day.
It gets condensed over time. Take for example Continental Drift/Plate Tectonics theory. One day Alfred Wegener saw the coasts of West Africa and East South America were almost a perfect fit, and connected the dots. But he had no need to read the work of the many surveyors that braved unknown areas and mapped the coasts of both continents in the previous 4-5 centuries, nautical mile by nautical mile, with the help of positional astronomy. The knowledge was slowly integrated, cross checked and recorded by cartographers. Alfred Wegener insight happened at the end of a long cognitive funnel.
Leibniz did the same, in the same timeframe. I think this lends credence to the Ortega hypothesis. We see the people that connect the dots as great scientists. But the dots must be there in first place. The dots are the work of the miriad nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans. Once the dots are in place, somebody always shows up to take the last hit and connect them. Sometimes multiple individuals at once.
> I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work' to 'sedentary lifestyle'. The latter only happened in the post war years when we worked out how to have all of the energy we need on tap
By sedentary lifestyle I don't mean individual sedentarism, like being a couch potato. I mean society-wide, in the sense of not living in permanent settlements were people spend their lives mostly in the same plot of land, but are constantly on the move.
On the flip side, that could also be plausibly a blessing, avoiding them to fall into the same trap of becoming too powerful before they get wise. These comics illustrate it: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded