gravescale

From your first paragraph, i was sure the video was going to be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R4226lBJ_qI

You can already live in a tiny cabin and never go outside in any major city of your choice (or even outside a city, but you might need to provide your own cabin). You can even choose to pay the vast proportion of your salary to pay for the right to live there.

But you may have to make do with fresh air and water unless you make your own recirculating scrubbers.

Give it a few years and Amazon will do housing and then you can even buy everything from the same entity that provides your living volume.

I wouldn't want to bet that the operators of a space habitat wouldn't take some cues from the company town era, except with even less oversight.

Indeed, when opening a hatch and allowing scalding ultra-high-pressure sulphuric acid into the habitat is an option, dissent will be fairly easily handled!

> Sit around and write software?

It'd be a pretty extreme way to make web developers think about latency of their bloated websites, sorry "immersive app experiences", but it might actually be the one that works.

No, the idea is that historically-normal interest rates around the 5-10% mark won't be conducive to free VC cash being sprayed around for start-ups to wank themselves silly over "piv-iterating" endlessly over spamming complete nonsense and using headcount and office shininess as a substitute for useful and robust products.

Yes, it makes the barrier higher even for good products and helps entrench incumbents, but short of a transnational revolution, the macroeconomic system is what is it and you can only chose to find the good things in it or give up entirely.

Like people who post "here's what ChatGPTx said" instead of their own answer. Quite literally, what is the point?

However, I don't think it's really bad for the technical industries long term. It probably does mean that some companies with loose internal quality control and enough shiftless employees pasting enough GPT spew without oversight will go to the wall because their software became unmaintainable and not useful, but this already happens. It's probably not hugely worse than the flood of bootcamp victims who wrote fizzbuzz in Python, get recruited by a credulous, cheap or desperate company and proceed to trash the place if not adequately supervised. If you can't detect bad work being committed, that's mostly on the company, not ChatGPT. Yes, it may make it harder, a bit, but it was oversight you should already have been prepared to have, doubly so if you can't trust employee output. It also probably implies strong QA, which is already a prerequisite of a solid product company.

Normal interest rates coming back will cut away companies that waste everyone's time and money by overloading themselves on endlessly compounding technical debt.

> We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work

Everyone using C++20 compilers: side-glancing monkey.

Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved.

Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.

If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.

You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.

Relatedly the wristbands used at for example, Taylor Swift concerts use 38kHz IR floodlighting for the control signal. Recently HN'd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492515

You mean so you don't accidentally hire idealists who won't be on board with your shenanigans?

I never understood that move. If you're evil, you can be evil just fine even when "don't be evil" is your motto.

If you're not, then there's nothing wrong with it.

Awesome.

Reminds me of the time that an expensive Spectrum Digital XDS200 probe didn't work on Linux, and then bricked while I was doing the firmware upgrade it said it wanted. SD said the only thing I could do would be return it to the US to be reflashed. The cheap clone worked out of the box, so that was nice!

I honestly believe that a pair or noise cancelling headphones and an eye mask would have statistically noticable effects on outcomes. The bright, noisy environment of a hospital makes good, natural sleep basically impossible and that is brutal on even healthy people.

My ward even managed to have the (networked digitally controlled, and do presumably very expensive) lighting set up so the night lighting was inside the curtains and shining directly into the bed spaces, and the main ward lights would come up if you touched the wrong thing (even the nurses weren't quite sure exactly what the proximal causes of lighting changes was). With the pumps alarming the whole time (about once per night, per patient, up to 20 minutes until resolution each time) plus all the other regular medical checks preventing any extended quiet time, it was absolutely exhausting at a very deep level.

I think it's just as simple as when you're already poor, having children doesn't fundamentally change things. Children don't actually cost that much when you have nothing much to give them anyway, and quickly turn into free labour if anything. If you're very lucky, they can get a job in the city/abroad and send money home. But for generations, having children and having them continue much the same, generation after generation, is just how is always been. It's often also required by religions, because religions that encourage children grow, and so it's self-reinforcing.

The problem is in modern "wealthy" society, everyone is allowed to work (to be clear I'm not saying that's not a problem in itself), and the Red Queen effect means that within a couple of generations¹, most couples are both in full-time work just to afford rent and the "basics" of a modern lifestyle. Children are now a huge opportunity cost, one that might cost you your home. Then, because the couple would have prospects to offer the child, the common human instinct is to invest everything in them or their future, spurred on by the social expectations and the Childhood Industrial Complex. Vitamins and private healthcare into expensive high chairs, a "safe" car and a top-line car seat, toys, computers, clothes, experiences, holidays, housing near good schools, tutoring, a degree etc. Plus the fairly modern sentiment that you should spend as much time as possible with the child, which may inhibit large families even for those who can financially afford them. The expectations around what a "minimally non-negligent parent" must provide children are so high that many people think "I quite literally cannot be sure to provide that, so I should not have children". Of course in the background, "don't have children if you can't afford them" has been the tabloid "anti-scrounger" slogan for at least a generation now, and religious adherence is way down in wealthy societies.

It's a hell of a catch, as Heller would say. Be poor and offer your children almost nothing material in life, and so have them, or be rich and be unable to offer your children far more in an absolute sense than the poor person could, but still far below what you would want to, and so forgo them.

¹ After a couple of generations of taking up the slack in the middle classes (e.g. go-getter Yuppies giving their children unthinkably luxurious childhoods with their new dual incomes, plus the productivity revolution initially paying out as worker wages), the Millennial generation was the first to really notice en masse that they really could not provide to their children what their parents provided to them. Certainly I can't give my children what my parents gave me, and I'm in roughly the same income decile.

What has been holding you back so far? It seems strange to me that so many normally quite pro-privacy, pro-FOSS, Google-sceptical people are still using Chrome to this point.

Robot soldiers don't look like humans for the same reasons that bulldozers don't look like Shaq holding a shovel.

Robots that would win the Ukraine war would look like a barrage of drones or missiles (either stealthy or in overwhelming numbers) flying into the air defence radars. There are 100m-wide radio dishes in orbit, the exact location and type of every radar on earth is known. Followed by standoff hammering with precision artillery (both the guns and the shells are fundamentally robotic) and lots more drones and missiles.

The this hasn't happened seems more a question of not revealing capabilities the US feels it might one day need as a trump card. Combined with not wishing to aggravate things to much (they say) or, cynically, not wishing to let the war end until the Russians are bled dry. Don't want them to capitulate while still in possession of anything more advanced than a Mosin-Nagant.

Finally some news that makes me think the Firefox has a glimmer of hope left.

Why is there's always an Akin's law?

> 38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

The Ancient Aliens discovered the same laws of engineering:

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

Indeed. Even a pretty mediocre modern microcontroller is capable of incredible feats of computation and speed, doubly so if you glue it to an FPGA, even a cheapo one. The fact that each is probably a few mm across and costs almost nothing just adds to it. Many analogue devices and DSP systems would be downright supernatural if you showed it to an engineer in the 70s.

99% of computing power is used for "make work"¹ (graphics, teetering stacks of abstraction and now AI) so things don't really feel different to humans on a desktop level other than "shinier, drop shadows and in 4k I guess?", but the actual capabilities of computers are virtually unlimited in the context of some tasks.

If the robots turn against us and they don't need to use all their cycles on the abstractions and other human frippery, then we're really in trouble. A true AGI will know how to wring everything out of a scrap of silicon and human engineers will be wondering how a program that looks like random noise and fits in a STM8 can possibly be the controller of a captured drone, right before they get headshotted with a ball bearing fired by a passing drone at 1000 feet that picked their heartbeats out of the ambient soundscape or something.

Humans' best defense then would be somehow hide behind something computationally intractable where the AI couldn't use it's raw computing power. I'm not really sure what that would be, though (if I were, I'd probably write a novel!).

¹: well technically all human endeavour is make work, so this isn't meant as a slight, though I have some opinions on the state of modern software, just that the vast majority of the cycles aren't doing the core thing you're trying to use the computer to do. For example a graphical calculator program may be running the thick end of a hundred million instructions to run a handful of actual ALU ops.

I mean it's better then "Ask HN: how to grind leetcode to get a FAANG job with TC over $400k, I want a million in the bank by age 25 latest?".

You just need more Productivity Modules in those assemblers and a better inserter/belt topology.

When you're doing it in front of the Guinness Book of Records observer, it does need to work within 'n' attempts (they had a cube jam on the first go).

I get nervous at a demo in front of Important Stakeholders even though the thing seems to work perfectly up to that point. Because demos summon gremlins.

Also Surface Detail where a large portion of the plot involves a virtual war to solve a disagreement.

I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.

It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.

To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.

Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.

Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.

Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!

If there was any actual willingness to do any kind of governance what you can do here is actually investigate what happened, don't take the "service providers" at their word and then, if they're not doing their jobs, throw the book at them.

It won't happen, partly because that's effort and would need some amount of being bothered and also UK is just a messy heap of middlemen all providing the minimum service (and usually less) at maximum margins while disclaiming accountability, and it's not only not seen as a problem, but actively desirable.

Everything from fixing potholes, x-raying patients to recruiting for the army is outsourced and re-outsourced and no one ever seems to think that the outcomes may occasionally need to be looked at.

New, old asphalt goes up to around 0.25 in some cases apparently: https://eng.auburn.edu/research/centers/ncat/newsroom/2016-f...

You'd be dark too if you were made out of the smashed insides of two crash victims mushed together!

Though it probably doesn't feel very dark in sunlight with no atmosphere above you. Like standing in a very exposed, lumpy, dusty car park (asphalt albedo: 0.05-0.1), except the sky is black, not blue.

You'd think spacenews.com could get that right: was it really in their title before?

This is really the key. Grinding something you don't actually enjoy or find useful is pretty deathly, even if you get actively paid for it. "Low level", as others have said, is a very, very broad field and if you have an general interest in lower-level stuff, home in on what specifically interests you by trying to achieve some actual goal of use or interest to you.

It doesn't really matter what it is, it could be porting FeeeRTOS to your toaster, writing a kernel driver for something, reversing some device protocol, implementing something on an FPGA or building some embedded device or hacking another one into something else. Just get stuck into something and feel the gravity of your open interests.

Nothing you learn along the way will be a waste.