neolefty

The article points to the eruption of a super volcano as the more likely cause.

They seem pretty good for getting to low orbit, and once you're there, lots of possibilities for propulsion open up.

Mostly it's moar stages. Each stage of a kerolox engine can get you about 5 km/s, and LEO is about 8 km/s, so two stages works pretty well. Velocity for LSEO (low super-earth orbit) might be 11 km/s, so you'd need a third stage, and each stage would be 3-5 times the size of whatever it's launching.

Or a jet stage followed by rocket stages.

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Hi, I'm Beecher, an experienced engineer (22 years) who can really help a team gel — I lead by example, mentor, and communicate well. Fully remote since 2018. Modern full-stack web since 2016, experience with startups, established companies, and scientific research. I love a good startup, can wrangle a crisis, and I can also handle legacy situations just fine.

Location: Indiana, United States

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but I can be on-site 1-2 weeks per quarter.

Technologies: Full-stack web & ops — React or other modern front-end framework, Python, .NET, all relational databases and provisioning workflows.

Resume: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt, https://github.com/neolefty

Blog: https://neolefty.org

Email: bbbaker@alum.mit.edu

Hi, I'm Beecher, a friendly and experienced engineer (22 years) who can really help a team gel — I lead by example, mentor, and communicate well. Fully remote since 2018. Modern full-stack web since 2016, experience with startups, established companies, and scientific research. I took 5 years off to teach high school in China 2011-2016. I love a good startup, and I can also handle legacy situations just fine.

When you have surplus photovoltaic capacity — an increasingly common situation — you could turn it to electrolysis. You still have to pay for the equipment, but it sounds like it could be pretty cheap.

It would cut out the cost of mining, and possibly a lot of transportation costs, if you can use the products nearby.

This is so true, and so wrong. We will look back and see it as outright barbarism.

I think we're headed towards a major Constitution revision (or a sequel to the Declaration of Independence) within a couple of generations, and the "rights" we will enshrine will include things like "health care whose PKI is health outcomes and not profit" and "money cannot be a factor in elections".

Of course, voter education has to go right along with that.

Some big auth providers throw in a few extra signals too. Your IP address changes? That might hurry up expiration a little. Your user agent changes? Big red flag. Etc.

They also expire faster when suspicious things happen, such as your IP address changing. Auth providers are pretty quiet about what they find "suspicious" — some are obvious, some are clever.

We know why it fooled everybody, but AFAIK the material doesn't have any outstanding properties. With certain impurities and under certain conditions, it:

- has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature change — a property published in 1951 as a property of copper sulfide

- has some ferromagnetic properties — enough to be tipped up in a magnetic field but not to levitate

Location: Indiana, United States

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Email: bbbaker@alum.mit.edu

Friendly, energetic, and experienced engineer (22 years) who enjoys helping a team gel, hiring, mentoring, and building useful things. Skills are up to date, and I love a good startup, but I can also handle legacy situations just fine.

I think it's natural for new tools to be Propietary, while Free alternatives of the basics work their way up the chain:

Most of the cost of software development isn't in writing software — it's in the exploration of the solution space. Once you have settled on a good design, re-implementation is vastly cheaper and more streamlined than the original fumbling around in the dark. And sometimes it's better because you can jettison the legacy that comes from all that exploration.

So IBM employed Ted Codd and an army of engineers and salespeople, but now we all get to use Postgres.

What is being built today commercially that will be distilled into architectural principles and re-implemented as Free in the future? It's hard to know, but in hindsight it may seem obvious.

The article points out categories that were once proprietary — OSes, compilers, runtimes, clients, data stores. For example: DB2, System V, PCC, Internet Explorer. They were built at great cost — and remember they all had proprietary siblings that have since been abandoned, that also had to be paid for: OS/2, Itanium, Hypercard, DBase, various compilers, IDEs.

And then the few survivors were copied by open equivalents. System V gave way to Linux, DB2 to Postgres, IE to Chrome. A few never had proprietary equivalents AFAIK — I don't think there is a closed ancestor of Redis.

And sometimes the Free version hasn't fully arrived yet (x86), or it's just free (Google Docs), or it's doomed to remain not nearly as good as the proprietary tools (GIMP, desktop Linux). Or it's rocky (Linux vs SCO) or chaotic (BitKeeper to git).

(And it's no surprise that tools used mainly by programmers are more likely to have high quality Free equivalents than tools with a wider audience — after all, their users are capable of improving them directly.)

A UBI coin like WorldCoin needs proof-of-identity as well, to prevent duplicate payouts.

And using biometrics is itself a hack to circumvent the vagaries of government ID systems. So you'd be hacking around a hack.

It makes me think at some point we'll be back to inventing government-issued IDs. Or um using the ones we have.

The ideal government would be the ideal partner — unfortunately the governments of the world are far from ideal.

So I can understand why you'd want to circumvent them. But in the end, we do need government, and circumventing them just means eventually needing to re-create them.

Which leads to the question: Do we fix the governments we have, or create new ones?

It seems analagous to the rewrite-from-scratch fallacy. In the end, I can't see any way around fixing the world's governments. Educating the electorate, structural reform, all of it.

So yeah. Currency and UBI seem like functions of governments to me too.

I think the trick is to learn how to scale it up. One view of human history is to see it as increasing scales of fellow-feeling and practical cooperation.

Seeking work: US (Indiana), Remote — although on-site 1-2 weeks per quarter is fine.

Technologies: Generalist; lately full-stack web (React, Python, JVM, .NET, TypeScript, all databases)

Resume: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt

Email: bbbaker@alum.mit.edu

Friendly and experienced engineer who enjoys helping a team gel and building useful things. Skills are up to date, and I love a good startup, but I can also handle legacy (codebases and people) just fine.

Location: Indiana

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but 1-2 weeks on-site per quarter is fine.

Technologies: Generalist; lately full-stack web (React, Python, JVM, .NET, TypeScript, all databases)

Resume: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt

Email: bbbaker@alum.mit.edu

Friendly and experienced engineer who enjoys helping a team gel and building useful things. Skills are up to date, and I love a good startup, but I can also handle legacy (codebases and people) just fine.

I heard it about Berthold K P Horn https://www.eecs.mit.edu/people/berthold-horn/, professor of machine vision. And it was extra convenient because he wanted to output the result of the computation as an image anyway, and what better way than with a high-quality printer?

So is this plane totalled? Or can it be repaired and returned to service?

Some societal implications:

* Kids playing with iron filings sounds a lot safer than kids playing with gasoline. "Don't leave your magnets in the fuel tank; it clogs up the lines!"

* The gasoline party scene in Zoolander would need to be reconsidered.

True, if we're getting it the traditional way.

Fortunately, iron oxide can be reduced using hydrogen. In the article, they conclude that the system cost of shipping iron and iron oxide back and forth from an electrolysis facility (presumably from renewables) is lower than using hydrogen directly as a fuel.

They mention that with hydrogen. It's cheaper to produce hydrogen but much harder to transport it. Fortunately, hydrogen can reduce iron oxide, which turns out to be a great complement. Their analysis is that the system cost of burning iron and renewing it at electrolysis plants is lower cost (and safer) than using hydrogen directly.

It could become as low quality as some of my SMS threads!

Reddit premium subscriber here — I use it because it hides ads, I get a lot of value from Reddit (and want to make that sustainable, if possible), and Premium gives me stickers I can award to comments occasionally in addition to upvotes.

Or trying to catch up to Apple?

It leverages the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) https://mlir.llvm.org/ which is a follow-on from LLVM, with lots of lessons learned: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/12/27/lessons-from-llvm-an-sc21...

I ran across this out of curiousity, and just thought it was so well-written and a great scientific subject.

I especially liked the identification of controversies, such as "How did hydrolysis of water arise?", while not taking sides.

Yes, I will end up depending more heavily on sources that I know are thoughtfully edited by humans. Unfortunately, that set will diminish if bot herders overwhelm crowdsourced sites.