notfish

When the cause for optimism is “some humans will probably survive”, I don’t feel very optimistic

Monopole magnets probably aren’t allowable in our current understanding of physics since the magnetic field is just a consequence of a relativistic E-field.

Reddit seems to think that Starlink is already serving users via sat-to-sat optical links https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/xsupcn/laser_link...

Or just

    x = x mod 10  
    y = y mod 10

One might even say that the long term weather patterns have shifted permanently. We should have a term for this, maybe something like climate change?

Also, H2O is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so this is prolly not really a great idea

How? Unless you get a breakthrough with fusion, I just don’t see us finding the energy to make carbon removal feasible. You either need huge tracts of land to power forests, or massive amounts of energy from another source to do it with tech, and neither of those is going to be the easy fix people believe is coming.

They actually just scoop em out of the ocean instead of catching the fairings now

1. “Climate scientists are claiming that all changes from climate change will be bad!” is quite the strawman. No scientist really believes this, but almost all agree that the average change will be very bad for humans.

2. Climate change does not mean “increasing CO2”. It means changes in global climate as a result of human activity - things like dumping waste in the ocean count too. CO2 isn’t causing the Anthropocene, Humans are.

3. Arguing in poor faith against climate change because the idea of global catastrophes scares you is a poor evolutionary strategy and you should reconsider your outlook.

Am I misunderstanding you? Sure, we probably won’t be able to continue expanding exponentially, but to be honest I don’t really care if we grow forever or stay steady at 10 billion.

There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.

It’s force per area so it’s definitely a pressure, the difference is just that the driving mechanism is chemical potential instead of a difference in number of particles.

I’m guessing you’ve already read it, but I’ll post it for anyone who hasn’t:

https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...

This is my go-to resource for explaining what it’s like to live with chronic illness to healthy loved ones. Christine is far more eloquent than I could ever be.

Maybe they were cheering for failure because they know more about their goals than you do

My model for understanding phenomena where quantum effects matter is this: if you think of the universe like a big sheet of something stretchy, an electron/proton/particle is just a knot tied in the sheet. Outside of some small region local to the knot the sheet looks flat.

That quote is incredible, and now I know what coffee feels like leaving my nose

This is only recently possible! They just got starlink: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-service-antar...

I’ve always thought of it more like “will slam on their breaks” than “turn into a wall”. In most states, rearending is your fault unless the person in front of you stopped faster than is normal (i.e. was hit head on by an oncoming car), and I think that sets a good standard for what you should be prepared for.

If a tree falls on the car in front of you and you hit them because they stopped instantly, it’s hardly your fault.

We probably need to get more precise for a real answer.

The number I’m getting is about 2 photons/minute per steradian; a steradian has solid area 1m^2 at 1m away. With fully dilated pupils (8mmish) you get an area of pi x 2 x r^2 = 50mm^2, which gives us a rate of about .15 photons/day.

So… Maybe. If you’re very lucky. It’d be interesting to do the same math for a room temp object to see if you’re above the noise floor at all or if this is completely impossible, but I should go do my actual job instead of letting myself get nerdsniped by this.

This fun fact gets even more fun when you consider that a human radiates a nonzero amount of visible light via blackbody radiation - on the order of a photon/minute - which means that in theory, with some luck, in an otherwise cold and completely dark room, two humans might be able to notice each other through vision alone.

You can check my math here if you want to convince yourself: https://www.spectralcalc.com/blackbody_calculator/blackbody....

Can you explain more about the focus on hover feature being intentionally missing? I’ve never heard of this.

SpaceX acquired swarm in 2021: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/08/09/spa...

Factorio is like meth for hacker brains; this post is just a PSA that we need to lock our switches away if we want to be productive.

I like to play a game with my future self by laying down little traps I know I’ll fall into and be confused by. I call it singleplayer pranking, it’s great!

Which is, of course, included as “The story of Mel” in the jargon file:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

Exactly. I’d also add that climate change is a just a symptom of us reaching the natural carrying capacity of Earth for humans, so adding new ways of generating power doesn’t completely eliminate the issue.

I do think planned economies generally fail though - capitalism (meaning the process of letting individual agents decide on resource allocation) is a very powerful tool for optimizing something, and trying to centralize that decision making requires way more processing power. There’s just a huge amount of parallelizability here that you miss out on by having the government try to do allocation.

Don’t take this as me saying unregulated capitalism works even a little bit, you definitely need someone in charge of operating that tool or you end up in our current mess.

I don’t think interstellar travel necessarily implies much better tech than we currently have. I mean, Project Orion style nuke-powered spaceships can get you there in a lifetime but unless you wanna nuke your colony whenever someone needs to leave you still might be stuck on the surface.

Nine months is the duration of a Hohmann transfer to mars, not necessarily the shortest possible for starship - since starship has ~6900 m/s delta v ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1151300180148252674 ) and an earth-mars transfer only requires 3900m/s I think 6 months is well within the realm of plausible.

Theres definitely a lack of rigor math-wise in physics as a rule. It’s not for everyone.

That being said, that lack of rigor is a useful tool sometimes. The dirac delta “function” (functional?) was described in the world of physics first as the only reasonable derivative of a step function/impulse before it was properly defined in the words of mathematics; just because the equational rigor isn’t there yet doesn't mean the argument isn’t solid or the tool is poor.

Agreed, usually if they have hardware access it’s gonna be cracked eventually. Hard to imagine a system that was truly unhackable with infinite unrestricted physical access.