ufmace

I don't really see the hyperbolic language about it. I've definitely worked some process-heavy corporate jobs where I could be perfectly satisfactorily productive as far as my management was concerned while only doing actual work like 20-30% of the time. Maybe I'm super smart or maybe they're just terrible at generating and assigning tasks, I don't know. Not my problem either way.

Especially in the WFH era where it's much easier to get away with it clean, I don't see anything all that wrong with working 2 or 3 such jobs at the same time. If all of them are happy, or at least not too terribly upset, with your performance, what's the harm. There's definitely been times in my life where I could see myself doing that just for the sake of being bored.

I know the feeling. I made the switch a few months ago, and haven't regretted it at all.

It's funny in a way the reluctance people have to part with relatively small amounts of money like $5 or $10 a month for something so core. Given the amount of complaining online about being the product instead of the customer, you'd think more people would jump at the chance to establish the proper relationship with their primary source of information on the internet for the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee or a fast-food meal.

Just that alone is easily worth the cost, not to mention the drastically better search results, and the ability to customize things intentionally, based on what you actually want, versus what Google thinks you should want, or more like what their actual customers, the advertisers, think you should want.

It's been well known for a long time that Google extensively customizes search results per individual based on dozens of unknown factors. It's entirely possible they get those particular search results right for one person and wrong for someone else, and nobody will ever know why.

Which makes things worse in a way - just like with LLM AIs, you can never be sure that what they give you is actually right unless you already know, so there's much less point in using them at all.

I'm not entirely sure what to say to someone who genuinely hasn't noticed that Google search results have gotten a lot worse in the last 5 years or so, regardless of whether any individual search result was right or wrong.

> We could have had a steam engine during the Roman Empire and thus an Industrial Revolution thousands of years earlier, but no one did it. It was just a toy. Imagine having the vision.

No, we couldn't. The Romans were missing several other critical technologies that were necessary to make steam engines more than a toy.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

I do agree that it's probably nowhere near the top of the list of issues preventing this thing from working at least as well as conventional drilling technology.

However, anything about radar, ultrasound, or laser ToF would require electronics at the head of this waveguide and a way to communicate data to the surface. From what they're saying, the downhole environment of this thing is going to be very high temperature. Physically vaporizing 100% of the rock to make hole tends to do that. Conventional oilfield electronic tools already have trouble getting the MTBF above a few hundred hours at current downhole temperatures, which are much cooler. It seems likely that no electronics would survive at all at the temperatures they're planning on running.

That was answering silly speculation about intentionally leaving worn-out drill bits behind. There are actually workable procedures for drilling around things, but it's far more cumbersome and time-consuming than replacing a bit normally. Those procedures used for things like the drillstring getting stuck due to hole collapse; nobody would do that just for a worn-out drill bit.

The actual way to avoid the problem is by using bits whose design lifetime in the formation you're drilling is at least as long as the hole section you're planning to drill.

Oh, I just thought of another issue too. A liquid well-control incident with this thing would indeed suck for the reasons given, but there's a lot of gasses down there too. What happens if there's a gas well-control incident?

It could be flammable natural gas. It may or may not burn or explode in the wellbore, since there's not going to be much oxygen down there. How about at the surface though? Flammable gas erupting out your wellbore with this system sounds very not fun. They have megawatts of electricity flowing around, do you think all of that meets industry standards for avoiding explosions in an environment of flammable gasses? I think there's high potential for a very big boom, and maybe the whole well turning into a giant blowtorch you have no way to control.

Or it could be a poisonous gas like H2S. Poisonous gasses billowing out of your wellbore with this system also sounds like a major pain.

So, who wants to come up with a practical way for this thing to deal with that too? The oilfield has proven methods for preventing it in the first place and dealing with it if it happens anyways. Trip your annular blowout preventer, evacuate the rig, and circulate heavy kill mud until the gas stops flowing.

Maybe these guys could flood the well to stop it. Which means they also need to keep many tankers full of fluid on-hand, and after it works, they're back in the initial situation of needing to figure out how to seal the leak and evacuate the fluid again. I seriously can't think of a good way to do any of that.

Note that diamond (usually called PDC) drill bits have been in common use in the oilfield industry for decades now. Search PDC on your favorite search engine, and you'll find dozens of manufacturers actively selling them, each with a big selection.

Exactly how long you can drill with one varies widely based on a bunch of factors. You do have to pull the whole drill string to change one. It's slow, but not that slow. Most actual oil wells drilled have in the neighborhood of 10 or so trips in and out with drilling tools for the whole operation for various reasons. Varies widely of course depending on a bunch of factors, but that's usually the ballpark. Plus a few more for casing and cementing runs.

Physical support isn't actually that important - conventional wellbores are not physically supported either until they are cased and cemented, and mostly don't have too much trouble with collapsing. What they need is a seal tight against liquid and gas to prevent it from leaking into the wellbore.

Conventional wellbores accomplish this with the hydraulic pressure of the drilling fluid. These guys can't have any fluid though, so they would have to rely entirely on this condensed rock stuff to both support against the pressure and seal against any leaks. Seems very unlikely, considering that it isn't deliberately created by any kind of process, just randomly condensed from rock vapors.

Note also that they won't really start to run into trouble with this until they get at least a few hundred feet down.

Also, you definitely aren't going to drill more than 6 inches while attempting to physically support the wellbore with any part of the drillstring or waveguide or whatever they're calling this thing.

People should also understand that oil drilling is a highly competitive multi-trillion dollar industry employing tens of thousands of smart people all around the world. Absolutely everything that anyone could think of has already been tried, and adopted if it worked and abandoned if it didn't.

The technology being discussed hasn't actually drilled much of anything yet. Their latest press release with actual numbers[0] gives depths drilled in inches. Nice progress, yeah, but they're not anywhere near competitive with even water wells, much less the current generation of conventional oilfield drilling technology.

Geothermal power is indeed cool, but to get it usable anywhere on Earth instead of a few places where magma currents happen to be near the surface, we'll probably need several orders of magnitude deeper and wider holes than we're currently capable of drilling just for starters. Can these guys do the job? Maybe, but let's just say I'm not planning to invest in them.

[0] https://www.quaise.energy/news/from-lab-to-field-testing

That's exactly what they do. It just takes a while since there's tens of thousands of feet of drillstring.

Another thing that occurred to me after watching some of their videos - how do they plan to control rate of penetration?

Their radiation head thing has to be a certain distance from the rock face it's cutting / vaporizing, but it isn't actually touching anything. So how do they know how fast they're actually vaporizing more hole and how fast to advance?

I'm sure you know this, but for the rest of the audience, conventional drilling rigs use the measured weight of the drillstring to determine how much weight is on the bit and how fast to advance. I don't see any good way for these guys to do anything like that.

That's their idea yes, but it's only an idea, and I am extremely dubious. It's much more like handwaving speculation by people who have no experience in drilling deep wells than a practical proven solution.

They're expecting the hole to be open air, with nothing at all to push back against formation pressure. It has to be, for the radiation system to work. But that means that this supposedly fused glass wall has to withstand all of the formation pressure all the way through the borehole perfectly. And they seem to be expecting this to happen from the vaporized material just condensing on the borehole walls. One little crack anywhere, and the whole borehole could flood with water or oil, possibly even blowing out at the surface. How do they recover from that? They'd have to figure out where the failure was, seal it, then get all the water out, each of which seems practically impossible.

You can kind of get that now with the 360-degree rotation laptops, which are available with Windows or Chrome OS. I haven't used a Windows one, but Chrome OS behaves pretty nicely as a tablet.

The trouble though is, once you get an acceptable laptop keyboard and a corresponding screen, the resulting device seems excessively heavy and bulky when flipped over into the tablet form factor. You probably won't want to hold it up for more than 10 minutes.

I like the idea of one all-in-one device, but it's hard to see a way around these things. The cheesy tiny portable "keyboards" they make for tablets are pretty lame for extended typing, but better keyboards are too heavy for tablets. Meanwhile, I expect a desktop device to have the compute horsepower and RAM that are tough to get in a proper tablet form factor.

Pretty sure astronauts do too. I remember the weird astronaut love triangle incident where some astronaut lady who was in love with some other astronaut drove nonstop cross-country with apparently a BB gun and wearing a diaper to do God knows what to the guy. It was explained that wearing a diaper during spacewalks was routine for astronauts, so it probably seemed like a reasonable and convenient thing to do for her, rather than crazy and outlandish as it seemed to most regular people.

There's an easy way to put your money where your mouth is here. Just offer $11k for this or similar vulnerabilities out of your own pocket, and then resell them. If there really is a large and active market for this at higher dollar values, you'll make a killing!

Sure is funny there's nobody doing that despite so many people being so dead certain there's an active market.

I don't think "surprise bills" is a good reason to avoid AWS. Yes, you avoid them on other providers by doing simple bare-metal Linux boxes. But doing a bare-metal Linux box with no other services is also fixed-cost at AWS. You only get into tricky to determine in advance variable costs when you string together a bunch of AWS's extra services in ways that you don't understand well or don't/can't set limits on.

On the other hand, doing single bare-metal boxes being much more complex and usually more expensive is a good reason to skip AWS for simple projects. In addition to the profusion of instance types and billing/usage options.

I also think the lack of options on limiting max billing for flexible services is pretty reasonable actually. For most of them, there's no single obvious reasonable thing to do when the money hits the limit. Storage costs money too, but I don't think much of anyone really wants to have their data get deleted when the cost hits the limit, for example.

Yup, been using Kagi for pretty much all of my searches for like 6 months I think. No regrets so far, just better search results and less ads and tracking. The money is a pittance compared to lots of other things I do.

> cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

I feel we should point out that none of us know what it actually costs SpaceX to run these rockets. Given that they have very ambitious goals, if their actual costs were much lower, the obvious move for them would be to price their launches only somewhat lower than their competitors anyways, take that extra money, and invest it right back into Starship development.

Indeed, one would think that if there wasn't actually that big of a gap between their costs and the prices they're charging, they'd never have enough money to even think about developing Starship. I don't see any other sources of big consistent $$$ for them, and surely they wouldn't bother trying if they weren't highly confident they'd have sufficiently reliable income to take the Starship all the way through development to a successful commercial version.

It was snarky and ridiculous, yes. But then, so is the implication that subways aren't sufficiently safe due to emotional appeals to incidents that happen a single-digit number of times a year versus the millions of riders every day.

Getting rid of cars entirely may not be practical, but it is objectively true that many more people are killed and injured in car accidents in the same area over any particular length of time you could name compared to subway crime. What is the objective reason why subways are "scary" but cars aren't?

For that matter, what is the objective source for such statements as that stations are "getting dangerous enough" or that "people are avoiding them"? Is any of that backed up by actual crime statistics or ridership numbers, or just sensationalized headlines?

Out of about 3.5 million riders a day. Meanwhile, nobody pays any attention to the roughly 250 people who die in car crashes every single year in the NYC metro area. If you're so worried about safety, we should ban cars entirely instead of just taxing them a little.

It did say he was supposedly "considering" doing that, not that he actually did it.

I completely agree. I also call "citation needed" on physical keys being replaced.

It actually works quite well, if you use WSL.

Ruby itself works okay on bare-metal Windows, but virtually guaranteed any decent size Rails project will use some native gem that's a nightmare to get to build on Windows.

I'd argue that keeping Linux updated is at least as much of a nuisance.

Who is keeping a Linux machine updated without regular restarts? I've never heard of that.

Yeah, many applications on Windows update themselves. I've never seen one restart without warning, though I also don't use the windows "app store".

Meanwhile, on Linux, you often do have a package manager with packages available for a bunch of third-party software. Except the version is often years out of date. If you'd like a more recent version, the instructions for that (on the project website) are usually either to run a bunch of CLI commands to install and approve keys for another external package source, or pipe a command from a website into a root shell.

And then sometimes you end up with 20 of those extra package sources. And one randomly breaks, and you have to do a bunch of debugging to figure out why and fix it.

And then some package may either fail to initially install, or an update fail to install, due to some bug or config error, and you're stuck until you can figure out why.

The thing about metaprogramming magic in Ruby is that, it can work okay for one thing, but if you have 2 or 3 or more things all using it to do different things, it's very likely they'll conflict and blow up in a way that's really difficult to troubleshoot or solve.

Well yeah. Which shows that, despite the poor understanding of some in tech of how conventional finance actually works, it's dramatically more secure than any type of crypto at securing large amounts of money for actual users.

I think a lot of people bought some crypto early on when it was really cheap, were kind of sloppy about the security of things, and then left it alone and ignored everything while it went up by 10,000x in value. Now when their account is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, their security is pretty inadequate for something with that actual value.

Yup. If you DON'T have this feature, you're depending on every user who has TOTP 2FA to actually save their backup codes somewhere they can retrieve ~years later or back up their TOTP some other way manually. Naturally, most users will fail to do this, so you'll have to deal with how to securely reset the accounts of people whose phones got lost or destroyed.

But then if you DO have it, you have to deal with the situation in this story, where if you can compromise their one key account, you get all of their TOTP codes too.

That's what I dropped in to say. I've used most of them, and I think Rake is my favorite.

Pretty much all of the others are shell command runners with a couple of extra bits bolted on. Well and good most of the time, but it's another language to learn, and you're mostly SOL if it doesn't support something you want to do nicely.

With Rake, you get the same basic ability to do pre-set shell commands as the others, a single one or a sequence. But you also have the full power of Ruby, a full-fledged programming language, if you want to do anything more complex.