7 ms·

My unfiltered additions: * SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought imposs

My unfiltered additions: * SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought impossible is very important for humanity in general. * The new Dune movie was downright amazing. The CGI was believable and an important part of the story. * AI-generated art. Fascinating. * Wikipedia. Wow. * I can invest in lots of different assets relatively easily. * Playwright and Puppeteer. I have automated a lot of workflows thanks to those projects. Pressing a button and watching those workflows run is an empowering experience. * Raspberry Pi and Arduino. A month back I built little hack projects for the pure joy of exploring. Very rejuvenating experience. * Electric cars. I'm particularly excited about the F-150 Lightning. They really leaned into the whole electric thing and tried to find some compelling use cases e.g. the generator and the massive front storage (Disclosure: I have some Ford stock, less than 1% of my overall portfolio). The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful. * Wind + solar + nuclear energy. And a nod to geothermal and hydroelectric. Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.

WalterBright 5y ago
I have no reservations about SpaceX. SpaceX is doing what every entrepreneur wished they were doing. I want to buy stock in SpaceX. I don't even care if the stock tanks, I just want a piece of the dream.
- GDC7 5y ago
  > I just want a piece of the dream As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life. When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow. Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there. You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph. As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
  - FourthProtocol 5y ago
    I think there's value. Resources at the very least, be they from moons, planets or asteroids. The problem I have with space exploration is the cost. Almost 10% of the global population still goes hungry, even though more than enough food is produced to feed the global population. That's 811 million people that starve while Bezos facilitates ego trips to space.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Starvation in the world is not due to lack of attempts to alleviate it. It is due to countries run by communists and criminals.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    > When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there Nothing but resources, science, space to expand, copious energy and the chance to make humanity some what immune to the next asteroid. 200K years ago there was a guy sat in a cave saying "I don't know why you need to go over that horizon, we have everything we need here". I am an atheist, I'm not dogmatic about it. I just think that a species can have more than one goal at a time and that some goals transcend petty day to day things. The ancillary benefits are nice as well, research and development often pays off in completely unexpected directions. It's about what I hope the future will be and that's a humanity as partially a spaceborne civilisation. I was born too late for Apollo (1980) and too early for whatever we are hopefully about to do but I hope to live long enough to see it the first parts. > Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there. You have to boost enough into space for things out of the gravity well to become mostly self-sustaining outside of the gravity well. To do that you have to get launch costs down by orders of magnitude on what they have historically been. We don't want to be putting 10 or 20 tonnes in space, we want to be putting 100 up on every launch with multiple launches a day, the solar system is full of raw materials and energy but to make it viable the processing has to be done without sending it down and up the well every time. The US didn't become the economic powerhouse that is because the UK shipped everything over to the colonies, that wouldn't have worked instead we (and the other countries colonising North America/Canada) shipped over enough resources to bootstrap an economy by supplying the tools/equipment to mostly survive on local resources, then initially shipped back raw materials which allowed the colonies to expand and eventually become independent/self sufficient in their own right. I could see a somewhat analgous thing happening in reality and it's been a trope of science fiction for quite a while (The Expanse series has an interesting take on it, the UN/Earth, Mars and the Belters).
ryukafalz 5y ago
> The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful. For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking. It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous. Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  In Hong Kong, a bit denser than Philly (I googled for giggles: HK is 6300 p/km2, Philly is 4500 p/km, still surprisingly high), we have, I think, reached your no-car target simply because it's unthinkable people get cars when space is so rare and expensive (people here do mortgages to buy 200k USD parkings as retirement investment when they cant buy a home). Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate) I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.
  - jiggunjer 5y ago
    I think bike use would pick up if they had dedicated infrastructure in the city. They seem more popular in the suburbs (NT) where there are some dedicated lanes.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    Fascinating, why are taxi prices so low in HK? Competition? I knew that public transit there is one of the best.
nynx 5y ago
Yes! Not just electric cars but electric vehicles! Cities could be designed around electric bikes and scooters!
tapan_jk 5y ago
> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it. I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  My hope is the poor, and low middleclass are not the ones paying for it though. It's easy for the wealthy guy to go electric, go solar, and move his stocks to around so he feels like he's making a difference. The poor guy is struggling, and is forced to go with the cheapest solution. We don't have the luxury to be virtuous. I try by having a small truck (couldn't afford gas for a large one), and am pretty much a vegetarian. (The price of chicken, and beef, makes it easy.)
- rhizome31 5y ago
  I don't understand how it is possible to still have this view of the problem. All the resources I am aware of that seem backed by facts and science are currently forecasting an utter disaster. I think I'm someone with a rather positive attitude in life and as you said I always try to look at solutions rather than just complain. In fact I'm doing rather well at the personal level. But in the case of the environmental crisis (which isn't limited to a climate crisis), I honestly can't see how it's going to work. In the optimistic camp all I see so far is wishful thinking. > Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it. It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    > If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances Right here, here is a sign that you are reading quite extreme literature. More importantly: Unbalanced, uncriticized literature. Scientific studies don’t only need to seem backed up by facts, they also need to be criticized to ensure the facts were not cherry-picked. Studying science in the current political climate is like saving paintings during a revolution.
aynsof 5y ago
I'm interested to hear more about what you've done with Playwright and Puppeteer. Would you be willing to share any details?
cyber_kinetist 5y ago
SpaceX still pales nothing to what NASA did in the height of the Cold War. Well, it's better than zero space exploration, but it's also pretty disappointing compared to what people have already achieved half a decade ago.
- varjag 5y ago
  I don't know where are you from, but over here landing an orbital rocket booster on its ass is pretty impressive. Something NASA didn't even bother enough to try to achieve.
  - mihaic 5y ago
    I think the previous commenter was refering to the NASA of the 1960s, which returned a human from the surface of the moon before Elon Musk was born. SpaceX has more than a few kilobytes of RAM and can't really be compared to the immense achievement of the cold-war space programs.
    - varjag 5y ago
      NASA of the 1960s was consuming 10% of America's GDP. You can do a lot with that kind of money. SpaceX does its part on a Snapchat budget.
      - TheGigaChad 5y ago
        wrong.
      - askl56 5y ago
        Not even close to true. US GDP in 1965 was $743.7 billion[0]. NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. The agency was building up to the first Moon landing and the Apollo program was a top national priority, consuming more than half of NASA's budget and driving NASA's workforce to more than 34,000 employees and 375,000 contractors from industry and academia. $5 billion is 0.67% of $743.7 billion. [0] https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
bool3max 5y ago
No one really gives a fuck if you own Ford stock.

WalterBright 5y ago

I have no reservations about SpaceX. SpaceX is doing what every entrepreneur wished they were doing. I want to buy stock in SpaceX. I don't even care if the stock tanks, I just want a piece of the dream.

GDC7 5y ago
> I just want a piece of the dream As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life. When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow. Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there. You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph. As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  I think there's value. Resources at the very least, be they from moons, planets or asteroids. The problem I have with space exploration is the cost. Almost 10% of the global population still goes hungry, even though more than enough food is produced to feed the global population. That's 811 million people that starve while Bezos facilitates ego trips to space.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Starvation in the world is not due to lack of attempts to alleviate it. It is due to countries run by communists and criminals.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  > When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there Nothing but resources, science, space to expand, copious energy and the chance to make humanity some what immune to the next asteroid. 200K years ago there was a guy sat in a cave saying "I don't know why you need to go over that horizon, we have everything we need here". I am an atheist, I'm not dogmatic about it. I just think that a species can have more than one goal at a time and that some goals transcend petty day to day things. The ancillary benefits are nice as well, research and development often pays off in completely unexpected directions. It's about what I hope the future will be and that's a humanity as partially a spaceborne civilisation. I was born too late for Apollo (1980) and too early for whatever we are hopefully about to do but I hope to live long enough to see it the first parts. > Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there. You have to boost enough into space for things out of the gravity well to become mostly self-sustaining outside of the gravity well. To do that you have to get launch costs down by orders of magnitude on what they have historically been. We don't want to be putting 10 or 20 tonnes in space, we want to be putting 100 up on every launch with multiple launches a day, the solar system is full of raw materials and energy but to make it viable the processing has to be done without sending it down and up the well every time. The US didn't become the economic powerhouse that is because the UK shipped everything over to the colonies, that wouldn't have worked instead we (and the other countries colonising North America/Canada) shipped over enough resources to bootstrap an economy by supplying the tools/equipment to mostly survive on local resources, then initially shipped back raw materials which allowed the colonies to expand and eventually become independent/self sufficient in their own right. I could see a somewhat analgous thing happening in reality and it's been a trope of science fiction for quite a while (The Expanse series has an interesting take on it, the UN/Earth, Mars and the Belters).

ryukafalz 5y ago

> The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful. For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking. It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous. Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!

secondaryacct 5y ago
In Hong Kong, a bit denser than Philly (I googled for giggles: HK is 6300 p/km2, Philly is 4500 p/km, still surprisingly high), we have, I think, reached your no-car target simply because it's unthinkable people get cars when space is so rare and expensive (people here do mortgages to buy 200k USD parkings as retirement investment when they cant buy a home). Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate) I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  I think bike use would pick up if they had dedicated infrastructure in the city. They seem more popular in the suburbs (NT) where there are some dedicated lanes.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Fascinating, why are taxi prices so low in HK? Competition? I knew that public transit there is one of the best.

nynx 5y ago

Yes! Not just electric cars but electric vehicles! Cities could be designed around electric bikes and scooters!

tapan_jk 5y ago

> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it. I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
My hope is the poor, and low middleclass are not the ones paying for it though. It's easy for the wealthy guy to go electric, go solar, and move his stocks to around so he feels like he's making a difference. The poor guy is struggling, and is forced to go with the cheapest solution. We don't have the luxury to be virtuous. I try by having a small truck (couldn't afford gas for a large one), and am pretty much a vegetarian. (The price of chicken, and beef, makes it easy.)
rhizome31 5y ago
I don't understand how it is possible to still have this view of the problem. All the resources I am aware of that seem backed by facts and science are currently forecasting an utter disaster. I think I'm someone with a rather positive attitude in life and as you said I always try to look at solutions rather than just complain. In fact I'm doing rather well at the personal level. But in the case of the environmental crisis (which isn't limited to a climate crisis), I honestly can't see how it's going to work. In the optimistic camp all I see so far is wishful thinking. > Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it. It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.
- laurent92 5y ago
  > If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances Right here, here is a sign that you are reading quite extreme literature. More importantly: Unbalanced, uncriticized literature. Scientific studies don’t only need to seem backed up by facts, they also need to be criticized to ensure the facts were not cherry-picked. Studying science in the current political climate is like saving paintings during a revolution.

aynsof 5y ago

I'm interested to hear more about what you've done with Playwright and Puppeteer. Would you be willing to share any details?

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

SpaceX still pales nothing to what NASA did in the height of the Cold War. Well, it's better than zero space exploration, but it's also pretty disappointing compared to what people have already achieved half a decade ago.

varjag 5y ago
I don't know where are you from, but over here landing an orbital rocket booster on its ass is pretty impressive. Something NASA didn't even bother enough to try to achieve.
- mihaic 5y ago
  I think the previous commenter was refering to the NASA of the 1960s, which returned a human from the surface of the moon before Elon Musk was born. SpaceX has more than a few kilobytes of RAM and can't really be compared to the immense achievement of the cold-war space programs.
  - varjag 5y ago
    NASA of the 1960s was consuming 10% of America's GDP. You can do a lot with that kind of money. SpaceX does its part on a Snapchat budget.
    - TheGigaChad 5y ago
      wrong.
    - askl56 5y ago
      Not even close to true. US GDP in 1965 was $743.7 billion[0]. NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. The agency was building up to the first Moon landing and the Apollo program was a top national priority, consuming more than half of NASA's budget and driving NASA's workforce to more than 34,000 employees and 375,000 contractors from industry and academia. $5 billion is 0.67% of $743.7 billion. [0] https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

bool3max 5y ago

No one really gives a fuck if you own Ford stock.