bnralt

29 ms·

301.
by bnralt 4y ago
If you want to restrict yourself to the earth's crust, that'd still be ~5,000,000,000,000 kilos of iron you could use per star, or 1,500,000 Saturn V's. And that's just using one planet. Sure, there are rarer metals. But
302.
by bnralt 4y ago
Like you said, if you want it to do "something interesting," like building a colony, we're not talking about probes anymore. But even then, it seems like mass producing the would be faster. Consider - you're clearly goin
303.
by bnralt 4y ago
There are ~2 x 10^9 stars in the solar system. The mass of earth is 6 x 10^24 kilos, with about 1/3 of that being iron. So even if we're just using the mass of a single celestial object the size of the earth, and only looking at i
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by bnralt 4y ago
I've been wondering what the advantage of von Neumann probes are. Once you have the ability to autonomously construct probes, it seems like it would be easier and faster to mass produce them in one solar system and send them directly t
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by bnralt 4y ago
> If musk decided to ban use of the letter A in tweets, whether PG ran afoul of the rule is not an important factor in the story. You'd certainly be justified in saying that a rule banning the letter A is ridiculous. But you wouldn&
306.
by bnralt 4y ago
Yeah, I can't see how "I can't post my handle here so go to my website to find it" isn't an effort to bypass restrictions. That doesn't mean that what Musk is doing is good, or that trying to bypass restriction
307.
by bnralt 4y ago
> I mean, Juicero, what was that crap, anyway? People can argue that it was too expensive or over-designed. But I don't think the basic idea is as ridiculous as people make it seem. "You can just juice it yourself!" Sure,
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by bnralt 4y ago
Especially risky since the conspiracy has them not just assassinating a president, but killing multiple people (you see at least a couple of others mentioned in this discussion), while relying on multiple highly unstable people outside the
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by bnralt 4y ago
Some time ago Joe Rogan thought this joke video[1], showing a Boston Dynamics robot being trained for the military which goes rogue and attacks his human handlers when they try to have it shoot a robotic dog, was real. He was talking to Lex
310.
by bnralt 4y ago
The thing that gets me about the unintuitive system for ranking is that you have zero idea how long something will be on the front page. It could be 3 hours old, #4 on the page, with a few hundred upvotes and more points than almost all of
311.
by bnralt 4y ago
Sure, but where is the line drawn? A lot of political rhetoric across the board is pretty extreme. The guy who shot up a Republican Congressional baseball game at baseball practice was into a lot of anti-GOP and anti-Trump stuff[1]: > He
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by bnralt 4y ago
If anyone's interested, Japan is seen as a cautionary tale for the bad things that low inflation/deflation can bring. They've been fighting it for years[1]. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/25&#
313.
by bnralt 4y ago
> The most interest aspect in the FTX saga, for me, is that SBF was treated very gently by major news outlets (and maybe by government regulators too)... until regular individuals in social media started asking: Why is SBF being treated
314.
by bnralt 4y ago
I highly doubt much if any of the space exploration now is going to have a significant impact on humans being an interplanetary or interstellar species. A good analog might be the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. It was interesting, but
315.
by bnralt 4y ago
> Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first. The first geopo
316.
by bnralt 4y ago
It seems telling that the most concrete example he gives for the value of human space flight is the usefulness of unmanned satellites. Simplistically it's true that whenever you spend money on some effort there's going to be some
317.
by bnralt 4y ago
Yeah. Off the top of my head I can think two pieces of popular media - The 40 Year Old Virgin and Cobra Kai - that had a scene where a guy lucks out and meets an attractive woman, asks her out on a date, the woman asks when he'll pick
318.
by bnralt 4y ago
I'm not even sure living in the country helps that much on its own. The issue is that the vast majority of your language intake comes from your immediate surroundings - the media you consume, the friends you have, the books you read, t
319.
by bnralt 4y ago
Particularly since the New York Times article he links to talks about crypto expats flocking to Ukraine because of lack of regulation: > Ukraine has already lured some Americans and Brits in the crypto industry, and they didn’t come beca
320.
by bnralt 4y ago
Madoff was also involved in a highly regulated industry. That's one thing that confuses me about all of this. A main selling point - probably _the_ main selling point - for crypto has been that it allows users to avoid the current lega
321.
by bnralt 4y ago
> The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Who counts as the unknowing? The people who thought we were going to have hit the singularity by now spent a lot of time reading up on this stuff. T
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by bnralt 4y ago
> A building which does not learn, its unfortunate inhabitants must adapt to it. That's one of the most interesting and depressing parts of post-WW2 architecture (it's present in certain "high culture" architecture be
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by bnralt 4y ago
> People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. It's possible to generalize too much: 1. The size of the different context and the extent to which
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by bnralt 4y ago
It even changes the name of the building it's criticizing to make it more difficult to find. After a search I located it, it's The Greenpoint (not "The Josh" as the article claims). You can look it up on Google maps, it&
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by bnralt 4y ago
I agree. We should go further, and think about what we, as a society, are actually trying to accomplish with higher education and how good universities are at achieving those goals. Not just some vague "it teaches you how to think&quot
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by bnralt 4y ago
Some years ago I was trying to do something that required a certain amount of points. Perhaps write a comment to a question instead of posting an answer. So I looked for ways to make points. Most of the interesting questions I could easily
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by bnralt 4y ago
This is a decent article that covers U.S. involvement: https://web.archive.org/web/20150820164417/https://www.forei... Basically, when the U.S. saw opposition to Mossadegh growing they tried to organize
328.
by bnralt 4y ago
> It’s worth noting that Iran was a democracy until the 1953, when the US and UK supported a coup to install a corrupt dictator This simply wasn't the case. I discuss this in a post below, but by the time Mossadegh was removed he ha
329.
by bnralt 4y ago
It's also strange how people portray Mossadegh's government at the time of his removal as democratic. If you look at the history[1], Mossadegh had a power struggle had a power struggle with parliament. Mossadegh responded with a f
330.
by bnralt 4y ago
I mean, certainly there are plenty of things people want to comment on without writing a blog post on it. This discussion, for example. We're discussing this with relatively quickly written comments, not as blog posts that we spend a g

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