cletus

23 ms·

91.
by cletus 2y ago
Elon literally cannot stop lying [1]. [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
92.
by cletus 2y ago
I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole but IMHO there has been a whole lot of historical revisionism and propaganda regarding the history of both Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it.
93.
by cletus 2y ago
I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything. I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up pr
94.
by cletus 2y ago
SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1 billion per launch. As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. Did you know Blu
95.
by cletus 2y ago
So I have some experience with this because I wrote the non-Fleash Speedtest for Google Fiber. I also have experience with this by virtue of being from Australia. Let me explain. So Google Fiber needed a pure JS Speedtest for installers to
96.
by cletus 2y ago
It depends on how you define "DB" in this context. Ex-Facebooker so I this may have changed but I doubt it. It's fairly fundamental. At the lowest level, data is stored in MySQL so yes, that's open source. Almost nothing
97.
by cletus 2y ago
Former Facebooker here. I have some thoughts. IME I find that many people don't have the problems GraphQL is intended to solve. No shade to the author but, as one example, i don't see the word "fragment" mentioned anywhe
98.
by cletus 2y ago
There are different froms of this and it depends on your goal. For the 1-5 billion year range your issue is the Earth overheating because Solar output is increasing by about 10% per billion years. There are three basic ways of doing this: 1
99.
by cletus 2y ago
Mars currently has less than 1% of Earth's sea level atmospheric pressure. Cusco is roughly 0.6atm of pressure. So Cusco is a lot closer to use. Mars is essentially the Moon. Actually, it's worse than the Moon. Because all Mars&#x
100.
by cletus 2y ago
This [1] may interest you. It estimated Mars's atmospheric loss at 0.1-0.5kg/s, which amounts to about 3-16k tons/year but that's also with Mars's current almost nonexistent atmosphere. Losses would be higher with a
101.
by cletus 2y ago
Atmospheric loss is an interesting and not-entirely-understood subject [1]. But here's one aspect we do know that puts the scale in context. Any gas has a Boltzmann distribution of kinetic energies. You can calculate that a certain por
102.
by cletus 2y ago
Here's a partial list of civilization ending events: - Nearby supernovae - Gamma ray bursts (eg from a neutron star that happens to be pointing directly at us and is sufficiently close) - Large icy or rocky bodies hitting the planet -
103.
by cletus 2y ago
I generally agree but there are two problems: 1. You're writing C++. You've really lost half the battle laready :) and 2. Writing correct templated code is difficult and should generally be reserved for when you're writing a
104.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm firmly in the camp that doesn't care what the rule/style is, I just want an unambiguous rule. I'll just use whatever the language conventions are. Snake case in Java, for example, would be a hate crime. So would came
105.
by cletus 2y ago
> You don't have a way how to transfer power from Dyson swarm without absurdly staggering losses. Why do you need to transfer power? The point of an orbital is primarily for people to live on. A single orbital could potentially supp
106.
by cletus 2y ago
It's true that the L1 Lagrange point is unstable so would need some station-keeping. It's an issue but it's a solvable issue. For one thying you have a bunch of energy to spend. For another, the solar wind itself can be used
107.
by cletus 2y ago
> Is there enough time in the lifetime of a star to build and use those structures? Easily. Sci-fi has misconstrued what a Dyson Sphere is to the point where the preferred nomenclature is "Dyson Swarm". A Dyson Sphere was never
108.
by cletus 2y ago
To build about a billion O'Neil Cylinders, which is about the number you'd need for a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun, would consume (IIRC) 1% of Mercury's mass.
109.
by cletus 2y ago
That's a very optimistic view of the future of fusion, IMHO an unreasonably naive view. There are lots of problems with fusion that are unclear if they will ever be solved, specifically: 1. Energy loss from neutron escape. Stars don&
110.
by cletus 2y ago
Three big possibilities: 1. Interstellar travel: people don't realize just how large the energy budgets are to get to even the nearest stars, even with pure matter-to-energy conversion. This is, of course, the theoretical upper limit o
111.
by cletus 2y ago
The term "Dyson Swarm" is preferred because it is a cloud of orbitals, not a rigid sphere. A rigid sphere was never the idea proposed (by Freeman Dyson). This idea comes from science fiction misunderstandings of the term "Sph
112.
by cletus 2y ago
> Well, so is building Dyson swarms and spheres Building a Dyson Swarm, which is really just the problem of creating one self-sustaining orbital (since after that it's just a scaling issue) is really just an engineering problem. A h
113.
by cletus 2y ago
There are several possibilities here. First, the Earth already receives a ton of energy from the Sun that is "wasted". We estimate that at about 10^16 Watts of power, compared to humanity's energy usage, estimated at 10^10-10
114.
by cletus 2y ago
A lot of thought has gone into this and other possible explanations. Isaac Arthur, of course, has an excellent video [1] on this issue. His entire library on the Fermi Paradox is worth watching. The short version of why this seems unlikel
115.
by cletus 2y ago
Bayesian reasoning applies here. Natural phenomenon is the most likely cause. think of it this way: imagine in the future we travel to Alpha Centauri and find sentient life or even the remnants of such. That would be really bad. Why? Becaus
116.
by cletus 2y ago
See my comment for a more detailed explanation but the short version is: a Dyson Swarm (preferred term) is merely a cloud of orbitals (ie not a rigid shell; there is no known or even theorized material with the strength to build a shell tha
117.
by cletus 2y ago
I love this topic. If and when we detect a technologically-advanced civilization, I truly believe this is how we'll do it. But why? Because the Dyson Swarm (the preferred name; "sphere" implies a rigid structure that was neve
118.
by cletus 2y ago
There's always a flavor of the month. 2 years ago it was NFTs. 4 years ago it was crypto. It's useful to see what's at the top of the hype curve.
119.
by cletus 2y ago
The downsides to having a golden goose are that a silver goose just can't compete, another golden goose is a threat. Golden geese are rare too and so much of it is luck. For example, Google's search and ads complete dominance bega
120.
by cletus 2y ago
Have we forgotten the cautionary tale of Steve Ballmer's Windows Phone boondoggle already? Ballmer wanted to use the same codebase for desktops, laptops, phones and tablets. It goes back further than that too. Microsoft bought the Side

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