maaku

71 ms·

721.
by maaku 12y ago
I should have said "the great filter explanation of the Fermi paradox is nonsense." There may be one or more great filters. There may be an early filter, or a late filter, or both. But that issue is orthogonal to why we see an emp
722.
by maaku 12y ago
The simulation could be lazy, only simulating what it needs to for the observers contained within. Keep in mind that if you are inside a simulation, your sense of time is artificial. When something requiring more fidelity is run, the entire
723.
by maaku 12y ago
Because the trajectory of where this thing ends up is in the ocean (on purpose -- think about failure modes to see why).
724.
by maaku 12y ago
I'm not sure what aspect of my post you are arguing against? I guess there could be different definitions at play here, but I was talking about a hypothetical developmental stage where most civilizations destroy themselves. E.g. nuclea
725.
by maaku 12y ago
Great filter theory is nonsense. The period between intelligent life evolving and it taking over the universe at near the speed of light is so short, in cosmic time, that any civilization anywhere should expect to see an empty universe (in
726.
by maaku 12y ago
This testing gets you valuable information about performance and stress characteristics which can allow you to make improvements to the rocket, either by changing its shape for better efficiency or by making it lighter where it turns out to
727.
by maaku 12y ago
Well I wouldn't get upset about that. Now that it's built, $700k/yr is an insanely cheap price to maintain such a strcture. Now e.g. SpaceX can use their Space Act agreement with NASA to use the facility at cost for testing t
728.
by maaku 12y ago
> Video card memory is not used when not playing game. You'd be surprised.
729.
by maaku 12y ago
Oh one little snag: that reprocessed fuel for the 2nd gen reactors I referred to? It's plutonium. You know, the kind you use to make bombs and really awesome spacecraft. If we actually started doing that you might end up with a pluton
730.
by maaku 12y ago
"All that waste" ... you mean the 60 years of waste that if you amassed together would fit in the endzone of a typical football field? You mean that "waste" which could actually be separated into medically and scientific
731.
by maaku 12y ago
Ah, so you're pro coal and natual gas then. You do know that it is these source of energy that the grid is engineered to fall back on to even out fluctuations in supply? And that even if the grid was "100%" renewable, it&#x27
732.
by maaku 12y ago
What exactly is the position you are arguing?
733.
by maaku 12y ago
Just FYI, being home around the first few months isn't that important. If I were doing it over again, I'd take the first few weeks off to help my wife, then a longer month or so when the baby is a little older (3-9mo). Really the
734.
by maaku 12y ago
Many states (e.g. California) do provide paid family leave.
735.
by maaku 12y ago
You should have personal illness / sicktime in addition to vacation. If you don't ... that's sleazy.
736.
by maaku 12y ago
5 days is pretty common actually (the week between Christmas and New Years).
737.
by maaku 12y ago
MIT is under a moral obligation to act in the interest of its students, learners worldwide, and science in general.
738.
by maaku 12y ago
So? Remove Walter Lewin from MITx. Don't punish former and current students (I am one) by removing that absolutely amazing resource that is the Lewin Physics video lectures. Walter Lewin's course took me from failing physics to lo
739.
by maaku 12y ago
That statement makes no sense. You know it is possible to have violence without guns, right?
740.
by maaku 12y ago
Some people consider small fishing villages to be nice places.
741.
by maaku 12y ago
No if you mean people with commit bit, we have just two of the five active developers. The community of Bitcoin developers is much larger though and we come no where near a majority.
742.
by maaku 12y ago
Thankfully there's already a good canary for ECDSA (which is not a cipher) -- Satoshi's 1M btc only protected by a public key.
743.
by maaku 12y ago
What's the chance of that happening 12 times in a row? (Rhetorical question, you'll find the answer in the last section of the bitcoin whitepaper.)
744.
by maaku 12y ago
"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google&
745.
by maaku 12y ago
Actual implementations of AIXI are also quite easy. I've written one before. Not that it's very interesting to run -- it is basically indistinguishable from an infinite loop. As for what the acronym stands for, heck if I know.
746.
by maaku 12y ago
Interesting. I'll have to check those projects out. I have the same problem as the GP -- I have a script that rips CDs, taking multiple reads until it gets two bit-for-bit identical copies. And just about every time at least one track
747.
by maaku 12y ago
Java?
748.
by maaku 12y ago
And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which
749.
by maaku 12y ago
Notice that nowhere in the graphic is there a Martian lander. This looks like a re-purposing of the Orion spacecraft into a twin configuration to support a one-off slingshot around Mars on an approximately two-year free return trajectory, w
750.
by maaku 12y ago
You might be interested in learning about AIXI. It is in fact trivially easy to create a general intelligence effective in arbitrary domains ... if you assume infinite computational capability. It goes to show that the problem of artificial

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