mapt

42 ms·

721.
by mapt 2y ago
They don't have COMPLETE and PERFECT separation of storm and sanitary sewers, but they are substantially separate systems at this time almost everywhere. They just have a finite capacity, and the overflow often ends up mixing in older
722.
by mapt 2y ago
I make no claim about what we should do in other contexts, only that mutual destruction of access to orbit is so easy to achieve we're currently careening towards it full speed without what politicians perceive as 'open hostilitie
723.
by mapt 2y ago
It is trivial to retaliate in orbital disputes, and ASAT warfare produces long-lived hazard which cannot be cleaned up. Imagine two rival nuclear plants in nearby cities buying artillery and shelling each other, including with aerially depl
724.
by mapt 2y ago
We've been doing it since Deng for the sake of making a few CEOs and shareholders richer. China operates or is monopsony sponsor of numerous pieces of infrastructure around the world in the name of trade.
725.
by mapt 2y ago
This doesn't work conceptually, but it's hard to explain without attaining a KSP baseline of understanding. https://xkcd.com/1356 "Clearing a path" is something you can do with a bulldozer through a tra
726.
by mapt 2y ago
Even in a purely planar distribution, nodal precession still occurs slowly. It doesn't even need to be factored in, though, if different planes are colliding with each other and energetically generating a spectrum of new orbital vector
727.
by mapt 2y ago
If 800km impacts go asymptotic, it pollutes 700km and 900km orbits by virtue of having a distribution of resulting debris velocity vectors, and as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becom
728.
by mapt 2y ago
Orbit is not a location. Orbit is a group of velocity-location vectors which form a stable loop around a body, without intersecting that body. Imagine a bullet circling your head at mach 25. Now imagine a second bullet, circling your head
729.
by mapt 2y ago
That works a little bit when we're talking about one satellite poofing in a year based on a collision with another satellite, and not at all when we're talking about thousands of events a year, many of which are satellite-debris
730.
by mapt 2y ago
Invite them in. Launch their satellites for them, at 400km. Give them cash or territory. Give away the farm. How doesn't matter. What matters is that we start coexisting at 300-500km, and we mutually taboo launching large amounts
731.
by mapt 2y ago
For how long? Because this thing is happening right now, it's happening fast, and it's happening without any effort to fight against the trend. If your answer is "let's revisit this in 2050", then it isn't an a
732.
by mapt 2y ago
Yes. In a lot of historical spaceflight programs, the stage used in the upper atmosphere stayed with you to the final orbit, and was detached at low speed there. This saved you from having to design your satellite with significant onboard
733.
by mapt 2y ago
The current trajectory is that SpaceX proved the commercial and military viability of an LEO megaconstellation, repeatedly lowering their target altitudes and raising their satellite count because of debris and cell size concerns... And now
734.
by mapt 2y ago
A number of these sorts of "What is this" posts on Reddit about mysterious yellowish blobs, end up being polyurethane expanding foam. They float, and their default state is "mysterious blob", the only action necessary to
735.
by mapt 2y ago
You are talking about appreciable micropayments for appreciable amounts of entertainment from small creators. And I would argue we did get those in the form of subscriptions in Patreon, Onlyfans, Buy Me A Coffee, et al, or in the co-op worl
736.
by mapt 2y ago
If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without
737.
by mapt 2y ago
Debris in orbits that nearly intersect the atmosphere are practically harmless. The issues arise when you have an orbit that will intersect other orbits a billion times before decay. While the reality is very complicated, you can make a ro
738.
by mapt 2y ago
It's designed to survive re-entry in a very particular, and repeatedly adjusted, orientation. It's unclear how much would survive re-entry in an uncontrolled tumble. But better safe than sorry.
739.
by mapt 2y ago
That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people. Normally, if we show up at the flagpole at noon to confront each other, and you throw a punch, you have escalated things to a fistfight, and
740.
by mapt 2y ago
This isn't about "making a mistake on the captcha", this is about charging them one pence for every attempt and just not having a captcha. It's an entirely different sort of system, and it would require a cordoned off se
741.
by mapt 2y ago
Unfortunately, even understanding these things, on a shared connection it might take you literally two or three minutes of captcha work before Google recognizes your personhood. Am I identifying the boxes wrong? Am I doing it too fast? Whe
742.
by mapt 2y ago
There is another option. CAPTCHA is useful only when it is costly to solve. It is a costly signal that this is a real person, or at least is more than 1/10^9th of a real person (you're not running a fully automated spam system).
743.
by mapt 2y ago
You believe I'm overestimating current AI. While my estimations are probably a bit higher than yours, mostly I think you're overestimating hydrogen bombs. They're not that complicated, and not that secret in 2024. These A
744.
by mapt 2y ago
I think one of the big things we don't appreciate yet is fires. It's not so much "These things all explode" (they don't) or "wahh I can't put out the oxidized fire, so much flame, so little water, make it
745.
by mapt 2y ago
"you'd better have the car in a heated garage (it doesn't charge well when it's below -15 C / 5 F)." This I find interesting. Why doesn't the internal resistance of the battery raise the temperature suffi
746.
by mapt 2y ago
A typical driver makes 14500 miles per year. If manufacturing learning rates hold, then by the time that driver runs through 200,000 miles, a new battery pack of the same size will cost less than 25% what it cost new.
747.
by mapt 2y ago
"Not possible" is a vast overstatement. We've negotiated imperial territory disputes and hired mercenaries on contract with pantomine. You get there eventually if you're motivated & creative. It's about how ef
748.
by mapt 2y ago
Humans could engineer a hydrogen bomb in the 1960's from publicly available research and multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors. Turning that into an agent which builds its
749.
by mapt 2y ago
It is enormously easier to code for an AI agent which pursues a task doggedly by iterating down its list of available tools, without any consistent human moral values, than to code in some kind of human morality manually. For that, you nee
750.
by mapt 2y ago
With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be". Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable in

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