pencilguin

34 ms·

451.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The stable societies still standing after confronting and defeating numerous upstarts will be the ones that really are more advanced. You could say there will be a survivorship bias in the extant population.
452.
by pencilguin 4y ago
string_view would definitely have been wrong. std::span did not exist in the Standard at the time std::from_chars was adopted. An overload that takes std::span would be easy, and harmless. But as std::from_chars is only ever used from with
453.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Right: storage is mostly 19th-century tech, battery chemistries and catalysts excepted, that only needs building out. But we need not feed the trolls.
454.
by pencilguin 4y ago
See, you don't know how, and I don't know how. But they are, remember, incomprehensibly more advanced than you or me. And they know a bunch of other incomprehensibly more advanced civilizations all the way on the other side of
455.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Civilizations will sort out neatly into expansionist and stable. Stable civilizations will be, generally, much, much older than expansionist neighbors, and so incomprehensibly more advanced. Thus, each expansionist civilization will spread
456.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Wind/solar/storage does, in fact, solve the power problem. Period. Variability is in fact a trivial problem solved by storage and transportable backup. Even NG suffices as backup. Even coal suffices as backup. In the future, a
457.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Grid scale energy storage does, in fact , exist. So your whole argument scheme is bankrupt. Is there as much grid-scale storage now as there will be later? No. There will be lots more, of numerous kinds, in many, many places. They all work
458.
by pencilguin 4y ago
It is foolish to build storage before there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. So, everybody builds generating capacity first. Storage cost is falling even faster than renewable generation did.
459.
by pencilguin 4y ago
He has a Patreon acct. For a few bucks, he will send you authentic Godbolt stickers for your laptop lids, for the ultimate in geek cred.
460.
by pencilguin 4y ago
"The Producers." And, yes, classic.
461.
by pencilguin 4y ago
And yet is also uncompetitive.
462.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Any civil engineer can explain numerous storage alternatives to you. It is all centuries-old tech, excepting only novel battery chemistries and catalysts.
463.
by pencilguin 4y ago
You need to get that tritium out every day to have something to operate the reactor on. Look up the worldwide stock of tritium sometime.
464.
by pencilguin 4y ago
"Liming the ocean" is a very interesting idea I had thought of but not seen published before. Idea is that dissolved CO2 reacts with alkali metals and precipitates out, raising pH and making atmospheric CO2 more soluble. Best plac
465.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The paper is about how to prevent production of tritium. It mentions breeding tritium, but not how to extract grams of it, every day and at negligible cost, from a thousand tons of lithium salt. So, my point stands. Do futile jabs at rene
466.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Helion is the only fusion startup I know of that is not obviously a scam. They count on D-D side reactions for neutrons to use breeding tritium, which decays over decades to the 3He they need. I don't see how that could produce enoug
467.
by pencilguin 4y ago
See, this is how they find pigeons to hand over all their money.
468.
by pencilguin 4y ago
At PPB concentration? Literally anything can seem, to somebody.
469.
by pencilguin 4y ago
I wonder about a merger of a pair of supermassive black holes, say a billion solar masses each. Would it sterilize the whole galaxy? A galaxy is a pretty dangerous place to be. Probably we should get clear at first opportunity. A pretty big
470.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The rest have to spin thread 16 hours/day.
471.
by pencilguin 4y ago
They are already succeeding: they have got the investors' money, and no force on Earth is powerful enough to make them give any of it back. There was a movie with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, a few years back, about this business model
472.
by pencilguin 4y ago
If they used 50% enriched 6Li/7Li, they would breed extra tritium. But there would be no point, because they would have no way to refine it out. They don't care, because they know there will never be an actual power plant. They wi
473.
by pencilguin 4y ago
They will, fortunately, not need to solve any of those problems, because there won't be any power plant. Instead, they will spend all the investors' money and then go do something else.
474.
by pencilguin 4y ago
This, like all fusion startups (except maybe one), is a scam. That is to say, none of the investors will get any of their money back. If they are OK with that, fine. But probably most are not. You can think of it as a stupidity tax: enoug