billytetrud
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
648
Submissions
458
Member since
Mar 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
You're very wrong about that.
Comment · 1 year ago
Eliminating "the need" for overhead wires seems like a terrible trade off when you're adding "the need" for expensive batteries and charging infrastructure.
Comment · 1 year ago
You might be interesting in looking at the Lima programming language: http://btetrud.com/Lima/Lima-Documentation.html . It has ideas that cover some of these things. For example, it's intended to operate with fully automatic optimization. This assumption allows shedding lots of complexity that arises from needing to do the same logical thing in multiple ways that differ in their physical efficiency characteristics. Like instead of having 1000 different tree classes, you have 1 and optimisers can then look at your code and decide what available tree structures make most sense in each place. Related to your async functions idea, it does provide some convenient ways of handling these things. While functions are just normal functions, it has a very easy way to make a block of async (using "thread") and provides means of capturing async errors that result from that.
Comment · 2 years ago
Have you ever had Nixta? It's a corn spirit with a very unique and pleasant flavor
Comment · 2 years ago
I still don't see you making any constructive comment. If you're going to, make it your next one please. If you want an answer to your original rhetorical-looking question. The answer is no.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'd be very surprised if you could convince me that solar or wind could eliminate the need for the majority of our electricity to be generated by base-load systems like hydro, coal, oil, or nuclear. Do you know what the cost of solar power is if you factor in storage needs?
Comment · 2 years ago
Your question was full of self righteous snark and your response to my question was as well. Trying to tell me you were just "curious" and "asking for clarity" is 100% bullshit and you know it. If you want to actually engage in a conversation, drop the snark and I'll be happy to have a pleasant conversation with you. Otherwise, I guess we'll both have to be assholes.
Comment · 2 years ago
> enough of them
How much is enough? A von neumann machine shouldn't need to be that big. You can send a single one to a solar system and let it replicate itself indefinitely. A single seed can sprout an entire civilization.
> If an intelligent species directed such an object to our galaxy, how close would is need to be for us to detect it?
We could probably detect it for many hundreds of lightyears if not orders of magnitude further. Why? Because an intelligent species capable of sending a von neumann machine to another solar system would probably be intelligent enough to make large scale infrastructure projects like dyson swarms. Such structures would basically be visible from any distance we could see the individual star from, which we can do from at least 50 million light years.
And not only that, but we could see evidence of a von neumann machine coming through in the distant past as well, even if for some reason its no longer active, because it would have left an enormous amount of artifacts behind.
> When it is part of the question, how is it irrelevant?
Fair enough. But what I mean is that if life isn't "rare" (for any definition of rare really), one would expect to see a massive amount of evidence of life and civilizations etc. Since we don't see that evidence, we should assume either that life is rare, or we're not the "average" planet that the copernican principle assumes.
> If it was on the other side of the galaxy, how would they know to send someone to our solar system
They wouldn't have to know. They would simply send spaceships everywhere and would happen across us by random chance within a million years.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'm sorry but if you think the US had a "free market" for nuclear power, you're an idiot.
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for the info. I did some more research and found out that Nuclear Power was indeed not subsidized from 1985 to 2000, but after 2000 some nuclear subsidies seem to have been created. However, while over 20% of the electricity in the US is produced by nuclear plants, only 1% of energy subsidies goes to nuclear, which looks like is approximately on par with subsidies for fossil fuel power.
I don't think we should be subsidizing power (or most things) but it seems disingenuous for an article to claim that nuclear power isn't viable because it gets subsidies, even tho fossil fuel gets at least as much subsidies per mwh as nuclear.
Comment · 2 years ago
You're an idiot, goodbye.
Comment · 2 years ago
Was the basic research funded by governments? Yes. Is subsidization necessary or even done for nuclear powerplants to be built and profitably run given that basic research as an already-existing stepping stone? No.
Comment · 2 years ago
No it doesn't "turn out" that way. It is a self fullfilling prophesy where a government either grants a monopoly to a private company or to itself. There is almost nothing that would actually be a monopoly without government protection.
> you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home
Why the fuck not? You are asserting things that you clearly haven't thought much about. But I don't have time to try and change your mind. Your biases are clearly too ingrained.
Comment · 2 years ago
Sounds like you're ignoring my whole post. I guess this conversation is over then.
Comment · 2 years ago
> turns out when you grant a for profit company a monoply they take advantage. every time without fail.
Yes. Granting anyone a monopoly (a corporation or a government) is always a terrible idea. Let's stop doing that.