Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Yeah, how is that mars colony plan going realistically. have they figured out the bits about how humans are going to survive in a toxic irradiated environment for months on end? I want it to happen, but I honestly havent heard much from spacex about it other than we have to be allowed to develop cheap rockets. There's a lot more involved in a journey to mars than just cheap launch costs.
Comment · 3 months ago
Taken literally you are technically correct, but... 1. Space is big, but LEO is not that big and if a single company clutters it enough, other organisations might start bumping into issues like 'if i don't get sign off from starlink corp, i might hit one of their satelites on the way up and my insurance wont cover that so I cant afford to launch given the risks of being sued by elon'. 2. Applying for a licence in this context, mostly means greasing the right palms (preferably the pudgy bruised ones).
Comment · 6 months ago
Devils advocate here. There is currently an article on the front page about a US bill to compel operating systems to collect age verification / id data. If something like that was actually in place and every packet on the internet was stamped with your digital id then you could feasibly demand that aws purge/filter your data out of their systems.
Comment · 7 months ago
correction. in the real world all smartphones are either apple, android or none/other. in terms of legals, you really do have to cater to all three, which is why we don't have one world government.
Comment · 1 year ago
Because high level languages are where the libraries that do all of the heavy lifting exist. Libraries provide a suite of tools for absstracting away all of the complexities of creating a 'simple' web app. I think a lot of newer devs dont realise how many shoulders of giants they are standing on, and all the complexities involved in performing a simpl fetch requeust.

Sure an LLM could write it's own libraries and abstractions in a low level language, and im sure there are some assembler or c level web api wrappers, but they would be nowhere near as comprehensive or battle tested as the ones available for high level languages.

This could definitely change in the future. I think we need a coding platform that is designed for optimised LLM use, but that still allows humans to understand and write it. Kind of a markdown for code. Sort of like what OP is trying to do, but with the built in benefit of having a common shared suite of tools for interoperability.

Comment · 1 year ago
SpaceX is the stoic incumbant by now. They have the launchpads and enough money to fight any challenging patents. If I was an up and coming rocket engineer, they would be my goto stable career choice. If I had ideas, i would shop around.
Comment · 1 year ago
The process you describe took me right back to my childhood days when I was fortunate to have a simple 8 bit computer running BASIC and a dialup modem. I discovered the concept of war dialing and pretty quickly found all the other modems in my local area code. I would connect to these systems and try some basic tools I knew of from having consumed the 100 or so RFCs that existed at the time (without any real software engineering knowledge - i was a 10 year old kid). I would poke and prod around each system, learning new things along the way, but essentially going in blind each time.

The only real advantage I had over the current crop of LLMs was the ability to reliably retain context between sessions, but even that wasnt very useful initially as every system was so bespoke.

I then moved on to using some level of social engineering to extend my ability to gain access to and learn about these systems.

Doing this over and over, I like to think I have developed some pretty complex understanding and abilities.

Comment · 1 year ago
The same motive that all nascent life has - survive and propagate.
Comment · 3 years ago
Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT.

I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

Comment · 3 years ago
Google also quite often fires customers.
Comment · 4 years ago
In the context of interface/product design, gender identity is just another data point for marketing purposes. I cant think of many products that are genuinely gender specific.

When data collection and manufacturing supply chains were more crude, it was easier to make blue and pink gi joes and barbies.

Now we have the abilitiy to collect more nuanced data about peoples preferences and efficiently service the long tail, it makes sense to let customers define their likes on a spectrum rather than as binary choices.

I dont see why you would feel so strongly about restricting how people choose to define themselves.

Comment · 4 years ago
True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.
Comment · 4 years ago
Dyson swarms are fascinating concepts, but as we are learning about our own ever increasing energy requirements harvested from our ecosystem, moving around too much energy in a complex system can have undesirable consequences.

I would imagine that a planetary system as a whole has a 'climate' driven by it's host star, and redirecting large amounts of that energy would have unpredictable consequences. While most of the suns energy does leak off into interstellar space, before it reaches that point it interacts with various bodies big and small, solid and gaseous, it generates magnetic fields and powers phenomena we may not be aware of.

Perhaps the choice of creating a Dyson swarm IS the great filter, and any civilization that has achieved it finds itself in a state of 'solar climate crisis'.

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