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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.


  • I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

    Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

    Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.


  • They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

    Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

    Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

    In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

    Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

    These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.


  • CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It’s actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you’re in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.

    Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.

    When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don’t actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.

    At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you’d still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.


  • Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.






  • I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

    Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.


  • I would say this is likely not a practical super conductor… But it may well be the first ever room temperature super conductor.

    Yes of course it would be a big deal if they create one to begin with. However if it’s difficult and expensive to produce, that’s not much help. It has to be mass producible and inexpensive to have industrial significance. I mean we already have expensive solutions. Don’t need any more of those.

    The first semi-conductors were not practical either, but we can all see where that led!

    I don’t know that semiconductors are a good parallel. Growing the crystals dates back to the early 1900s and was never an expensive or technologically difficult process. Doping silicon to create devices like diodes and transistors was something new, but was not exceedingly expensive or a great technological challenge. The migration to chips which require lithographic doping was more of a challenge.

    In any case semiconductor devices were practical shortly after development. One of the first consumer products that used them was the “transistor radio” which was inexpensive and came out shortly after invention of the technology.






  • That’s good they won’t be adopting WEI, but if my bank or some other critical site decides to enforce a desktop browser with it, I’m still in the same boat. I did think of a way to avoid a WEI browser on my desktop if it comes to that. I can probably substitute a phone app for any critical services, but that’s still a drag. I don’t like phone apps much, I use a desktop browser for everything.

    I think Google’s destruction of the Internet is most simply a matter of influence. If Chrome didn’t have the huge market share they wouldn’t be able to pull off this kind of thing, open source or not. Unfortunately people have a herd mentality with everything on the internet so we allowed it to happen by doing what we always do.


  • A conductor with no resistance is a big deal for many electrical applications. Electrical resistance is often a big part of design. Removing that aspect changes things significantly. Electrical power losses and the size of conductors can be greatly reduced.

    I’ve read lots of unsubstantiated claims about superconductors. A solution has to be producible in quantity at a reasonable cost. Otherwise it’s not going to be a breakthrough. I mean we currently have expensive and bulky superconductor solutions, but they’re limited to applications where it’s reasonable such as MRI machines and particle accelerators.

    An inexpensive room temperature superconductor would make the most difference in tech sectors such as power transmission, electromechanical, and power electronics. These are areas where power loss due to circuit resistance is a big part of design. The impact would be minimal for computing and logic. There may be areas where power loss can be reduced, but logic relies on semi-conductors which must have resistance to function, it’s in the name. The term “semi” implies resistance.


  • Here’s something more interesting. A matter-antimatter reactor converts 100% of mass to energy so it’s a hundred times more efficient than fusion. In modern times antimatter has been produced at quantum levels in large accelerators such as the Hadrian collider. So it does in fact exist and can be produced.

    However a matter-antimatter reactor has some serious technical problems. For one it’s currently impossible to create antimatter in any practical quantity. Second if antimatter comes in contact with matter, instant boom. Like a sugar cube size of the stuff could level a large city. So containment would be an insurmountable problem.

    The interesting part is when you see an antimatter reactor in shows like Star Trek, it’s based on real science. Interestingly in 1968 when they wrote the original Star Trek, nobody knew antimatter was a physically real thing. That’s a case of sci-fi predicting science.


  • Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It’s outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.

    The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 1015.

    Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it’s gone. There’s no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.