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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

    The word you’re looking for is “big”. As in, it embiggens the noblest spirit.

    I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

    It’s also not possible to protect the ISS from either of those and yet it’s operated fine for 30 years. You do not need every little bit of it to be perfect, you just need to deflect enough solar wind that it allows Mars atmosphere to build back up which is what provides the real protection.

    If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

    Like I said, we waste more resources than that all the time. I’d rather we didn’t build yachts and country clubs and private schools, yet we do. There’s no reason to not get started building that array, especially if it will take a while.

    There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

    That is not what e-waste is. E-waste primarily consists of silicon chips and the metal wires connecting them. Even the circuit boards themselves are primarily fibre glass, not petroleum.

    And no, we wouldn’t be creating those using actual magnets, we’d be using electro magnets, which is just coils of wire connected to PV and logic chips.

    I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly. You know that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire right? And you know virtually that all of them just sit on their wealth, and do nothing with it but wast on luxury lifestyles for themselves right? Yeah it would be better if billionaire’s did not exist, but as long as they do, why are you upset about their money going to space exploration as opposed to just yachts and $20,000 a night hotel stays?






  • This is a pretty embarassing way to open this article:

    Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

    NASA legitimately has a plan for this, and no it’s not crazy, and no it doesn’t involve restarting the core of a planet:

    https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

    You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point (the orbital point that is stable between Mars and the sun), and then it will block the solar wind that strips Mars’ atmosphere.

    Otherwise cosmic rays etc are blocked and interrupted by the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere.

    The confident dismissiveness of the author’s tone on a subject that they are (clearly) not an expert in, let alone took the time to google, says all you really need to know about how much you should listen to them.



  • This is a trash article.

    Here’s the Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/maersk-agrees-study-nuclear-powered-container-shipping-2024-08-15/

    It makes it clear that Maersk has joined a study being lead by Lloyds Register and Core Power to assess the potential of using 4th generation nuclear reactors on cargo ships.

    A couple of demonstration nuclear powered commercial ships have been built in the past (by the US, Japan, & Germany), but they’ve all been too expensive to operate commercially and have all been retired or converted to diesel, mostly due to being too complicated to maintain and repair, and too specialized to benefit from any economies of scale.

    The US Navy and France both currently operate nuclear powered aircraft carriers, the US, UK, Russia, France, India, and China all operate nuclear powered submarines, and Russia has a bunch of different nuclear powered military ships and icebreakers so it’s not a radical concept, and I have no idea where the linked article is getting the “only 4 have ever been built” claim.

    Lloyds Register has also been running these studies for years, the only real interesting tidbit here is that Maersk is interested and they’re big enough to move the needle singlehandedly, but again they’re just signing up to participate in an early high level assessment of the idea, the assessment could just say ‘nah, not worth it’ and this is just a non story.





  • For software to run on a computer, it needs to tell the computer what to do, “display this picture of a flower”, “move my character to the left”, “save this poem to a file”.

    And for a bunch of different software to all run on the same machine, they all need to use the same basic set of instructions, this is called the machine’s Instruction Set.

    Because the instruction set has to work for any software, these instructions don’t look that readable to us, instead of “show this flower” they might be “move this bit of memory into the processor”, but software builds up millions of those instructions to eventually display a flower.

    Intel processors used a set of instructions that were called x86, and then when AMD made a rival processor, they made theirs use the same instruction set so that their processors would be compatible with all the software written for Intel processors (and when they needed to move from 32bit instructions to 64bit instructions, they made a new set called x64).

    Meanwhile Apple computers for a long time used processors built by IBM that used IBMs PowerPC instruction set.

    Now many companies are using the ARM instruction set, but ARM is still a private company you have to pay licensing fees to, so RISC-V is rising as a new, truly open source and free to use instruction set.



  • For 3D Modelling / Printing, if you have even a little bit of programming / scripting ability, OpenSCAD is amazing.

    It’s basically just a small scripting language for generating 3D objects and performing 3D modelling operations and its so handy to be able to store important info as precise variables, and create new objects and cuts and stuff just with for loops and if statements.

    I use the web version a lot of the time, and while it could use a little work, it’s pretty amazing.


  • I’m not as hardcore as most, I run windows as my main OS, but I do love my LG Gram 17" laptop from ~3-4 years ago.

    It’s powerful enough for general use, webdev, and very light 3D modelling, and it is insanely light and portable. I have a 14" MacBook at work and the gram is lighter than it, thinner, not that much bigger, and far more durable.

    Great keyboard and trackpad, giant screen (I wish it was brighter but this is the version from 3-4 years ago), and surprisingly solid Bluetooth, microphone, thunderbolt etc.