Viewing profile — pfdietz

There is no need for an organized, unified project for life to spread across the galaxy, any more than there's a need for a unified effort for bacteria and fungi to consume some ta…

And puckish.

If I were saying we were definitely rare or unique, you'd have an argument. But I'm not doing that -- I'm saying it's a possibility that is consistent with evidence. The claim that…

These companies have very low profit margins (as a fraction of cash flowing through them). They have strong incentive to keep costs down. What does stock price have to do with this…

Well, and also because of the "I've been told in Scheme you should do it this way, so by gum I'm going to do it this way!"

One place where this shows up is in parse trees. The grammar for a list of things may involve productions that look like list constructors. This, directly translated into a data st…

Even SBCL doesn't do TCO at all times. Compiling at (debug 3) means no TCO. Another related footgun is deep recursion of other kinds, for example when recursively traversing down l…

Lack of TCO is also a common footgun for Scheme programmers using Common Lisp.

This is an attitude that sets one up to be blindsided by developments. It's backward looking, not forward looking.

You confused $/kg with $/ton.

Heat pumps and radiators. Pumping heat to 2x the absolute temperature reduces the size of the radiator by ideally up to a factor of 8.

No, even if you include that. Remember to not commit the mistake of thinking current launch costs are written in stone for all time to come.

What part of "potentially" didn't you understand? The critics of space data centers seem to be focused on the immediate instant and downplaying any potential tech improvements.

Heat pump and a radiator, I believe. Very low mass PV would help a lot; PV can in principle be much less massive than a radiator of similar area.

Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system th…

Sorry, when you make an assertion, you don't get to demand I justify questioning it. You need to explain why I should believe you. Your reversal of burden of proof is a red flag th…

"SpudCell" already has 36 genes; the information encoded there basically cannot occur by random processes. There is still an enormous complexity gap between it and abiotic systems.…

And also when doctors are expected to provide the best treatments or else they can be sued for malpractice.

Health outcomes in the US are affected by higher levels of obesity. If anything, the higher health spending keeps that from being worse. I expect Ozempic and the like to have a sig…

I could be sad this was gone if I had any idea what it was.

> There is likely simple basic life as advanced as bacteria around the universe What is the basis for this assertion?

I agree. The Fermi Argument, and the apparent rarity of K3 civilizations in other galaxies, is to me powerful evidence of the scarcity of life. At the least, this suggests SETI sho…

The Youtube channel Kyplanet recently had an episode on recent arguments that the Earth/Moon system was formed from at least three giant impact events, not just a single one betwee…

Were that to happen it could be the worst news humanity ever receives, since it would greatly increase the chance the "Great Filter" is in front of us, not behind us.

> Shouldn't entirely new life develop all the time on earth? It's possible OoL requires some exponentially unlikely step. We wouldn't realize that because of observer selection: ha…