Viewing profile — pg-gadfly

And why is that? Would bringing water into your house by a bucket also be a great idea? Unlikely, unless it serves another, non-obvious point.

Waste is very subjective. When you have 100x the supply of something, it becomes cheaper to do stuff, which means other more valuable resources can be saved instead. We don't manag…

I don't think there is a problem with the former statement at all: Amplifying stupidity must mean it can solve problems without external intelligence. If it required more intellige…

As I've been saying, you don't know the point at which there is no more to learn. Even minor things can have major impact when combined with further research. Things like "enormous…

I think the author is giving lots of value to computation itself, which is not how humans generally allocate it. It's results are seen just as another generic resource. What do peo…

>There is no efficiency There is certainly efficiency to consider when making energy. We can't tap into the full potential of any source, there are "hard limits" to many of our cur…

It isn't "exactly impossible" though, it never is. You can find out a more efficient way to create it, or you might have more power available in the future. All manmade elements ha…

The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself. Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of. Anything that moves wor…

The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there

In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.

It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living. Pr…

All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency. There are lots of examples which …

Any load balancer will let you do that. Scaling is a few lines of scripts to do on any platform, and well worth the couple minutes, you don't even need a tool for just that. No too…

_any_ non-proprietary tool is "cloud agnostic". Kubernetes is bundled software, and achieves the things those pieces achieve. There is nothing holy about k8s specifically, the tool…

>It’s really bizarre to me that THIS is the aspect of consumerism that people go after for energy use It's more common than you think. In fact it's so common that it has it's own W…

Observing complex reactions with chemicals requires much longer study than simply beaming things with microwaves. Results are nearly immediate, and any long term effect would have …

Increasing attention available should be good regardless of how it would be used, even the worst-case scenario would be where we are now, only we get more done

Increasing the responsiveness of everything should have the exact opposite effect, because attention is most affected by latency. If you're always immediately getting what you're l…

Depending on how many people a single point serves, it can imply a pretty sizeable chunk of energy. Smaller things add up when you're talking of hundreds of millions of people

Attention is highly latency sensitive, and bringing reaction for your action a second sooner has major implications, and significantly increases your ability to interact with and u…

Of course there has been improvement in absolute terms, but our current state is much more than just that, which skews the results when thinking about where we are. The opinion is …

Behavior of microwaves is well-understood yes. Proving a negative would be rather difficult however, much like I find it hard to prove that no magical gnome exists at the bottom of…

I think people often misunderstand how bandwidth (and generally any utilization) works. It's not about using 10% of the speed for some time, but using 100% of it for a fraction. Yo…

Latency benefits would enable many new realtime applications both in business and consumer end and speed up many existing ones so they'd be much less janky to use, and thus more ac…

It's also to note that SSD capacity hasn't strictly improved, it's been gained through massive compromises that severely impact their lifetime and performance. More than that, a 5 …