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Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#231

Post by Rury »

maybetryit wrote: post #204
Rury wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I think communism sounds great, but the problem is that it simply doesn't work in practice. In other words, it has been tried, it just doesn't work. To see why, you can categorize the forms of government as so: - Monarchy/Dictatorship: Power in the hands of one, one person is authority - Oligarchy/Republic: Power in the hands of a few, aristocrats are authority - Democracy: Power in the hands of many, majority…

"For example, in Democracy, you settle disputes by voting, where the majority wins, and the rest don't get their way. This ability to settle disputes without violence, is what makes us civil and what makes society a society. Without it (such as with communism), you are in complete anarchy, where raw might/ability (eg successful violence/persuasion) is the only thing there is left to settle disputes. Thus, those who w…

You're right. The US isn't a democracy, it's predominantly an oligarchy/republic. And as matter of fact, no national government is purely a democracy (because a pure democracy at such a scale also doesn't work, because of how bureaucratic it would be). Most governments are hybrids to varying degrees. The way I categorized the governments here was just to show how things work, nothing prevents it from being a spectrum.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#232

Post by solardev »

thelastgallon wrote: post #154

Renewable power production is wasted due to curtailment.[1] All this free power is being wasted, which could be used to charge cars. The US has 2 billion parking lots, 290 million cars and cars are idle 23+ hours every day. All we need is a cable from nearest building to parking lot to charge electric cars. The technology exists. This is a win-win opportunity, accelerate renewables and wean off of fossil fuels. I'm w…

I don't think it's solely a matter of getting more electric cars connected. Basically it's a mismatch between production and consumption by time (peak vs base loads) and so storage (whether electric cars or otherwise, like home storage solutions) acts as kinda a buffer. But so would utility scale storage (pumped hydro, giant battery farms), demand time shifting (smart water heaters, HVAC, dryers, etc.) or fossil fuel/hydro peaker plants.

But a big part of it isn't just the engineering but the human and consumer psychology. You can build all the infra, but convincing households to abide by your time of use schedule is challenging unless you force them into it (which many utilities do). People want to use their stuff whenever they want, not when it's most efficient for the grid.

That's where the storage is nice, letting the utility manage those fluctuations, but we can't produce enough battery capacity at a good cost right now. And there's geopolitics too, China controls a lot of the raw materials, and production of the downstream products are often limited by the Japanese and Korean battery manufacturers.

It's a multi faceted problem, not just something we can throw an infinite amount of EVs at.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#233

Post by palata »

nurettin wrote: post #223
palata wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does every invention need to burn society down? Apparently, yes. That's called "rebound effect". I don't know of an invention that did not suffer from it. 5G is more efficient than 4G for the same usage, but it allows us to use more, so we will use more. Reusable rockets are more efficient, but they will allow us to launch a lot more rockets, so we will. We don't know how to constraint ourselves. That's probably al…

I don't see a reason to believe this. A lot of my examples went unaddressed.

> A lot of my examples went unaddressed.

You mean the "why can't people invent " part?

Not sure what to say to that, to be honest... would be cool to live in peace in a sustainable way, that's for sure. But I don't see that as an argument.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#234

Post by palata »

okeuro49 wrote: post #222
palata wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my knowledge of European history, this is not true. You will need to elaborate on that. > Marx also said that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat, who should seize the means of production. Which should be temporary, right? Do you have an example where it was actually temporary? That would answer my point above.

> You will need to elaborate on that. My particular familiarity is with the German Democratic Republic. There were many true believers in communism, who in their attempt to construct a communist utopia created and contributed towards a police state. Jordan Peterson said it shows arrogance to suggest that people just weren't doing communism right, and that if only they got the theory right, then they would usher in th…

I think we're talking past each other. You say "communism doesn't work because we can't reach it", and I say "it's not entirely clear if communism doesn't work because we haven't managed to reach it".

Don't you think that you risk missing interesting ideas if you reduce communism to temporary dictatorships?

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#235

Post by Nesco »

theossuary wrote: post #181
Nesco wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasoning is very flawed for a single reason. If by let’s say 2075 the population was reduced to 1975 levels, the demographics would still differ widely. 1. Age distribution would look like an inverted pyramid instead of a pyramid 2. The geographical, racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different. The share of global population of the global south, which is currently highly…

> racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different Why is this a problem?

Not an issue per se. It shows the limit of the analogy used by defrost to justify such a world would be as functional as 1975’s was.

The basic assumption that the two situations are similar is just… false

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#236

Post by palata »

ianai wrote: post #225
palata wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but... yeah I guess I need to elaborate on why I believe fusion is not a solution (and get more downvotes from techno-solutionists, yay \o/). First, let me say that I usually start by mentioning the mass extinction, because technical people (myself included) have a tendency to believe that "the problem is CO2 emissions, and we can find new technology to reduce that". So I find it important…

Energy is not a bad thing in itself. Fossil fuels are problematic precisely because they’re slightly more energy dense than previous forms of energy while having huge, dispersed externalities not reflected in their upfront costs. Fusion and nuclear in general put the power densities of fossil fuels and all other previous forms of power to shame. It’s not a single order of magnitude more dense, it’s very many. And the…

> Energy is not a bad thing in itself.

I did not mean to say that. My intention was to say that our society fundamentally relies on fossil energy, and it seems more and more clear that we won't manage to solve that without degrowth before our society collapses.

> But thinking we’re past some fundamental point that makes any progress futile

Who said progress is futile? I say infinite growth is bad. I find it much more elegant to build a sustainable society with clever use of technology than to rush for productivity. Since we're on HN, look at software: we as an industry mostly write bad software, because all we care about is growth. We could probably write better, more sustainable software, for more sustainable products. To keep with the software comparison, my feeling is that I am saying "guys, please stop piling up crap code and hacks just to release a bad product tomorrow; let's go slower, but write good code that solves actual problems". And you're telling me "stop obstructing the rest of us, we like piling up hacks and releasing crappy software, and it makes good money".

Degrowth does not mean "go back to how people lived 300 years ago", but rather "be clever and do sustainable stuff". Or "instead of optimizing for productivity (which is killing us), what about trying to optimize for something that would be sustainable?". I, for one, would call that progress.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#237

Post by oli5679 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #19

The biggest problem domain worth pursuing is figuring out fusion. If we can unlock what is effectively limitless power a lot of problems become far more tractable. Everything else is a distraction. We need cheaper and more available power. Every physicist and engineer in the world should probably try dedicating at least one or two month of their life to figuring out fusion. If humanity could pay a trillion dollars to…

What's the biggest problem with fission that fusion solves?

My understanding is that that raw materials are a low % of total cost for fission, waste disposal is not that hard, and that it's technically more complicated and expensive to build a fusion plan than a fission plant.

I found this pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tYlXY19I3c

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#238

Post by mikewarot »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #230
s1gsegv wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's much more work to be done here in the open source community, and I think it might have to be done there due to lack of aligned incentives otherwise. For instance, on platforms such as Android that are meant to be secure in this way, I can't block an app from accessing the internet anytime it wants. Of course, the reason for that is that blocking internet access would also allow blocking ads, which Google…

We also need UX innovations that make granular permission management friendly for average users. I suspect good defaults are half the battle here. If we use the popup approach for 20+ permissions when users download an app, they'll likely say yes to everything, no to everything or be frustrated at how much time they spend setting up their new app. None of these seem like good outcomes.

Permission management - not part of capability based security. That's the bad thing with the same name that happens on cell phones.

Capability based security is more like cash(an economic capability) in your wallet. You take out $5 to buy something, you can't risk more than $5 in the transaction.

With a phone, it's like you enable access to ALL of your money, effectively forever, in a binary manner. (Unless you remember to turn it off later, or the OS does after 3 months of non-use)

Edit/Append - Capability based security dates back to the 1970s. It's perfectly possible to do it with modern hardware. You just need to protect the OS from applications, which anything with an MMU can do. (Or, if you don't have an MMU, you could just run WebAssembly, which is capabilities based)

The key is that instead of giving file names to programs, you give handles (capabilities) at run time, when the user wants to open a file, save, etc. Otherwise the program has NO access to anything by default. (Thus it can't cause unwanted changes anywhere else)

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#239

Post by nurettin »

palata wrote: post #233
nurettin wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a reason to believe this. A lot of my examples went unaddressed.

> A lot of my examples went unaddressed. You mean the "why can't people invent " part? Not sure what to say to that, to be honest... would be cool to live in peace in a sustainable way, that's for sure. But I don't see that as an argument.

Okay, I don't really see much of a point in arguing for the tech we do have that doesn't cause any society to collapse that you are oblivious to.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#240

Post by spacebanana7 »

mikewarot wrote: post #238
spacebanana7 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also need UX innovations that make granular permission management friendly for average users. I suspect good defaults are half the battle here. If we use the popup approach for 20+ permissions when users download an app, they'll likely say yes to everything, no to everything or be frustrated at how much time they spend setting up their new app. None of these seem like good outcomes.

Permission management - not part of capability based security. That's the bad thing with the same name that happens on cell phones. Capability based security is more like cash(an economic capability) in your wallet. You take out $5 to buy something, you can't risk more than $5 in the transaction. With a phone, it's like you enable access to ALL of your money, effectively forever, in a binary manner. (Unless you remem…

Ah okay. Is it possible to have capability based security in software at all? Or is the definition such that it must be implemented at the hardware level?
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