171–180 of 202 posts
Now here that is on one chip. That change blows my mind.
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20 years ago nobody spent any money on smartphones. Now, the money spent on them has created billions of processors with magnitudes more power than the spacecraft we're being wistful about. Consumerism rerouted itself to forwarding science. And that's just a device for watching cat videos. The carry-over between rockets and modern technology like hypersonic missiles is even greater - which is why we invented the spac…
Carry over is still not as efficient as directly spending on what you want.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
I sure never anticipated cosmetic surgeons twerking on Instagram in their scrubs to advertise themselves between the videos of a chick jumping into a confused Labrador's mouth and that one of the kid on a bike being shocked by the existence of brown chalk when they see a Pokémon drawn on a sidewalk.
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Imagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...
And still mostly wasted. Look after the people on Earth first. Once we show we can accomplish that, then and only then do we begin to earn the stars.
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I think we're unlucky. I think the next generation or a couple generations down the line they will figure out biological immortality. If you're immortal the sum total of things you will see in your lifetime will dwarf the experience you're having now.
And what will we do with immortality? Our organs will continue to deteriorate, especially the brain. Many older people are already quite gullible and easy to feed propaganda to, being a favored target to politicians, let alone someone 90+.
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I think we're unlucky. I think the next generation or a couple generations down the line they will figure out biological immortality. If you're immortal the sum total of things you will see in your lifetime will dwarf the experience you're having now.
I agree. I feel like we missed immortality by a few decades to a hundred years at the most. We might be some of the last generations that actually have to die.
I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…
If you want to gain a deeper understanding of how computers work, write an emulator of something relatively simple — GameBoy for example. This is kinda disillusioning. With the bugs you'll inevitably make, you'll understand how very, very, very dumb computers actually are. A CPU just fetches an instruction from memory, executes it, and updates the program counter. It does this indefinitely, for as long as power is ap…
I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…
If you want to gain a deeper understanding of how computers work, write an emulator of something relatively simple — GameBoy for example. This is kinda disillusioning. With the bugs you'll inevitably make, you'll understand how very, very, very dumb computers actually are. A CPU just fetches an instruction from memory, executes it, and updates the program counter. It does this indefinitely, for as long as power is ap…
This is the one I played some time ago: https://nandgame.com/
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If you want to gain a deeper understanding of how computers work, write an emulator of something relatively simple — GameBoy for example. This is kinda disillusioning. With the bugs you'll inevitably make, you'll understand how very, very, very dumb computers actually are. A CPU just fetches an instruction from memory, executes it, and updates the program counter. It does this indefinitely, for as long as power is ap…
"just" and "executes" are doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting here
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I think a moon base is actually more useful because there’s actual commercial use cases to a moon base like mining etc. and not only that but doing a mars mission is far easier and cheaper if you already have a moon base since you can make rocket fuel on the moon for cheaper in terms of delta-V if you can come up with a hydro lox chemistry design.
What could you mine on the moon that would be worth transporting home?
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Modern loneliness is a far more multifaceted issue than it’s often presented as. For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.
Those kinds of movements aren't new though: Entire generations in many a country ended up emigrating across the sea, back when it was far slower and dangerous, to make their fortunes, as their home was too poor to handle more than one son. And today we have our home culture on our phones. I can watch TV from my home country, and my home team's soccer matches live. I can video call whenever, for free. So maintain conn…
Instead it’s often necessary to move repeatedly, for reasons varying from going to school to getting a job to finding housing with room for kids to just trying to keep rent from eating up the majority of one’s paycheck.
In my case I’ve moved 9 times in the ~15 years since I turned 20 and it’s very likely I’ll be moving again in the future. It’s been very disruptive for maintaining connections, even with the power of modern communications at my disposal. I’ve more or less grown used to it and am kind of introverted anyway so I’m not depressed but I could see where others might not be so lucky.
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