pbmonster
1d ago
IMO you’re better off dove hunting if you want to switch to mostly birds.
Interesting, never met anybody doing that. Those birds are tiny, right? Can you reliably shoot enough for a full meal for multiple adults? Can you fill a freezer to have some for the off-season? Do you need a dog to find the birds, or do you go looking for them yourself?
pbmonster
1d ago
Same. I think my snobbishness saves me. If I swipe through Youtube shorts, my brain doesn't dump dopamine, it goes "this is shit" over and over again and gets more annoyed with every swipe.
Video is the wrong format for most content, and short form video is the wrong format for very close to absolutely all content. The very few exceptions to that rule where discovered 10 years ago on Vine, and done in thousands of variations since.
pbmonster
1d ago
It's coming, and soon. Zero-knowledge proofs for age are in the design of the age-verification framework of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, and in the specs of the Swiss eID law they passed a while back. Both involve an app on your phone holding your ID and your crypto keys and generating ZKP responses to things like age requests.
Both designs are decent in my opinion. Once you've come to terms with the slippery slope that we'll soon have digital ID checks everywhere, all the time, there's not much to criticize. It's probably the best way to do it, if we agree that we need to do any of that. But also, it's pretty far from a "very easy way". This scheme absolutely needs a central authority (probably a national government) doing the final ID/age check and then the issuing of crypto keys. I'll be curious how the US handles this. I expect Google/Apple to take over that task, since the majority probably won't trust the government to do it right...
pbmonster
6d ago
ion engines still have much higher specific impulse, but are only viable in space
True, I ignored those since they're not practical to push payloads to Mars or beyond. Insufficient thrust to power ratio, if you want to move serious cargo you need so much power that thermals become unmanageable. Other engines use the propellant as coolant, which is kind of genius - but also requires large propellant mass flow. Still, very useful for low mass probes!
And you're still sidestepping the point that upper-stage nuclear rockets (the original topic) and large nuclear payloads are completely separate issues.
Sorry, didn't mean to sidestep. I think we're just talking about different scenarios. Launching a nuclear thermal rocket from earth is an option for a non-stop express to anywhere in the inner system. There's plenty of use cases for those.
But up-thread and side-thread, people were discussing "serious space travel", "permanent Mars colonies" and "asteroids" with nuclear propulsion. In that case, I assumed we would do more things than just sending resources from Earth to X. A system-wide economy requires more fuel, and while the hydrogen can come from anywhere (luckily, since you need to refuel all the time), the Uranium can only come from Earth. And once you start pushing asteroids, you need to get up a whole lot of fuel.
OK, so maybe same scenario, but different timescales.
pbmonster
7d ago
One is the launch, from Earth, of a nuclear-powered rocket (e.g. NERVA).
"Current" designs (well, currently available 1960's designs) of nuclear powered rockets aren't useful for launching from the surface. While they have by far the best efficiency/specific impulse of all engines available today, they have catastrophically terrible thrust to weight ratios. Absolutely useless engines for first stage and even most second stage applications. You'd only want to use them in space - then their low thrust doesn't matter, and they use their high fuel efficiency to cut down time of a Mars transfer by a factor of 3.
it's a lot fairer to compare that to an A-bomb like Little Boy (64kg) rather than just the primer of an H-bomb
The vast majority of atmospheric tests where tactical warheads with a boosted fission core. Those - just like H-bomb primers - always contain subcritical amounts of plutonium (4kg) for efficiency and safety (they can only fission if explosively collapsed correctly into a critical mass) reasons. Pretty much the only devices with larger amounts of fissile material are H-bombs with second stages and tampers. But even those are much, much lighter than Little Boy, and they weren't tested all that much.
And I'm not even sure how valuable nuclear rockets would be for long space trips (there are lots of options once you're up there).
Extremely valuable! Even the most primitive and conservative designs outperform chemical rockets by several hundred percent (again, in specific impulse). More batshit designs (nuclear pulse propulsion and nuclear salt water rockets) are probably technically doable today, and offer orders of magnitude more specific impulse. Those would actually unlock the outer planets and the asteroid belt, and maybe Alpha Centauri.
Sustained fusion is already difficult enough in containment, actual fusion propulsion is probably orders of magnitude more complex than that. I have no hopes to still be alive when it arrives.
One rocket's worth of nuclear material in the atmosphere is barely a blip.
I'm not convinced. One NERVA style nuclear thermal rocket engine contains hundreds of kilos of uranium. Put one as an upper stage engine on a SpaceX booster and you can lift another 100 tons of cargo to orbit - which quite frequently will be 100 tons of U-235 (or 233, since we'd probably quickly get into thorium breeding if we'd consider such a project). We want to fuel an economy the size of a solar system, after all, and earth is the only place in this economy where it would be economical to mine Uranium.
Compare this to the ~4 kg of an H-bomb primer, and vaporizing a nuke fuel truck sounds a whole lot more catastrophic that an atmospheric test.
The interesting part is the "vaporizing" here. I'm pretty sure that most failure modes of such a launch would not vaporize a significant fraction of the payload or even the engine cores. The "fallout" would quite literally be tens of thousands of 1-kg pits (and a few fuel pellets) raining down from the explosion. Compared with the alternative, that contaminates a much smaller area. Manual clean-up would be possible, economical and necessary from a proliferation (and ecological, of course) perspective.
pbmonster
8d ago
This is the truest blackpill IMO: collective agency has been eradicated from Westerners, and it will take at least a century to rebuild the necessary infrastructure to produce it again
Overly pessimistic, I hope. I think it could/would be rebuild much quicker through a collective crisis. I'm watching China with a lot of interest partly because of that. I think a descend into a Cold War era international order, followed by a defeat of the West at the hands of China - could be a relative minor thing like Sputnik - would jump start the entire thing right quick. Probably requires media alignment and effective political leadership, but I assume that would emerge more or less naturally.
pbmonster
8d ago
I remember when I was a teenager I could feel such passionate crushes and such intense butterflies, but by the time I made it through college I couldn't really feel much of that at all.
I think that's normal. That's what growing up is, and it happens to everybody. That first crush, that first kiss, that first love really hits different, but the butterflies mostly are just adrenaline. And the novelty makes it special and forms stronger memories.
It's sad in a way, but I find it reassuring that it happens to most people, even the people who end up being married to their first crush for 60 years.
pbmonster
8d ago
With those brands, you can also always get a 15 year old model with around 100k miles. It will perform equally well as the 3 year old model, but be substantially cheaper to buy, easier/cheaper to repair (do research, get a model that has a reputation for being reliable and common), and it will not depreciate at all if you drive it for 2 years and 20k miles.
I'd just get a Toyota with hybrid drive from that era.
That said, I agree that nuclear (or WMD) inspection is at least theoretically possible.
I always wondered about that in the case of highly industrialized nations (or nations aided by one of those). How hard would it be to secretly build a large centrifuge stack and then obtain either a lot of ore or a bit of high assay low-enriched fuel (basically 20% U-235)? With tight integration, you could spin that into a bomb in a week.
Are the fourteen eyes really that good? Will their spies notice and report inconsistencies in, I don't know, centrifuge bearing part inventory and then locate where exactly those ended up in time? If you keep pouring state grants into small modular reactor startups (there's over 100 of those today) and two dozen of those companies end up needing 20% enriched fuel right around the same time, and all those fuel shipments get confused at the post office and they end up getting U-238 pellets by accident... will the fourteen eyes see?
The classic nuclear threshold states are pretty clear, I guess. If Japan or South Korea want the bomb, the time window to stop them will be tight. Still, I'd be curious if all their centrifuges are accounted for (and if there's bunker busters on the shelf that already have those coordinates pre-programmed). But could Australia or Canada cook the books at their mines and start a little stockpile on the side? Could Germany repurpose all that fuel just sitting in those mothballed reactors on the down low?
pbmonster
16d ago
That doesn't make much sense. Being aware of, and agreeing to, a power imbalance doesn't make it go away.
And I agree, every couple should have those discussions. But going into the discussion with a younger man would obviously change the stakes, and the style. There would be, on average, more room for compromise. And sure, if both actually want the exact same thing in every aspect of life, that doesn't matter. But most relationships don't have a 100% match, so compromising is important.
Same with the threat of divorce. As long as one party is significantly more fucked by separating, there is a power differential. Agreeing to it doesn't make it vanish.
pbmonster
16d ago
But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship.
That doesn't make a difference, does it? A professor dating his student is an obvious power imbalance, no matter how aware both of them are at the start.
just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship.
Sure, still different than a couple graduating together and deciding where to move together - who then also get a lot (but often different things) out of the relationship.
Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?
There's only very few 10+ year age gap relationships in my extended bubble, but those I can think of have clear power differentials: the guy already owned a house and was established in his career when she left grad school. This means, once she decided to enter that relationship, he got to choose the city they would live in. She's also, by not pushing for it in a prenup, not on the title of the house.
At some point, his pension scheme is going to allow him to retire, maybe even retire early. Whether she will continue to work or retire extremely early herself - together with him - will probably not feel like her choice.
She could have pushed against all that, but by being older, a lot of the default choices were already locked in by him. It would have taken a lot of effort to change some of those defaults, and realistically, the relationship would not have survived that effort.
Oh the other hand: free rent, lots of disposable income, friends in similar situations, a network to boost her own career... certainly nice perks, but I bet she wonders how much of that would survive a divorce.
pbmonster
16d ago
That's the thing, I haven't notice the frequency of incorrect output to go down significantly! It just gets more and more difficult to detect the errors.
If you enjoy history, I can recommend the Asian Civilisations Museum. One of the better ones I've visited, specifically it is orders of magnitude better than every single anthropological/historical museum I've visited in Japan. The National Museum is more about Singapore itself, but I also found it well done. If anything, the museums are air-conditioned, which will make them very much appealing once you're exploring the streets. The city also has a nice selection of different styles of temples, I decided to visit all the major ones just as a mission to see many different parts of the city on foot.
If you like Asian food, I've had some of the best Chinese and Indian food of my life in Singapore, both street food and fancy restaurants. Selecting restaurants beforehand is probably worth it.
When I asked Singaporean people what they like to do, they suggested going to one of the mega-malls, with the cable cars to Sentosa Island and (of course) to Marina Bay. The two former I flat out hated, they are not worth doing, unless you really have time to kill or need photos for Instagram - they look much better in photos than in real life. No matter what, absolutely do not go swimming at the beach at Sentosa, that must be just about the worst touristic beach in Asia. Marina Bay (the towers, the gardens, the indoor jungle, the supertrees at night, and the area around it) are more or less obligatory for tourism in Singapore, but just like the main Botanical Gardens and the Zoo I found all that just extremely... mid. Unless you like park design and architecture, it won't even fill a full day.
Two weeks is a lot of time for a "young" city like Singapore. I would strongly recommend long excursions into Malaysia instead of staying in the city, and I regret not leaving for trips sooner.
pbmonster
16d ago
Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.
I dispute it. Both suffer exactly the same problem: the output they produce is frequently wrong in subtle and insidious ways. This makes both equally useless for work that requires correctness, especially correctness you can't write unit tests for.
pbmonster
20d ago
Just a question of energy pricing. Zero liquid discharge is possible for desalination plants, it just takes more energy and more CAPEX. And really, all the environmentalist want is that concentrated brine isn't dumped into the ecosystem.
pbmonster
20d ago
Yeah, I can see it for municipal water supply. For farming the central valley? Never going to be economical.
Speaking of economical, building reservoirs would certainly be cheaper than building desalination facilities and the power infrastructure they require. But desalination works even when the reservoirs don't get refilled much anymore because of climate change, so maybe they're the right choice anyway.
pbmonster
21d ago
Define "worthwhile". If you get around the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, you could dam several major northern rivers: Klamath, Trinity, Smith, and Eel each could support several reservoirs (there are old plans to build "dam ladders" up those rivers). But that's unpopular, for ecological, indigenous and financial reasons.
You could also just add capacity to existing reservoirs by upgrading the dams. There's many candidates. Again, expensive and unpopular.
Why is there only one good contemporary example? If it's such a great and effective strategy, we should see it more. It's like with evolution, we don't have to theorize about what works in nature, we can simply see what exists and know that must be pretty good by the very fact it exists and is succeeding.
It's more complicated than that, right? By that logic, you could pick 1985 and argue that communism was better for Eastern Germany than centralized monarchy and market economy. Which is wrong, in my opinion - even a bumbling idiot as the King of Prussia would have done his people better than the commies ever did. Same for Belgian Congo - just because they don't have a King and his Governor anymore doesn't mean that... whatever the fuck it is they are doing there today is better for the Congolese than monarchy was (not saying that the monarchy was working out particularly well for the Congolese, either, but life was certainly better in the '50s than it is today). Just because you can destroy something doesn't mean what comes after is actually necessarily working better. And sure, eventually the commies failed in Eastern Germany and something more effective took over. But that doesn't just happen automatically.
Exactly, they lost. There was a real world test and they lost it.
I'm not a fan of single shot experiments. Wilhelm II was an idiot. Run the story again with Bismark as emperor, and western civilization might be speaking German for the next 400 years. And of course, democracy doesn't automatically select for the most effective leaders for the majority of voters. American voters elected and reelected G.W. Bush, which arguably was both unnecessary and a strict loss for the majority of Americans.
If democracy is so bad and monarchy/empires are so good, then why are pretty much all the dictatorships shitholes while the democracies are rich and powerful? The only meaningful counter example is Singapore and that's more of a blend between dictatorship and democracy.
The only contemporary counter example. Both the German Empire and Imperial Japan performed respectably in the late 18th and early 19th century, both economically and militarily.
The German Empire doubled GDP per capita between 1870 and 1914, surpassing (democratic) France and slowly closing the gap towards both the (also democratic) British Empire and the US - and they did that without having access to a vast colonial empire or an entire continent absolutely full of natural resources, respectively. The details are a bit more complicated, of course, because the Emperor was kept in check by a democratically elected parliament, but they really didn't have all that much power (mostly some fiscal control, but the Emperor chose the Chancellor and could disband parliament at any time, which he frequently threatened). Also, Wilhelm II was a bumbling idiot mostly ineffective ruler.
Imperial Japan went through the Meiji Restoration during the same period, industrializing even faster than Germany and successfully using its new industrial might to absolutely crush China and Russia on the battlefield. Again, a centralized monarchy with power concentrated mostly in the Emperor, but some checks (council of elder statesmen doing some heavy advising - but nobody said a dictator couldn't have some competent experts to make some decisions). And yes, both monarchies extensively relied on market economies - with a lot of guiding industrial policy from their Emperors.
Would have been interesting how far those centralized monarchies could have taken their people (in absentia of a catastrophic loss in a World War they started putting an end to the experiment) - or if the monarchy would have been abolished/disempowered/constitutionalized by the people anyway, even without the wars.
Overflight of the zone above 18k feet is legal, which makes jumping to the "someone-lost-a-MANPADS-in-Juarez"-theory the obvious choice. Both the Stinger and the Verba have an effective ceiling a little under 18k feet. The interesting questions is how hard do you have to kick the cartels for them to fire one at everything that flies?
The other option would be counter-drone operations in that airspace, probably also against the cartels and their drone activity. But stranding tens of expensive commercial aircraft for 10 days would be a little absurd for something that should be easy to plan...
pbmonster
28d ago
I'm not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community, but I guess I can see the splintering into smaller units - even if many of those are just franchises of some anarcho-capitalist mega-corp that collectively hires armed security. Sounded more like a thought experiment to me, along the lines of "what if every American suburb was a gated community that had cyborg pitbulls mauling tresspassers?" And American suburbs famously don't have that much actual social community going for them.
Also, absolutely read Anathem next, if you haven't already. It's by far his best work, and the one that actually has an (extremely utopian) solution to exactly that problem!
Or if they want to make a more historical point: they use it in the way you'd say "Late Republic", the period of the Roman Rebublic that was characterized by civil wars, mass slavery / slave rebellions and internal instability.
Same result, really.
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