awalton

I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to figure out. I eventually found the speed running community to be quite good at this, as rain9441 would stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the achievements in one go), and it gave me a good hint on how exactly LB was supposed to work - I kept on screwing up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't build oil refineries in the machines you had, so you had to save a certain amount of crafts for them.

But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the !#( does this work" to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."

> I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.

If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a no-consumable power technology).

You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you're done. Forever.

And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends.

Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game).

But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).

It's 'infinite' on a technicality. Having your last few technologies on repeat all so your investment in tech-making infrastructure doesn't completely go to waste just barely qualifies, nothing more.

It feels like the only reason they even left it in the game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of those bases work without running into extreme update per minute (UPM) problems.

The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they're mostly the right amount of painful/challenging and interesting to make you actually want to try for them.

That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)

At my previous employer our code was littered with references to a backdoor. It was a channel for tools running in guest operating systems to talk to the host hypervisor through a magic I/O port.

It's even openly called "backdoor" in open source code directly related to it: https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/blob/master/open-vm-...

That's like saying "Google is just a search engine" and ignoring the fact that "to google" is now an English verb and the rest of the impact it has had on information availability in the world.

Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried.

But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly.

The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle.

And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.

They've got somewhere north of 3 million online subscribers paying $17/month. It's not Netflix numbers, but it's still more than $600M/year - about a third of their claimed revenue. Their writers are salaried at $110K/year on average and probably around 1300 writers (given data from 2016), so that's about half their digital income for salaries.

There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing).

What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.

No, what I want is Google Reader back. And I know I'm far, far, far away from being alone on this. Just give me the text, not the videos and the horrible formatting and poor font choices and all of that bullshit - I'd gladly pay for it, if it still existed.

May it rest in peace.

The short answer is reliability per watt. Solar's got lots of ups and downs which means designing bigger than you need. Batteries need replacing because they don't last forever. Solar panels have to be kept clean of dust on planets like Mars. Solar panels have to be deployed, which requires additional mechanisms that may fail or require human intervention, and so on.

The way they want to design reactors for next generation space exploration, they're set-it-and-forget-it designs. They have extremely few moving parts, and basically as soon as they're uninhibited, they'll run until something fails and their service life ends - likely several decades after construction. They're extremely reliable and are basically black-box sources of electrical power. Once they put it on the moon or Mars, they can just bury it under the regolith and run the cables back to where the habs are and forget about it. When it eventually fails, they can just leave it in the ground.

The biggest draw for nuclear power is continuous, autonomous processes, like thawing Mars permafrost for water, electrolyzing some of it for breathable oxygen and hydrogen, and using the hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane for return mission fuel for the complete in-situ resource utilization mission profile. These processes would run as soon as they were setup on Mars, without human intervention, and could run for months or years before humans even arrive, requiring no human intervention. Doing the same thing with solar would mean contesting with intermittency and having to actually assemble and maintain an enormous solar farm on Mars autonomously... We can't even manage that on Earth.

Curiosity and Perseverance both have radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), virtually identical in design: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/electrical-p...

The problem is for human inhabitants, the size of an RTG needed to provide power would be enormous and extremely dangerous to put into orbit. A more traditional fission generator could be much safer to put into orbit with the right design constraints, and deliver about a hundred times more power.

One such design would be to fuel the reactor on-orbit, and to launch the fuel in a vehicle with an escape system and isolation cask to ensure the fuel's safety during launch even in the event of failure... even though I honestly don't believe NASA will choose this option because of the weight/multiple launch problem, and the fact that they really want a reactor that's autonomous with respect to fueling and almost all aspects of serviceability. They're already playing around with designs on their own, even before they started soliciting commercial manufacturers and design partners to get in on it, with Kilopower and their 1KW KRUSTY prototype.

Yeah I'm right here as well. I built my own NAS first with FreeNAS and had enough issues with it that I eventually caved and I'm now three Synologys deep into my home lab environment, couldn't be happier.

Silently wishing Zoom would buy them and become the ultimate workplace productivity company...

> How is the cobalt getting mixed with the stuff mined from the ground?

So the term "fallout" is actually a pretty piece of propaganda. While a lot of it did or does indeed "fall out", there's still a lot of radioactivity in the air and on the surface from those nuclear tests in the form of fine particulate. It's in the fine dust all around you as 100nm and smaller particles, dancing around the air through Brownian motion. It's all over everything all of the time. It's in the water and the ocean. Nanograms here and there and everywhere. Not enough to really cause you health problems anymore, but plenty enough to increase the background radiation of the entire surface of the planet by a tiny amount.

How it gets into the steel is through the actual blasting of oxygen into the steel - hundreds of cubic meters of oxygen are used per ton of steel made, concentrating those tiny particulates into the steel they're going into and dissolving them throughout the melt, which is precisely why using ultrapure oxygen and vacuum processes could be used to make lower background steel today... if there was high enough demand to justify the absurd cost of that kind of handling. Fortunately though, there was plenty of steel made before the 1940s, and the demand is not all that high since it's usually used as a shielding material and not as large structural elements. As long as they don't remelt it, or do so in a high vacuum reformer, the metal can retain its low background nature.

Intermediate-lived gamma-emitting isotopes (cobalt-60, strontium-90, cesium-137, and so on) are the particular problem children of nuclear fallout in steel making. The cesium and strontium are largely removed by the same processes as steel is made in the first place - they're simply reactive enough to bond with the silicon and carbon and aluminum impurities being removed and will happily exclude the majority of themselves as part of the slag. So while they do contribute to the background, they're not the main problem. Cobalt, on the other hand, is right next to iron on the periodic table and its happy to stay stuck to the iron, even through rounds of recrystallization. Once the cobalt is in the steel, it's in there until it decays away to nickel over the next century or so. (This is also why it's much less of a problem now than it was even 20 years ago; the halflife of cobalt-60 is about 5 years, which means much of it from the nuclear testing is already gone - most of what remains is from nuclear reactor releases and neutron activation products.)

The more sensitive your instrument needs to be, the more radioactive contamination wrecks your instrument, which is already why physics experiments have to go to extreme lengths to keep everything clean of dust and debris, and are often located underground or underwater to avoid exposure to cosmic rays and atmospheric muons decaying. But the even higher sensitivity experiments like dark matter searches and measurements of cosmic background radiation have little choice but to reach for low background steels and lead as shielding material.

> Once we run out of cheaply salvageable steel, we'll likely turn to steel smelting processes that do not introduce air into the steel.

This would be exceptionally difficult, as oxygen is a basic requirement for steel making as we have ever known it. Steel is made from iron mixed with carbon and then heated to melt. Then oxygen is added which burns the excess carbon into carbon dioxide and reacts with all of the other reactive contaminants and brings them to the surface where they can be cupped off as slag. The melt is poured and cooled and you have steel. Early steel processes used air, blast into the furnace with high powered pumps. Modern steel is made with purified oxygen from cryogenic processes (and there are even designs floating around for steel mills which use the turboexpander from the oxygen processing to help generate electricity to drive the mill).

Without oxygen, you'd have to start with very, very clean iron ore (containing nothing but iron and whatever you wanted to alloy with the final steel), and add exactly the right amount of carbon (which is also exceptionally difficult, since carbon is light and the heat will want to make it sublime anyway). Odds are such a steel would still contain so much impurity as to require a second melt in a vacuum arc furnace, which also would dramatically drive up the cost.

While there might be a future making steel like this in space, I'm not counting it as very likely in the slightest to happen in this century.

It's much easier to use exceptionally clean oxygen - the mill could use an oxygen generation process (like a hydrogen peroxide chemical process plant being added to the mill), or by ultrafiltration of the process oxygen (which seems more realistic all told).

Yes. The demand for low background steel and lead is in the few dozen tons per year max, not millions of tons per year. Salvaging it is probably at least an order of magnitude cheaper than making new low background steel once you realize the amount of hassle involved. Furthermore, it's fairly easily recycled if you're not launching it into space (which is a common use case for the stuff, since building space probes to study the cosmic background is all the rage these days).

Great. None of these do anything for the real problem: Cobalt-60.

So this is all kinds of wrong. When you make steel, you typically use 99+% pure oxygen - modern mills do air separation and reject nitrogen and argon (which makes steel brittle when it's dissolved in) and basically anything they can reasonably separate out but oxygen.

But furthermore, it's not radioactive oxygen isotopes that get into the steel in the first place - they're scant to non-existent in nature, since all three common isotopes of oxygen are stable and most of the rest decay in seconds. It's other radioactive isotopes in the air from the bomb tests.

99+% isn't 100%, and it turns out those tiny fractions of a percent of junk contain the isotopes that are the real problem, namely Cobalt-60 created by the nuclear tests. Carbon-14 isn't nearly as big of a problem, since its decay mode is just beta and can be designed around, but the gamma decay from Cobalt-60 contamination is much harder to deal with.

Furthermore, because of Cobalt's position on the periodic table and the desire to have a small amount of cobalt in steel anyways to give it better working properties, it's not something that's easily filtered out, even in processes that reform steel like vacuum remelting which exist to make mechanically harder and better quality steel by slow melting and recrystalization. Once the Cobalt's in there, it's in there - you just have to wait for it to decay.

As it turns out, we're in luck, most of the fallout from those bomb tests has passed through numerous half-lives and is much less of a problem today than it was in the 1980s and 1990s when the low background stuff became such a hot commodity. So it doesn't really matter as much that we're running out. Furthermore, oxygen separation technologies and cryogenic liquid handling have improved, so we can do an even better job keeping contamination out. If someone wanted to set up a low background mill, they probably could do it today with commodity molecular sieves and centrifugation of the oxygen rejecting all but the light fraction...

Is enough of the PDK open now to allow for actual hacking on devices? I have a rather simple analog chip I'd love to make for my own personal uses (I'd love a really long modern bucket brigade device to build gritty analog delay lines for synth hacking)...

Drink tap water? Breathe unfiltered city air? Who do you think they are, working class plebs? These people can afford to live in their third homes on the side of mountains and get Fiji water shipped in where their servants unpack and stock their fridges for them. They get to places in cars with "Bioweapon Defense grade air filtration," and private aircraft.

So, no. They don't really live in the same environment as everyone else. Why would they care about its destruction?

That's not quite the right read - the previous work (I'm not even sure if it was that lab) was to engineer e. coli to make psilocybin, but e. coli was a bad factory because it still needed a very expensive to make/obtain chemical added as a feedstock.

So instead, they put the same genetic material into yeast which already had the necessary metabolic equipment to make the entire compound "de novo" (i.e. from scratch - just add sugar and yeast nutrients and it pumps out psilocybin). The downside is that the yeast's metabolic pathways chew up about half the product, so there is still work to do on making it more efficiently, but at yields of 600mg/L it's not exactly a bad start. (For reference, depression researchers tested the compound at dose of 30 mg for a 155lb man and it yielded psychoactive effects.)

> But the first thing I thought when I saw the headline was, "Wow. That's some interesting beer."

You know those researchers have already thought that one through. They've each probably got a brew going in their basements as we speak...

It's a salt dome underground. You could drop bombs on it for months and not crack the dome.

They drilled into a salt dome in Mississippi, placed and detonated a nuclear bomb into it to see "what if". They didn't destroy the dome. It created a nice little pocket of highly radioactive salt that self-capped with melt material. The cavity got bigger, but the salt dome is still intact.

That kind of durability is what makes these kinds of structures perfect for geological storage.

You know, with the advent of Amazon and other Task Rabbitty to-your-door delivery services, did they really save me any chore here? I can get just about anything delivered to my door stop within 48 hours, why is it trouble for me to get my preferred snacks at all?

> Beating Factorio quickly is not the primary point.

Maybe, but once you get into speed running it, it certainly feels like doing things slowly is against the point. (That and everything before robots feels so glacially slow... hard to adjust with Seablock and robots and good logistics chests being so far down the tech tree...)

I'm literally 3000 hours into Factorio and haven't burnt out on it. In fact, I'm just barely starting to get into the mods; I've done two complete Seablock runs (0.16 and 0.17), and I'm currently doing a Brave New World + Seablock run.

It's built into GTK+ now as GtkInspector: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/05/15/introducing-gtkin...

> It sounds like they had to torture several mice for days to get this result.

The paper's very explicit on how this is done - they injected the mice either with RTX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resiniferatoxin, a functional capcasin analog) or saline (at random) to induce a stress response, and countered it in some mice with buprenorphine to rule out false positives.

So, yeah, some of them got to deal with nothing, some dealt with a burning sensation, some dealt with burning followed by bliss, and some felt nothing but bliss.

But, at the end of the day they are lab mice, and there are plenty that are being subjected to worse treatment for less laudable scientific ends than understanding the physiological responses to stress and pain.

You're going to go with the dot-com bubble era for a comparison here?

> Seems like all that's happened is they just keep fat margins for themselves.

Judging by their S-1, not so much... They're offering up $100M in shares on $200M of assets and $300M in debt. They spend about as much on marketing as they make from selling the goods, leaving shareholders to pay for all of the administration expenses. If it were a tech company it'd be easy to say this is another debt-fueled startup looking for an exit...

> It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress.

I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.

You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.

I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.