saalweachter

No, I think they're charlatans.

Except you aren't leaving that heat in place.

You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.

If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.

It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.

If you spot Datacenters In Space as making sense, why does SpaceX acquiring XAi make sense to do it?

Why not have SpaceX build datacenter satellites and lease them to XAi et al, or XAi design and manufacture satellite datacenters and pay SpaceX to launch them? Heck, why not start a third company which focuses exclusively on datacenters in space, buying services from one company and selling them to another, so they can concentrate on this rather specialized skillset without distraction?

How does SpaceX acquiring XAi help anything but Elon Musk's personal portfolio?

Aren't dusk-dawn orbits already the most crowded orbital space with the most orbital debris?

I would note the big difference in that trial is for summer vs snow, with all-season showing smaller degradation.

So there's two things going on: first, snow tires are a softer rubber that functions better at lower temperatures. There is a zone of "warm" snowy weather where all seasons are just fine, but then you get below 20F or 15F or so, and the all season start to harden, and their performance drops off a cliff.

Second, snow tires are made to get packed with snow at low speeds, because the friction of snow on snow is higher than snow on rubber.

So damn cold weather or enough snow for the packing to kick in, and two snow tires will start beating four all season.

Now I just hear the Cinema Sins "ding!".

Snow tires can actually double your coefficient of friction on snowy pavement!

The coefficient of friction drops fast on snowy ground, with all season dropping as low as 1/3-1/4 of their dry value.

Of course, snow tires plus AWD is even better, but I find snow tires on a FWD vehicle to be plenty to drive up steep hills in snowy weather. (Before learning of the wonders of snow tires, I used to have to take different routes home if it began snowing because I couldn't reliably make it uphill without losing traction.)

Snow tires, people! Snow tires!

A FWD vehicle with snow tires is frequently better in the snow than an AWD without snow tires. Better control, better stopping, better uphill on snowy roads.

Pfft, there's no G train, it's just a psych experiment to see how long people will wait at a fake train station before giving up and seeking alternative transportation.

If Richard Nixon had used NordVPN, he'd still be President today.

Napaway briefly offered ticketed intercity service on busses with 18 sleeper pods, but has (temporarily) discontinued it in favor of focusing on charter service.

I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.

I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.

And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.

Your landlord has insurance on the property.

You are paying for it with your rent, just like you're paying property taxes.

If you are housed, you are almost certainly paying for home insurance, even if you rent.

Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?

The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.

I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.

Incidentally, the 4020 is like the tractor to me.

One of these days I'm going to buy one to restore, the way other men but the cars of their youth.

Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.

The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.

So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.

> while a Semi can do all the things you can do with a scooter

You may be able to lane split in a semi, but it also has excessive environmental impact.

"America's Long Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Finally Over"

Yeah, realistically the problems almost never happen and hopefully become rarer over time.

The typical human preference WRT the trolly problem ("don't take an action which leads to deaths, even if it would save more lives") is also a reasonable -- maybe the only reasonable answer -- to these hypotheticals.

Ie, move against the light to avoid getting rear ended, but not if you're going to run over a pedestrian or cause an accident with another vehicle trying to do so. (Even if getting rear ended would push you into the pedestrian or other car.)

> Which is of course what the road rules are: you slam on the brakes.

Yeah, there are a shocking number of accidents which basically amount to "they tried to swerve and it went badly".

You can concoct a few scenarios where other drivers are violating the road rules so much as to basically be trying to murder you -- the simplest example is "you are stopped at a light and a giant truck is barreling towards you too fast to stop".

If you are a normal driver, you probably learn about this when you wake up in the hospital, but an autonomous vehicle could be watching how fast vehicles are approaching from behind you. There's going to be a wide range of scenarios where it will be clear the truck is not going to stop but there's still time to do something (for instance, a truck going 65mph takes around 5 seconds to stop, so if it's halfway through its stopping distance, you've got around 2.5 seconds to maneuver out of the way).

That does leave you all sorts of room to come up with realistic trolley problems.

I mean, they kinda are.

Airline pilots aren't supposed to take a nap, and there are occasionally articles about the various things that have gone wrong because the pilots weren't paying attention.

So her recollection is that she was in the house to view Lincoln's funeral procession. She didn't, because she was three and got scared, but it was still an event she was a part of.

Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy and his brother were at the mansion for the event.

So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that time.

I was working at a crawling-based business around that time, and we thought it was because bandwidth contracts at that scale were symmetric, so the idea was that Google could serve video for ~free because they were crawling the whole Internet constantly and serving extremely light weight pages of ten blue links.

Corn produces something like 15M calories per acre, soybeans like 6-8.

When you feed those 36M calories to chickens, you get back 12M calories of chicken, which is actually less than 6 x 3 = 18M calories for the soybeans, so I'm misremembering something (maybe it's just an equivalent amount of protein? maybe chicken feed is a 3:1 corn:soy ratio?) or was just wrong.

Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.

Soy is pretty good, but corn is insane.

"Insider threat model".

Basic security hygiene in the modern world is "assume your employees can be a threat", either because they're incompetent ("I accidentally deleted the shared spreadsheet, I thought it was my copy"), malevolent ("I will show them all!") or compromised ("I clicked a link in my email and now my computer is slow.")

If you aren't designing your systems to be robust against insider threats, they will fail.

(If you design them to be robust against insider threats, they will probably also fail, so you have to be constantly working to understand how to limit the consequences of any individual failure.)

The simplest recipe for writing "almost bug-free" software is:

  1.  Freeze the set of features.
  2.  Continue to pay programmers to polish the software for several years while it is being actively used by many people.
  3.  Resist adding new features or updating the software to feel modern.

If you do that, your program will asymptomatically approach zero bug.

Of course, your users will complain about missing features, how ugly and ancient your products look, and how they wished you were more like your buggy competitors.

And if your users are unhappy, then you probably lose the "used heavily by a lot of people" part that reveals the bugs.

Nothing about the human body argues for solid engineering principles.