Ok, that paper is pretty fabulous. That does make for a good sanity check for quantum computing feasibility.

That said, don’t be surprised when these things catch up quickly!

No no, quantum computing is more about using the quantum properties of particles to do computing in ways that you simply can’t with traditional computers. If you write your program to accommodate this kind of computing, you can essentially design programs to test all possible outputs simultaneously - a pretty neat trick.

Right now we’re talking about photonic computing, simply using photons as the circuitry within a processor rather than electronic circuits using elections.

Though I’m not an expert on either, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask for more information on the subject.

Likewise, my father in law loves Libre now.

You don’t think Linux is a disenshittification solution for PCs?

Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. You want to run a custom android os, perhaps security and encryption oriented, or perhaps drm defeating is your goal. That all becomes possible if it’s simply legal to do whatever you want with your devices and your software.

Disenshittification isn’t something you wait for companies to do, it’s something you take for yourself! And it’s a whole lot easier to organize and do that if it’s officially legal.

That’s what we do in our house, I decided it was the easiest way to be sure my son actually lifts the seat. If he has to lift the lid, he’ll just lift the seat at the same time.

I totally understand where you’re coming from and I mirror the sentiment, 100%. I’m tired billionaires steering the country, and I’m especially tired of musk, I hope I never have to hear his name in the news ever again.

That said, I think your take is misguided. For all that I hate musk, spaceX has achieved some truly astonishing things. And not only have they achieved their goals, but they’ve done it at an unprecedented rate and at a shockingly low cost. SpaceX is developing technology at a similar rate to NASA way back at the beginning, during the Gemini and Apollo programs, except back then NASA was getting 4% of the federal budget. SpaceX has not had anything close to that level of funding. In fact, though they have most definitely taken government contacts, for the most part, they’ve been able to foot the bill themselves (and with investors) for the majority of their development costs. When you compare costs and outcomes directly - what spaceX delivered vs what it cost us against any other launch provider, the difference is astonishing.

But that’s all business stuff. What spaceX has done that impresses me is the technical stuff. They developed a relatively inexpensive rocket engine with a 184/1 thrust to weight ratio. That’s the best thrust to weight ever achieved by an orbital class engine, like by a lot. Before that, I believe the record was held by the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn-V and took us to the moon, it boasted a 94/1 ratio.

For their next major rocket engine spaceX developed the raptor, a full flow staged combustion engine, running on methane. Explaining why “full flow staged combustion” is impressive is probably outside the scope of this comment, but please believe me, this is a huge technical achievement and it provides some very real benefits. And running on methane is a good choice for reusability, it burns cleaner, and there’s potential for producing it off earth.

And of course most importantly they changed the industry by landing rockets. That’s not a small feat, some of their competitors called them foolish for wasting time even trying, the industry was very much not moving in the direction of reusability. Now that SpaceX has proven the viability and in fact the huge advantage of reusable rockets, there are many rockets being designed for this, from Rocket Lab, Arianespace, Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, eXpace (a hilariously named Chinese company), and probably many more; this is now the way the industry is going, that’s a big deal.

It’s my understanding that the idea of a dense asteroid belt (the kind Han Solo might try to hide in) is basically pure fiction, they don’t exist. However… that is essentially exactly what some parts of a planetary ring system may look like up close. So perhaps Han could hide in a planetary ring.

I see, so the simplified/traditional specifically refers to the written characters. I appreciate all the extra context as well!

Ok, it’s a bit off topic, but can I ask a naive question?

What the reasoning behind the different terminologies for the Chinese languages? Usually I see them then referred to as Mandarin and Cantonese, but sometimes I see the terms “simplified Chinese” and “traditional Chinese”. Or have I totally misunderstood what those terms mean? (Entirely possible)

Please forgive my ignorance.

Kessler syndrome is no joke.

Except it kind of is.

It can’t really happen at very low earth orbit, where the majority of satellites are, as any unpowered space junk would deorbit relatively quickly. And it can’t really happen at geostationary orbit, where most of the rest of them are, because when you go out that far there’s just so much space between every single object… The only way you run into something out there is on purpose and after a lot of calculations.

So there’s medium orbits and higher LEO those are the only areas we need to be really careful with.

Hell yeah! Actual useful industrial endeavors are the way we finally get humans off the planet, this is the way to the future. Once there’s a reason for industry in space, there’s a reason for support industries, construction, material supply, fuel supply, maintenance, etc. With those support services comes reasons for people to start to actually live in space, where they work. And from there, we can start to spread our legs and really “move in” to solar system, and the story of the human race truly begins.

It’s like the rings of Saturn: the likelihood of a collision is so remote that they didn’t even consider it when we had a satellite move through it.

I didn’t realize that, what mission is this your talking about? Cassini?

Wow, that is technically impressive, very cool!

How many full seeds are there? I mean how many could there be? Who has 300 Tb to throw at this?

Wouldn’t that be nice! Yeah I think it’ll totally work.

Hey, I think I see someone right now, they’re switching from writing in Python to writing in assembly! “Hey buddy, don’t forget to clear that register! And don’t forget you’ll need to write this all over from scratch to get it to work on any other platform!”

If you like his taste you should totally listen to his podcast, triple click.

It’s basically the only way I find out about new games. And it’s honestly super insightful.

You had multiple AI subscriptions…

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact could be written more simply as Hunter^2 : Nen x Impact

Just a suggestion, both are technically correct.

… and it destroyed their company right? Their entire business model broke down and it impacted the security of their customers who complained constantly about the decision. Right?

Right?

We should boycott them

How? They aren’t selling to us anymore, remember. They’re ramping down their consumer products because the AI specific products are more lucrative. Hell, not buying their consumer products just proves that point. We’re beyond fucked at this point.

Just grab some popcorn?