This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.

the lagrange point isn’t a stable orbit.

That’s totally true, but to be fair, it’s still more stable and requires less maneuvering than low earth orbit. So if we’re comparing the two orbits…

We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.

I gotta be honest, that sounds like a less-than-optimal solution. But I like that you’re thinking outside the box!

That doesn’t really happen at very low orbit, where Starlink is.

any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon

Well that’s kind of my point, that’s still a lot smaller than what Elon is suggesting. Elon suggested a sphere with a diameter larger than the earth, if the alternative is a disk larger than the moon, well that actually seems like a much better deal. Also, assuming a disk and a sphere have an equal diameter, the sphere has 4 times the surface area, so that’s not a trivial difference.

Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it’d also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge.

That’s interesting. Yeah that could be a challenge. Given the size of the thing, it seems like the obvious thing would be to utilize solar wind for maneuvering, as it’s already essentially a solar sail.

The Japanese space agency tested a solar sail in orbit with a novel steering system, rather than changing shape, it used something much like LCD cells to shutter individual quadrants of the sail. Something like that could potentially work.

Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Although if you were actually building something this big out there, you would probably build in some capacity for probes to dock to it. This is a huge installation after all, a facility more than a probe. Or just add on a module that duplicates the capabilities of the deep space climate observatory. I mean once you’re constructing something this massive, that additional cost has gotta be a drop in the bucket, right?

Why?

Usually when people talk about this kind of thing, they suggest making a sun shade and delivering it to the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. It certainly feels more reasonable to do it that way. But I wonder which method really is more feasible. (Obviously both methods aren’t realistic right now)

Given that AI trainers are training on YouTube videos too, that sounds like Anubis isn’t going to impose meaningful costs on them.

Well, does it work?

You don’t need to guess about it, you can simply look at traffic records and see how much it changes after installing Anubis. If it works for now, great. Like all things like this, it’s a cat and mouse game.

Also, the way your computer interprets a YouTube video and the way a scraper interprets a YouTube video may well be different. But in general, for a browser, streaming and decoding video is a relatively heavy and high bandwidth operation. Video is much higher bandwidth and has much higher CPU processing requirements than audio, which likewise is heavier and higher higher bandwidth than text. As a result, video and text barely compare, they’re totally different orders of magnitude in bandwidth and processing needs. So does an AI scraper have to do all that decoding? I actually have no idea, but there definitely could be shortcuts, ways to just avoid it. For instance, they may only care about the audio, or perhaps the transcripts are good enough for them.

Do you realize how much extra work your browser has to do every time you visit a site that makes money on ads? All the additional scripts being run in the background, it’s astonishing. Trust me, the additional work that users’ machines have to do for this is totally insignificant when viewed in the greater context of what we actually do with computers.

Watching a 10 minute YouTube video, that’s your computer doing more work than it would loading a million text based pages running Anubis.

Sure but if ”just the cost of doing business" becomes their official policy on this variety of traffic incident, they could end up paying $1000 a dozen times a day. That ads up pretty quickly.

Honestly, it’s hard to figure out what the first step in that chain is. If you want to start up industry in space, great, there are lot of potential benefits to that. But where do you start?

Within the next 50 years I do expect a broad sector of space industry to emerge, but I really can’t predict what the first opportunities might be. Still, we can poke fun at it all we want right now, but I suspect a great many people will be working in space 50 years from now.

Ok, so let’s say you’re making dinner and you want to watch something at the same time. Perhaps you’re chopping vegetables on the counter. Do you really want to be looking at the front of the fridge while you do that? If the fridge is against the same wall as the counter you need to crane your head back to see anything, and if it’s on a different wall you need to turn your head a totally different direction. Why not use one of those tablet cases with a kick stand and then put the tablet right in front of you, on the counter? Like right in front of the the cutting board you’re using.

I don’t know, I think if you do anything other than putting it right in front of you, you’re gonna and up losing some fingers instead of chopping veggies.

The fridge is also a good location for it, and you’d have to otherwise run a wire across your fridge to power your own tablet.

What? How is the fridge possibly a good location for it? In what world could that ever be true? And do you not have wall outlets in your kitchen? Put your device on the counter!

I mean… what?

But… Do you need the LCD panel? Will the box still get cold without it? Cause I do have a hammer…

This is actually a really good question for teachers.

And the short answer is “badly”. Especially bad for kids that were in elementary school during the pandemic.

Wow, that’s just incredibly dismissive and rude. And in response to a completely reasonable comment!

Look, forget the whole AI discussion, I don’t care. Here’s the thing, I really like Lemmy. I really like this community and I want to continue using it as a way to have discussions with people about interesting topics. What I don’t want to see is people yelling insults and swearing at any user they disagree with.

Frankly, that behavior is unwelcome. That’s reddit behavior, you can go there if that’s what you want to do.

I’m not talking about how efficient sea shipping is vs flying or driving.

Well I guess that was what made the original statement confusing, because that’s definitely what it sounded like you were saying . I imagine this feels like a frustrating conversation (and I am sorry for that), but it’s probably because of that lack of clarity.

I mean you said traveling by sea was especially inefficient, mentioning the huge waste of resources. I think it’s reasonable to interpret that the way I did.

I mean, yes. It isn’t longer enough to make sea travel anything but the most efficient method to ship something.

I just looked it up, it’s a huge distance between Thailand and Argentina, about 17,000 km if you were flying. Going around the tip of South America adds an extra 1000 km, making the trip 6% longer. Meh.

Someone is dropping pennies in the vacuum tubes again! Now the whole thing is jammed and we’ve got cargo backed up all the way to Guam!!

And yes Bob, we all know it was you!

By sea is an extremely direct route, and by land isn’t an option, so yeah, the only comparison left is by air. And shipping by air is less efficient in all respects except time.

So saying this route is especially inefficient by sea is just a confusing statement.