I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.

But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.

It would be amazing if there were a more open source option.

It’s unfortunate that cars are so big and complex to manufacture. With a just as complex a set of regulatory systems around verifying their safety and roadworthiness. I really don’t see something more open source being a realistic expectation at any foreseeable point going forward.

Here here! I second that!

Also, my favorite line in that clip “Well, this oughta be different…”

Well sure, if the electricity is powering something you already need and the waste heat is beneficial, then awesome, I guess that’s free heat. But it’s actually pretty rare that people need to be using that much electricity for anything as consistently as you would need for heating a home. And if you don’t actually need to be using that electricity, there’s really no way around the fact that electric heating is really pretty expensive.

I guess if you are stuck with electric heating as your only option and a heat pump is out of your price range, then mining crypto could be a nice way to offset the cost of electric heating… But then the equipment costs would add up and you’d probably be better off with a heat pump anyway.

If home improvement and DIY were actual categories for the Nobel Prize, i’d be running out of places to put all my Nobel prizes.

I’d probably have to put in a new shelf. Maybe use some nice cherry planks…

Well that’s all true, we don’t actually know what the real filters are, are we already past them, or are they still ahead of us? Certainly people have speculated about this for a long time, and I won’t pretend to have any more real answers than anyone else. But honestly, I’d have a hard time believing that the really rare event, that the great filter lays somewhere between the development of the brain and the development of the kind of intelligence humans have. It just seems like a relatively small jump (relative to all the other hurdles) between many of the smarter animals on earth and human beings. For example, many species use tools a whole lot actually. Only a few other species actually make tools or alter them to a large degree, but you know, give it 10 million years and see if that changes. Likewise, many species have languages, some species even give themselves names, so they can intentionally address other individuals in their social group.

If you don’t mind a bit of total speculation on my part, in my opinion, the explanation to the Fermi paradox is actually pretty simple, there really is no paradox. Intelligent life is probably relatively common in the universe, the reason we don’t see aliens all over the place is that intelligent life thrives too well for that. Once a species is capable of traveling other stars, it’s just a matter of time before they settle most of their galaxy, like within a million years (which is very quick on evolutionary scales). We’re just the first intelligent life in this galaxy, we can assume this because if there were others, they’d already have colonies right here on earth, because it’s a great planet.

To double back on the great filter though, my best guess about which events might be truly rare, my money is on Eukaryotic life and mitochondria. That feels like a real freak accident, as well as an absolutely vital requirement for complex life.

Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.

On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.

A reminder that all packets are delivered on a “best effort” basis, and some packets will be simply dropped en route.

Uh, I think it’s called the World Wide Web.

I mean, I’m joking, but I do remember buying games directly from a developers website, that’s a thing that used to happen.

Yeah, I had a similar thought. I mean nothing is set in stone with color coding, but there are some pretty clear norms.

Why would spider-man do that?!

Seriously, that pic looks like Tom Holland.

I think that’s what most people do, they get their piece of paper.

A 4.0 GPA is nice, but a bachelor’s is a bachelor’s.

I hate to be that guy, but… Is it time to get DSL?

Yeah, I get how that’s their intended use, I’m just saying I have my doubts about that business model. If this is their pitch, I don’t think they’re gonna sell many.

The thing is, they will be expensive. And it’s not an expensive service, it’s an expensive product. A state or a nation will have to buy a bunch of these, likely for hundreds of thousands each. And then just sit on them millions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure just sitting around not generating energy… Then when it’s time for them to be deployed you have a whole bunch of government workers saying “uh, I’ve never set one of these up, where’s the user manual?”

If instead you had them in regular use, when it comes time to deploy them in an emergency, you’d have people who actually know how to use them. Plus you could be generating power with them wherever extra power might be needed.

Hah, nerd puns…

It’s probably just downloading an update over and over and over again because it doesn’t know to stop.

That theory seems extremely likely to me! As soon as I read it, I thought “oh, yes that’s exactly what happened”.

Probably it automatically downloaded an unnecessary large update, it had enough storage space to finish the download, but then it started to decompress and install the update, at some point it ran out of usable space, so it started the whole loop over again, forever…

I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.

Hmm interesting. I don’t see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you’d use them to generate electricity/passive income.

You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.

So yeah, they’ll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it’s possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.

I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.

The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?

It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.