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.

Ok, I did say “why does this matter to anyone?”, and you’re right about the land owner, clearly it matters to them. Fair enough.

But you also said that we can care about more than one thing at a time. And while I agree with that up to a point, I think you can’t use that mindset all the time.

I made a reply to a very similar response below, (I don’t want to spam the thread with repeat comments, so I’ll just link to it) https://lemmy.world/comment/21477093

I think that’s actually a really good answer. There needs to be strict adherence to codes of conduct within the military, or we get all kinds of problems.

At least the article suggests that the situation is mostly under control, it certainly sounds like they’re going to try to crack down on this.

Edit: funny to see this get down voted. Why down vote a concession?

In reality you can, indeed, care about multiple issues at the same time

You say that, but I am learning first hand that I have a finite capacity for injustice and misery. I see awful shit in the news, sometimes far away, but sometimes very close to home and I see it every day. It takes a toll on your mental health, caring about everything, taking a moment to ask yourself “is there something I can do about this?” - it’s especially hard when the answer you come up with is “not really”.

I think one really does have a limited amount of bandwidth for this kind of thing, and we absolutely have a limited amount of time. So even if you did care about everything, it’s certainly not feasible to act on everything. And just carrying all those concerns that you know you’re never going to act on, that cannot be healthy.

Sometimes you just need to let something go, say “this is not my concern”. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that, so long as you make an effort to decide which things are important enough to care about, even when you’re at your limit.

In the grander scheme of things, is there a reason to care about this? I mean there’s a lot of shit going on in this country, a whole lot of crimes being committed by the authorities in charge. I’m not going to list it all right here, cause that seems like a truly monumental and depressing task. But let’s pretend that I did just list some of the truly heinous things that representatives of the US government are doing right now… in light of that, in comparison to all that, why does this matter to anyone?

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.

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.

Alright thanks, those are some good suggestions. And don’t get me wrong, the nas does technically work, I can do whole drive images, just not the differential file-level backups. What I really wanted was to be able to restore a single file quickly and easily. That was the dream 🙄

Ok, so I’m going to weigh in here because I have first-hand experience, but keep in mind I am a relative novice at self hosting.

I’ve been using a machine that has evolved over the years from primary gaming PC, to backup server, to Bitcoin rig, to Plex server, etc. Well I finally got tired of complex raid backup solutions and bought a 4 drive Synology nas. I figured I might as well just go with the name brand because I’d probably pay a bit more, but everything would work right away.

Everything did not work right away.

I fought so hard to get incremental backup working… So hard. But it just refuses to copy some files. It actually struggles with filenames! It can’t handle names that have too many characters or use certain characters. (Filenames that Windows and the MacOS have no problem with). So if I want that backup to work, it appears I have to rename hundreds of files on that PC and hope nothing breaks… While their hardware seems fine, I am thoroughly unimpressed with Synology’s software.

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?

I’m sorry, it seems like you think anybody is suggesting that launching nuclear waste to space should be a means of disposal for it. Clearly that’s not a workable solution for a dozen reasons.

A common (and reasonable) objection to nuclear powered spacecraft is the question of “what happens if the rocket explodes?” That’s really what I was responding to.

The solution for nuclear waste is frustratingly simple, bury it. It’s only a political problem because of misguided nimbyism.

Basically, yeah it works. One aspect that makes it easier is that the hotter something is, the more effective radiative cooling methods are. A nuclear reactor like this is designed to run in the area of 1000 F, and it turns out that you can pump liquid salt through a radiator that size, and it can take the salt from 1200F to 700F.

Your right though, convection does make radiators far more effective, air or water just work a whole lot better than relying on radiative cooling. But regardless, you can still make radiative methods work. Every satellite in orbit has to do it, the ISS has to do it (and you can see the big grey radiators on it). And every space base will probably need to do it too.

That’s why we don’t do that already.

But we do, we do a lot. Russia does it more. It’s why the Voyager probes are still working and sending back data. It’s why the curiosity and perseverance rovers persevere to this day.