guidoism

I think this is cool and all, especially watching all of the launches, but I don't understand why we aren't all talking about the growing potential of a Kessler Syndrome and are inability to access spaces for a century or so. Maybe I'm completely out-of-touch but it seems like a massive downside for only a small upside.

Yeah screw the timer. I can't work under pressure like that when it comes to word games. Maybe other people will enjoy that, but not me.

Apparently the LED is on the order of 500 nm. Isn’t that essentially the same size as the actual wavelengths? (Just skimmed the article maybe this is discussed)

Yes, I know I'm crazy, but

Any time I see this phrase I know these are my people.

ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.

Yeah I remember when Google used to be like this. Then today I tried to go to 39dollarglasses.com and accidentally went to the top search result which was actually an ad for some other company. Arrrg.

Nice! I've been using Claude Code and ChatGPT for something similar. My inspiration is Adler's concept of The Great Conversation and Adler's Propædia. I've been able to jump between books to read about the same concept from different author's perspectives.

They are identical in the same way that my Hacker News and Facebook are identical. They are both places where people post stuff and comment on stuff but the community in each is very different.

If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?

Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?

Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?

That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam: - If your number is in my address book then texts are free for you - If this is the first time you are contacting me then you pay me $1

There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.

Online generator: https://jxl-art.surma.technology

Look up “convivial computing”. This fits within that ethos.

Aren’t plants literally making food out of thin air? They take a series of photons and pull the carbon out of the “thin air” to make food.

The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.

This reminds me of my professor's (probably very poor) description of NP-complete problems where the computer would provide an answer that may or may not be correct and you just had to check that it was correct and you do test for correctness in polynomial time.

It kind of grosses me out that we are entering a world where programming could be just testing (to me) random permutations of programs for correctness.

That’s just a standard chemical rocket for the initial push and then a few gravity assists right?

Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.

Recipe articles with hundreds of words of irrelevant text before the actual recipe.

Way more interesting than this old zombie company is that new podcast about cpu design. Cool!

I also got in trouble for playing Leisure Suit Larry in 6th grade computer class.

Ours had PS-2s on a token ring network with a TUI to get to the word processor etc but it also had a “drop down to DOS” option that the teachers didn’t know about.

Reminds me of the drip.com TSR program that I put on some of the school computers circa 1990.

I wonder how different each of the wikipedias are between languages. There's barely any info about the dismantling of the Clémenceau in the English wikipedia. I occasionally read the Spanish language wikipedia for South American history as it is more complete. As a someone fluent in both languages I feel like I have access to more knowledge.

How much knowledge is "hidden" in other languages on Wikipedia?

Would be cool for translators to copy portions between languages. They must do this already, right?

I’m from the states but I was 23 and it was the first wedding I’d ever been to. And I guess wedding costs for guests wasn’t a topic anyone around me ever brought up.

When I was 23 years old, just out of college, just moved across the country my friend from high school got married. We never talked over the phone or email just hung out when we were both in our hometown.

He asked me (along with the rest of our group) to be in his wedding. He was the first of my friends to get married.

When I arrived I was appalled at the amount of money I was expected to pay. I paid for the plane flight across the country, yes that was expected. I got to the hotel and checked into the room he reserved for me but I had to pay for that (I would have gotten a cheaper hotel if I had known). The next day we drove out to a tux place and I was fitted for the tux. And I had to pay for that too, I think it was like maybe $150 to rent the tux. I was blown away by the costs of everything. Then during the wedding I find out that I'm an usher, I was just there to walk guests to their seats.

I think I paid like $600, not something I could easily afford 23 years ago.

It wouldn't have big that big of a deal if I had known beforehand but the costs were completely unexpected. I know better now. And have happily paid, but people getting married should be upfront with their wedding party how much it's going to cost them to be in the wedding.

Indeed.

Additionally I’m sick of people using “human right” to describe every conceivable characteristic of an ideal modern society.

Some things should be basic and a minimum and other characteristics should be add-ons you get for advancing civilization.

Pooling them all together waters down the most important ones.

Fascinating look into what it was like in 1991 to start a start-up.

Really cool seeing some old music videos that were originally shot in film get the rescan update. I watched Beat It on YouTube the other day and was amazed by the quality.

I re-typeset the text in TeX and have a nicer looking PDF for those that care: https://github.com/guidoism/tex-oberon

When I lived in the Bay Area I used to use a driving service to go to the airport and the owner had an early Model S. We had several conversations about how many hundreds of thousands of miles he already had on it and how well it was holding up. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted a million miles. Obviously the battery was degrading over time but the powertrain was so much more reliable than an ICE.

Honestly an array isn’t really the worst… for smallish files on modern processors. Sequential memcpy is pretty dang fast and pointer indirection can be slow.

Just sayin’

Apparently it has already happened https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/2... TL/DR: batteries are cheaper than paying an electrical to upgrade a 120 line to 240.

I honestly can’t imagine a future where we don’t have robots tending to each individual plant coming out of the ground like that one plant is the most important thing in the world.

We currently treat an entire field as one uniform thing because that’s the cheapest way to do it. We plant in rows to allow our simple machines to operate on them. We drive massive combines up and down the field. We spray the entire field uniformly.

I think there’s a move in the precision farming world to using remote sensing imaging to treat smaller tracts of land (like an acre) separately. But at some point the technology will be cheap enough to focus in on each individual plant.

Clearly there’s some extra growth that each plant would have if it would treated really well and harvested at the perfect time. That’s the opportunity. The cost is developing swarms of robots that go up and down the fields 24 hours a day checking on soil moisture, leaf disease, weeds and doing what it needs to tend to that plant. I think the hardware already exists and is cheap enough. It’s now just a matter of developing the software (yes, the devil is in the word “just”).

If there are 10 plants per square meter and we give the robot 1 minute per plant, and there are 10,000 square meters in a hectare, then we will need 70 robots to tend an entire hectare in a single 24 hour period. That’s the sort of math that I’ve been thinking of.