kevinkeller

I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.

India is rapidly expanding fiber internet connectivity, even in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Broadband_Network

In addition, 4G/5G coverage is extensive: https://www.ookla.com/articles/india-mobile-connectivity-1h2...

See India in this 5G global coverage map: https://www.ookla.com/articles/5g-map-2026

The number of people who are not covered by above-mentioned fiber/cell network, and can afford Starlink as it is priced now, will be extremely small (likely making Starlink unviable as a profitable business).

Micron has exited the consumer business, so this is only till stocks last: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

Thanks for the paper link!

Likely due to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment

I love this type of articles where we can reconstruct what happened so long ago just based on careful observations.

Some other instances I've come across:

* The K-Pg extinction event that wiped off dinosaurs had the impact it did because the asteroid happened to impact a shallow water region. This kicked up a lot of sulfur (in gypsum) that further affected global climate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Effects

* Earth likely had rings ~466M years ago. We deduced this by looking at impact craters from that time period, and seeing that they all lie near the equator (accounting for continental drift): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...

* Earth's rotation period was probably frozen at 21h, ~600M years ago, likely due to interaction between lunar and solar tides. This resonance could have been broken by ice ages (!!!). Amazing to think that global climate affects earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Resonant_st...

If PETM was due to large scale use of hydrocarbons, there should be evidence of depletion in the strata, right? For example, currently not all sources are uniformly exploited -- some coal seams and oilfields are all but depleted, others are currently being extracted, and others are yet to be found/exploited.

We should have seen signs of similar non-uniform usage in the strata from before that time period. I wonder if any research has been done on this.

I have been doing some late-night wikipedia binges on this matter, so I consider myself qualified to answer.

Is there a comprehensive list of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, etc. that we suspect may have liquid water?

Most large moons orbiting the gas giants are suspected to have subsurface water oceans, most prominent among them Europa. Ganymede, Enceladus, and Triton are other honorable mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_oceanography#Natural...

How many of them have liquid water without being super saturated with salts? What is the level of confidence we have?

We don't know the composition yet, just that a salty ocean supports the evidence we've seen. For example, Europa interacts with Jupiter's magnetic field in such a way that makes sense only if there is a large amount of electrically conducive material inside Europa. Given what we know about its formation, metallic stuff is unlikely. A salty subsurface ocean is a more suitable explanation. We'll know once Europa Clipper gets there (one of its missions is to 'taste' the ocean by flying past really close).

There are other reasons to suspect a subsurface ocean, such as signs of a geologically active body (like Enceladus), which in turn implies there is enough heat inside to have an ocean.

Which are most likely to bear life given our current hypotheses around the origins of life?

Europa, maybe Enceladus. Note that our search for life is heavily guided (biased?) by our understanding of how we think life started here on Earth.

Specifically, we needed these ingredients (non-exhaustive):

* a liquid medium to act as shelter and transport medium (liquid water ocean) * a source of energy, something that life can 'eat' (hydrothermal vents in the beginning, sunlight later) * protection from space-borne threats (atmosphere, magnetic field) * a home that isn't geologically dead (like the Moon, or Mercury), but also isn't too active (like Io)

Europa checks most of the requirements:

* suspected subsurface ocean * geologically active. This is important because Europa and other moons are too far away for sunlight to be a big source of energy. There has to be another source. Radiogenic heating (released by radioactive isotopes) and primordial heating (left over from its formation) aren't enough for moons to sustain liquid water (especially 4.5 B years after formation). This means tidal flexing is what we should be looking for -- something we know Europa has. * Europa's thick icy crust blocks pretty much all radiation. Barring a thick atmosphere (which only Titan has), a subsurface ocean underneath an icy crust is the best life can hope for out there, for protection against radiation. * We don't know much about what goes on underneath the surface. If the bottom of the ocean contains geothermal vents, then that could harbor earth-like life.

Saturn's moon Enceladus checks many of these same boxes (tidal heating, abundant water, signs of a young surface indicative of geological activity).

JUICE and Europa Clipper missions should fill in many of these gaps, and help confirm our understanding.

Largest ocean in our solar system isn't even on Earth, apparently:

... Ganymede’s ocean is even bigger than Europa’s—and might be the largest in the entire solar system. “The Ganymede ocean is believed to contain more water than the Europan one,” he says. “Six times more water in Ganymede’s ocean than in Earth's ocean, and three times more than Europa.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overlooked-ocean-...

I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.

If you have disks set up in RAID 1 or RAID 6, would you still lose data though?

Yes, this model works in many cases.

For example, ask the (better, costlier) Claude Opus to generate high-quality prompts, which get fed into (worse, cheaper) Claude Sonnet.

The NPU in the Snapdragon SoC used by the Windows Surface laptops was quoted to be ~ 40 trillion ops/s (TOPS).

Nvidia 4070 Ti has roughly the same performance: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3...

Of course, I'm massively oversimplifying, but it should be in the ballpark.

These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must.

An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app.

Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.

Have each person create their own account, and share nodes: https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/

What made you switch from Google Fi?

Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstruction.

Video by Tom Scott, that talks about the similar Chauvet cave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zJbi9YatcA

Poignant explanation of why such pre-historic art is important:

It shows that they have a life, they do have culture, they do have art as we do today. They may not have done it for the very same reason, but they do have it. And it shows that they do not just merely survive, they live.

I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.

I thought MPC-BE was the spiritual successor of HC. Good to see it's still alive.

Speaking of different climate in North Africa/Middle East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

As recently as 5,000 years ago, it was a much wetter place.

"Mathematics: Its Contents, Methods, And Meaning"

https://archive.org/details/MathematicsItsContentsMethodsAnd...

we are the only rocky planet that has both plate tectonics and a natural satellite

We have the oceans to thank for plate tectonics.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253303432_Are_Ocean...

I too read Why We Sleep, and found it quite interesting. Then I found out that there is some controversy regarding its claims.

Previous discussions on HN:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519

TBH I haven't made up my mind about the book yet, just thought you should know about these things too.

another downside with auto-type is that not all websites put their full names in the browser title bar so auto-type won't show you your related passwords in some cases. to fix that you can install a browser extension that puts the full web url in titlebar https://github.com/erichgoldman/add-url-to-window-title

Instead of modifying the browser title, I use AutoTypeSearch plugin for Keepass, that opens a dialog allowing me to suggest entries in case of no matches.

There is also another plugin that allows search using both URL and title -- "WebAutoType".

These two plugins together make the Keepass experience almost seamless.

Is it possible to run the laptop directly off AC power, bypassing the battery?

Alternatively, is it possible to cap the battery charging at, say, 60-80%?

Since one of the key aspects of the laptop is the longevity and serviceability of the hardware, I am curious how the battery health can be managed.

According to the myth of the Klamath Indians, Llao, the chief of the Below World, standing on Mt Mazama, was battling Skell, the chief of the Above World, who stood on Mt Shasta in California, about a hundred miles away (Clark 1953). They hurled rocks and flames at each other, and darkness covered the land. The fight ended when Mt Mazama collapsed under Llao and hurled him back into his underworld domain. The large hole that was created then filled up to form Crater Lake.

This sounds like an eye-witness account of such an eruption, and it undoubtedly is, for Indian artifacts have been found buried in the Mazama ash. The eruption has been radiocarbon-dated to about 6500 years ago on the basis of Indian sandals found in the ash, but had no datable materials been found, this myth alone would have served to date the eruption as post-Pleistocene, because this part of the world was first inhabited by people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge and migrated down through Alaska and Canada into the northwestern United States.

Geomythology: geological origins of myths and legends https://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/specpubgsl/273/1/1.fu...

Ukrainian Folk Tales

I happen to have one of those! It's a Kannada translation by Raduga. The surreal artwork is etched into my memory still.

https://imgur.com/a/Qs1ZWF8

You are probably correct, the timeline for India in the same page shows that IPv6 usage (which was previously stagnant) started growing sometime in mid-2016. Which is when Jio started onboarding customers from the general public (they previously had a closed trial stage).

The regulation will also benefit other smaller players, no? For example, Tata Cliq, Snapdeal.

paid services go to @paid.mydomain.tld, social logins go to @social.mydomain.tld etc

Any specific reason to do this over the usual way (paypal@mydomain.tld, twitter@mydomain.tld)? How are you benefitting from the extra hierarchy?

Azure can even configure mutual authentication between the LB & the underlying servers

You can achieve a similar effect in AWS, by declaring only the LB's security group as the source in servers' security group ingress rule.

Any requests sent directly to the servers simply wouldn't connect.

Does this still work if folks are authenticated via federation/SAML instead of as IAM users?