HN user
On an eternal quest to improve human collaboration.
Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig.
Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny.
Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached.
Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant.
What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.
New info now online. Elon Musk has now confirmed it is about getting regulatory permission for solar panel deployment. These regulation stop deployment at scale. Its cheaper in the future in space (prediction: in 36 months).
He was asked directly during interview: is this a regulatory play?
Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.
Indeed, graphene seems capable of .99 of black body radiation limit.
Quote: "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths". Article title "Perfect blackbody radiation from a graphene nanostructure" [1]. So several rolls of 10 x 50 meters graphene-coated aluminium foil could have significant cooling capability. No science-fiction needed anymore (see the 4km x 4km NVIDIA fantasy)
[1] https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-21-25-30964
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?
"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).
[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...
Impressive! We're a university lab and published recommendation algorithms. Never knew that doomscrolling could be this addictive this fast, thnx!
Please consider taking an hour and push this to a Github with quick readme. Scientists and developers would get it. We have been building a torrent-based alternative to Youtube for a few years. Not many knowledge out there around operational frontpage algorithm.
How to find a nice SHA1 hash? How do keyword search in this list? Search and discovery of quality are unsolved scientific challenges. Fascinating stuff.
At our university lab we've been working on this for 25 years. Building a search engine is the easy part. Keeping a federated server with a billion users running is unsolved. Creating a fully -serverless- decentralised search engine is possible, you also need self-funding economy. Seems we're one of the few labs worldwide to still make actual operational prototypes of this stuff. More shameless self promotion:
"SwarmSearch: Decentralized Search Engine with Self-Funding Economy" [0]
Really handy to have s search engine to search this webpage with 45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages and the rest of the web (no spyware, no tracking).
Great initiative! Note Re-Decentralise from 10 years ago with few hundred projects:
https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet/blob/...
This specific format includes details to see which projects are really active. Number of commits, lines of code, unique developers, and age.
This is a difficult project. The blog post seems to hint at reasonable feasibility, this stuff is hard! We build a less ambitious tool in the university lab: "ASTANA: Practical String Deobfuscation for Android Applications Using Program Slicing" [0].
Would advise to first read the reverse engineering related work. Genetic programming is just a technique best used when everything else has failed :-)
The MIT NANDA lab seems to have a link rot problem.
Their cardinal code repo is also 404. The NANDA Lab also does coding, their publication at AAAI 2025 is titled: "CoDream: Exchanging dreams instead of models for federated aggregation with heterogeneous models" [1]. However, the link to the Github repo is broken. Fascinating paper, sad about the missing code.
Indeed! Advanced countries will and have blocked apps.
For a more extensive discussion on censorship resilient mesh networking, see IETF Internet Standard draft from 2012 [1]. After the Arab Spring there was global hope. Great to see revival of this topic today. Mesh networking is 1990s. The lesson from decades ago was that mesh networking can't be the killer use-case. Users need a reason to install this and allow it to drain the battery while looking for nearby nodes. Mesh networking never broke through the glass ceiling.
Blocking apps is real. Even Amazon killed a side-loaded app [2].
[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-pouwelse-censorfree-sc...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-remote-disables-piracy-apps-...
Eurisko is an expert system in LISP from 1983. right? In 2025 this formal logic is replace with stochastic LLM magic. interesting evolution.
Impressive! Will you parse the papers in the future? Without citations this is not that usable for professors or scientists in general. The relevance ranking largely depends on showing these older, prominent papers. (from our lab experience building decentralised search using transformers)
Impressive design! Are you assuming bandwidth is free and abundant?
Mycoria routers, proxies, Tor exit nodes, and VPNs are difficult to run. There needs to be an global incentive, economy, or private community usually. Our Delft University students wrote "The fifteen year struggle of decentralizing privacy-enhancing technology" a decade ago. Scaling to many millions or billions is unsolved.
Have you talked to any lawyer or law professor about your MVP? "Being welcome" has known drawbacks when you operate a central DNS service.
Less jokey?
This great packaging has a critical social media tone for me. Absolutely amazing fun and addictive showing almost dark patterns. For a deep dive: "Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction", [1]
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
The great pseudoscience of this 'computer science' thinking
You spelled Nobel-level science wrong.
Most of Levin work is not easy to understand or appreciate. Our university lab has been doing cooperative intelligence for decades. The insight in some of his work is revolutionary. He shows why randomness is much more intelligent then most scientist think.
see e-Beam system Wikipedia page
indeed, Tailscale was the first to realise this.
We added specific 4G and 5G mobile features. these carrier-grade boxes have often non-random port allocations. "By relying on provider-aware IPv4 range allocations, provider-aware port prediction heuristics, high bandwidth probing, and the birthday paradox we can successfully bypass even symmetric NATs."
This slowly alters the essence of The Internet, due to the permissionless nature of running any self-organising system like Bittorrent and Bitcoin. This is NOT in Android, just isolated Web Apps at desktops at this stage[0]. The "direct socket access" creep moves forward again. First, IoT without any security standards. Now Web Apps.
With direct socket access to TCP/UDP you can build anything! You loose the constraint of JS servers, costly WebRTC server hosting, and lack of listen sockets feature in WebRTC DataChannel.
<self promotion>NAT puncturing is already solved in our lab, even for mobile 4G/5G. This might bring back the cyberpunk dreams of Peer2Peer... In our lab we bought 40+ SIM cards for the big EU 4G/5G networks and got the carrier-grade NAT puncturing working[1]. Demo blends 4G/5G puncturing, TikTok-style streaming, and Bittorrent content backend. Reading the docs, these "isolated" Web Apps can even do SMTP STARTTLS, IMAP STARTTLS and POP STLS. wow!
[0] https://github.com/WICG/direct-sockets/blob/main/docs/explai... [1] https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:cf27f6d4-ca0b-4e20...
many confounding factors
Indeed. May 2022 TechCruch [0] about sexism at workplace:
"Privacy watchdogs in Europe are considering a complaint against Apple made by a former employee, Ashley Gjøvik, who alleges the company fired her after she raised a number of concerns, internally and publicly, including over the safety of the workplace." "At the time, Gjøvik had been placed on administrative leave by Apple after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, and a hostile and unsafe working environment which it had said it was investigating."
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/gobbler-complaint-europe/?...
Indeed! It is never simple. Sexy simplistic CP-SAT constraint programming solver versus containers with deep frozen goods or tons of fireworks. Both need to go into a very special place on the ship. Then soft business requirements, keep a weekly schedule. Plus the real business issue: 5-10% of invoices in logistics are incorrect! Mistakes like wrong rate. (disclaimer: the stories I heard while trying to digitise end-to-end value chains. We failed.)
From Your Blog: > No Musk ⇒ No Mars
Sputnik 2.0 is near.
China AI and chip investments are off the charts. Note that China is scheduled to attempt a Mars sample return mission with Tianwen-3. They are scheduled before any other competing team. China has the industrial support of the non-democratic government. They are willing to bear the risk for their future. This might be more stable funding then commercial SpaceX or high-deficit-USA-NASA.
Agreed! Direct distribution will completely re-shape the content landscape, I believe. Probably starting with the most dysfunctional industry of "producing" music. The intermediaries are borderline parasitic there.
We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]
[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi [2] https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-showcase-decentralized-...
Indeed! Trust is a precious good in society and economy.
In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.
At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.
We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit. We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/2000-usenix-annual-technic... [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862... [2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/files/96914542/p1263.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09950 [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi
There is no crypto in Tribler.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
[1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862...
Tribler does not include a Tor exit node!
Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/First.Depl...
We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
We simply iterate on Linux and Wikipedia work.
The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.
By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
[0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...
Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed, 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-Spec...