zakary

Definitely a lot of potentially very serious and important downsides to this.

I’m trying to think of any possible upsides to this.

- harder for unlicensed people, eg kids, to drive a car and hurt themselves or someone else. - harder to steal a car if you’re not an approved driver, regardless of what you do with a copied key fob. - potentially easier to resolve insurance disputes - harder for people to commit premeditated crimes using cars (eg getaway driver to a robbery)

That said, these things only really happen if almost all cars on the road have this “feature”. Which means if all new cars in china must have this, then for at least 20 years after introduction, people wanting to skirt the law/surveillance will just use older cars.

So then in the end everyone loses out except for the people this is purportedly target towards, who just go around it.

I have worked with some people in the defence industry who got just that from Adobe and a few similar vendors. They had to negotiate with adobe and sign NDAs both ways, and they payed through the nose for it. But you can do it.

Better never means better for everyone. And it always means worse for some.

What’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software. For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this.

For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.

Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.

I imagine speed and simplicity. There’s a lot more things that need maintenance on a piston engine

Missiles and Drones. There’s essentially no viable use case for a hypersonic manned jet

It just so happens that one of my colleagues just finished a PhD creating materials which pretty much do exactly this; converting a relatively broad spectrum of light into a much narrower band of light. I’ve seen them in the lab where it’s colourless and clear to start with, and then it will convert any incident light in the blue range into a much narrower band of a specific blue colour. He has recipes for just about any colour, even into UV and IR bands. Not sure what the real world applications are though, maybe something to do with coatings for photovoltaic cells to increase efficiency

Human level touch/somatosensory system is one of the key breakthroughs needed to make humanoid robots truly useful.

As this articles details, touch is a lot more complex than simply “is there force on this spot” and the sheer amount of information our bodies process subconsciously throughout our everyday activities is staggering.

Ever wonder why it’s so hard to use a pen to write something if your hands are too cold, or if your arm has “fallen asleep”? Robots are in that state all the time, and we have to use a lot of fancy tricks to get them to manipulate objects without being able to feel them very well.

Whoever can solve this problem, with a product which is relatively cheap, reliable, and high resolution, will be creating a multibillion dollar opportunity for themselves.

As someone who works in robotics, I’d put my money on arrays of MEMS or microfluidic channels embedded inside a gel membrane.

I’m guessing the author is counting himself as CTO as part of that. $60 million for the CTO and his posse of senior managers and VPs, and the other $40m split between 180 non management engineers for $220k ish each. Still stupidly high costing now matter how you slice it.

Having something audited by an accounting firm doesn’t make me trust the numbers much more. It’s well known that many accounting firms will give you whatever result you want as long as you pay enough

Tall buildings are often demolished floor by floor from the top down. It’s a slow and expensive process. I don’t think anyone has ever demolished a building anywhere close to as tall as this one in a city centre. Luckily for developers of buildings like this, the cost of demolition will fall on either the city or the next developer who wants to make something better on the site. It would probably _only_ cost somewhere on the order of high tens to low hundreds of millions to demolish a building like this.

You’re right that nothing is unlimited. Luckily in this case, the energy of waves and tides is given to the oceans mostly by the gravity of the moon pulling the water as it passes overhead. Also a little bit by the wind which is fed by solar heat energy. The moon is slowly moving away from earth and eventually, in hundred of millions of years, it will impart significantly less energy into the tides.

The energy that the moon gives the tides is essentially the same as how the sun gives energy to the ground with light. That is to say: If we don’t collect it, it just gets turned into another kind of energy that is absorbed by the environment. For tides and waves that would be mostly heat, and a little sound. And most of that heat would eventually be radiated back out into space. So suffice it to say, while there is a finite pool of energy stored in the tides, it is so massive we could never make a difference, and it gets recharged everyday by the moon.

Interestingly, inside your body (in the form of a pacemaker battery) was and is the only legal way to possess plutonium as an individual (in the US)

As soon as you take it out of your body, or if you die, then it immediately becomes illegal to possess again.

Beta-voltaic and other nuclear batteries have been around for a long time. The issue, at least so far, isn’t technology, it’s mostly just cost and safety. These things cost hundreds and into the thousands per battery last time I checked. And for that they put out less power than a coin cell.

Outside of pacemakers and space probes where a battery change is difficult to impossible, there aren’t a lot of use cases where the cost is justified.

There actually are other isotopes such as Hafnium 178m2 which have the potential to make much more energy and power dense nuclear batteries, but due to safety concerns haven’t been developed yet.

Checkout: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy

178m2Hf has the highest excitation energy of any comparably long-lived isomer. One gram of pure 178m2Hf contains approximately 1330 megajoules of energy, the equivalent in about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of the explosive TNT. The half-life of 178m2Hf is 31 years

Yes you can. On Mac keyboard maestro will do exactly that. On windows it’s Autohotkey.

If you’re only sellable skill is making music, and you have to put food on the table, that isn’t begging to be exploited; it’s grit

Because in many places, especially disaster zones, a tent is a massive upgrade from the bare patch of dirt they often currently have to make do with.

This isn’t to replace an inner city hospital, this is the make it fast and cheap to deploy the basic necessities of medical care.

Perhaps this was some kind of rare memory fault where it took a series of photos and there was some kind of corruption that caused elements of each to be merged.

Or perhaps there was some weird fault that meant different sections of the photo were taken at discreetly different times and then stitched together.

My understanding is it has definitely been solved by the use of much thicker gloves or gloves with heating elements. But doing difficult technical climbing at very high altitudes also requires good dexterity and you are often up there for many days. Also lithium batteries don’t work much at all in temperatures that cold.

I could imagine some kind of warm water tube system that takes heat from a heat exchanger on your chest and transports it to your hands and feet, and is pumped by the action of walking. Not sure if that’s been tried before.

There’s a lot of great engineers who’ve done a lot of climbing so my guess is pretty anything that works sufficiently well to keep hands and feet warm, is also too complex, expensive or bulky to be useful in really extreme mountaineering environments.

Money is a powerful motivator

Thank you. That makes sense

Care to enlighten those of us who don’t already know the explanation?

Knocking on someone’s front door and noticing it’s unlocked is perfectly legal. It’s actually walking in that’s illegal.

Everyone has a price, and drug companies can usually find a way to meet it for even the most steadfast

No that’s pretty normal. the guy in the article has a problem

I've been reading Casey's blog post for a few years now, and while he is a very optimistic person when it comes to the possibilities of energy technology, nothing he says here stands out to me as unreasonable.

His basic thesis is: Solar PV energy cost is declining rapidly and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, primarily due to the scaling effects of making more of it. At a certain point, energy from solar will become so cheap it will start making financial sense to just make hydrocarbon fuels directly from air and water instead of digging it up from the ground.

He also spends a few paragraphs making hand-wavey statements about all the other things that might be done, like refining metals and recycling goods by turning them into a plasma and sorting the atoms.

But as far as making hydrocarbon fuel directly from solar pv power, as long as the trend of decreasing cost holds true for long enough, then it must eventually become economically feasible.

I really like this idea because it doesn't require that dozens of the worlds largest employers, oil companies, will just suddenly disappear in the next decade or two. That these companies can transition to oil and gas production, simply downstream of solar pv instead of a hole in the ground, is very appealing. and feels really possible.

Recycled plastic is less strong than new “virgin” plastic. That’s why manufacturers typically only use 10%-30%, much more than that and it’s hard to keep good tolerances on dimensions and strength metrics. Also the vast majority of recycled plastic isn’t from recycling consumer plastic waste, but from recycling the off cuts of plastic manufacturing. Almost all the consumer plastic waste is just put into landfill. It’s almost never economical to sort and recycle that stuff.

Whatever the cap is, I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you or making you do a captcha for every search. Pretty much all search services have some cap, after which they will put up roadblocks to slow you down

If the published inflation rate is significantly less than the increase in price of a wide variety of goods, then doesn’t that indicate that the inflation rate isn’t being calculated correctly? My understanding is the inflation rate should generally reflect how much more expensive things are getting each year

“Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy.” What this says to me is it’s going to be incredibly slow to read and write. It claims in order to achieve the headline densities they will use 3nm spot sizes for writing bits, no way can that be done by optical microscope so electron beam it is. There’s a reason why we don’t use e-beams to make computer chips, it’s incredibly slow. That’s why ASML sells a $200m machine to concentrate the extreme UV mask image down to the required sized. It can do all the writing in parallel, instead of serially.

I can still see this tech having use for long term archiving purposes, especially if it doesn’t end up being too expensive. But that’s a big if. Even if the ceramic storage tapes are free, running a massive high throughput electron microscope is unlikely to ever be anything close to inexpensive. My intuition is that it will probably not be able to compete with just buying some traditional HDDs or tapes and keeping backups. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the area can chime in?