• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 12 days ago
cake
Cake day: February 10th, 2025

help-circle





  • The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.

    If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.


  • It’s because your data is orders of magnitude more valuable if it has enough information to identify you as a person.

    They can’t sell it to data brokers for a lot of money if those data brokers can’t find any information to link that data with their existing profiles.

    Surveillance capitalism 101, companies obtain the most value by enabling other corporations to spy on every detail of your life.

    If you can’t use a service anonymously, without it being linked to your actual person, then you can either be okay with living with the panopticon, or don’t use the service.

    Discord has been slowing rolling this out over the years. It started being offered as a “spam protection” feature and eventually it’ll be a requirement to have an account.

    They depend on the masses of people who will trade all of their privacy in exchange for not having to learn how to use VoIP software, video streaming software or IM software.







  • No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.

    In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.

    That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.

    For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.

    There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.



  • He’s ancient, eats like shit and takes amphetamines. His cardiovascular system is shot.

    Trump isn’t competent enough to plan any of this. If you watch him at an EO signing, he looks like he’s hearing about the for the first time as they’re being put in front of him. He gets to surround himself with people who tell him he’s a special boy and gets to receive bribes while golfing every week. He’s a stooge who thinks he’s the King.

    Trump isn’t the scary thing. He’s the clown that the scary thing propped up in order to appear foolish and incompetent while implementing the early phases of it’s takeover. By the time Trump has a heart attack, the scary thing’s plans will have been advanced far enough that opinion polls don’t matter because there will be nobody left to oppose it that it doesn’t own.




  • You have met them, you just didn’t know it.

    They’ll be the people with a slightly nicer house who seem like they’re retired but are only 40. They’ll secretly have $25m in their investment portfolio but only draw 80k/yr for living expenses. They’re not trying to live ostentatious lives because they prefer the ‘American dream’ likestyle over the wealthy ‘travel all over the Western world and flaunt your wealth to be the main character’ lifestyle.

    The husband dresses like a skater out of the 90s and his wife teaches music or art at the local high school and is also the largest booster (well in excess of her salary). These are honestly the most common type of ‘rich’ people. By rich, I mean financially independent rich, not ‘private space program’ rich or ‘overnight celebrity/lottery winner’ rich.

    I worked for a years at a financial advisor, the owner had tens of millions of dollars. He drove an ancient civic, brought leftovers for lunch and wore the same set of Vans for as long as I knew him. Most of the clients were like this, though sometimes they’d have a spouse/partner that wanted a luxury car, or they’d take a vacation once a year that was more expensive… but if you ran into them at the grocery store you’d think they were just some guy.



  • I grew up when the Internet was essentially a bunch of forum communities and 10k people was a lot of people. Something Awful felt massive with 300k registered users.

    You don’t need 150,000,000 people on a subreddit to have a good community.

    Communities are far better when you can recognize the names of people and remember then from previous interactions. On Reddit, you’ll probably never talk to the same person twice.

    You can’t have a community full of bots if there are only a few hundred people who all know each other.