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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • An industrial machine designed to handle 10,000 psi gas is a little different from a tank you’d take to a BBQ.

    A fuel station will also get resupplied regularly, so any small leaks are no big deal, as there will be a shipment of fresh fuel coming in a regular schedule. Your BBQ tank of hydrogen likely will need to be refilled regularly even if you don’t use it, as any valve that would be cheap enough to mass produce is not going to be able to keep hydrogen in for months while it sits in the garage.

    Then there’s also the fact that most uses for gaseous hydrogen require the above 10,000 psi storage pressure. This allows a useful amount of hydrogen to be stored in a non-comically large container. 2 problems I see with this:

    1.) a 10,000 psi container is fucking terrifying. If that things bangs into something and ruptures, it going to send shrapnel through a house.

    2.) a propane like tank can be opened to the Atmosphere and does not have a regulator built into the tank because most people don’t know how to actually use a regulator. So a 10,000 psi tank with just a hand valve between the user and a jet of gas that can send the tank into the stratosphere does not sound like something that should be available at your local hardware store.





  • Paraplegics still need to move or be moved.

    If they don’t rotate into different laying or sitting positions, they’ll develop bed sores they can’t even feel, which can be extremely dangerous. They also still need to move their limbs to avoid blood clots.

    All this shows is that Neurolink isn’t ready for one reason or another. Either the wires are so fragile they become dislodged or broken by gentle movements during physiotherapy, or the surgery damaged the brain. Either way this is a major issue with the technology. No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.





  • If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.

    It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.

    A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.


  • At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.

    Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.

    Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?


  • Marques is actually very balanced even in his critical reviews.

    Even with the Humane AI pin, he did commend them on their physical build quality, even if the rest of the device was practically useless, he never outright said that, just points out the flaws.

    Although I do wonder sometimes how much he tries to hard to be balanced, as some products, especially cars due to the price, don’t deserve kind treatment for noticeable faults.




  • And what, you want to be able to use spy satellites to see your neighbor sunbathing in the backyard?

    These are military satellites, to look at military shit like what planes an enemy has on the runway and how many, where tanks are on a battlefield, if a convoy is getting ready to leave a depot and how many vehicles it has. Not to mention, what they are even capable of seeing is a matter of national security. If an enemy knows your satellite only has a certain resolution, they can figure out exactly what camouflage they need to defeat it. If they know how the infrared photography works, they can develop strategies to fake the number of functional vehicles they have. Not everyone in the whole world should know that shit. Otherwise the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States should just pack up and retire.

    We already have a global low latency communication network, it’s the thing I’m sending you this message on now. When we don’t need is a global, high quality, spy satellite network that everyone and their brother can use and learn the capabilities of.


  • You have no idea how a spy satellite works, do you?

    They take pictures.

    With really, really fancy cameras.

    Cameras that are very carefully, and secretly, designed to be very good at their jobs.

    No, you can’t just let some third party decide to use your fancy spy satellite, that means they now know what your satellite can and can’t do, which means they can hide things from it, which means it’s now just a very expensive lump in orbit.

    And need I remind you that SpaceX is not some magical self funded space ferry service. They’re a US Government contractor, that’s where most of their money comes from. The satellites are made by other contractors. There’s not a government satellite factory somewhere in the desert, they pay companies like Boeing and Honeywell to make them the parts for the satellite, and then SpaceX gets money to launch it.

    When the government pays for something, the contractor is legally required to keep their mouth shut about it, hand over the keys, and be available if it breaks. The contractor cannot just decide to let someone else play with the government’s toys, that’s called espionage.




  • Space travel is very expensive and NASA has a very small budget these days.

    Back during the space race, NASA could afford to launch multiple missions per year. Now they can barely afford to maintain existing missions and are lucky to launch a major missions every few years. Which is why they’ve moved to buying space on commercial missions, as it’s cheaper to only pay for a spot on a rocket/craft than to pay for the whole thing.

    NASA also has to justify its missions to congress. Sending rovers to mars and probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have actual scientific interest and can answer questions about the formation of the solar system, and the viability of life off of earth.

    Slingshotting something really fast sounds cool as fuck, but there’s not much data to be gathered there. We’ve also recently beaten the “fastest man made object” record with the Parker Solar Probe, as it’s currently whipping around the sun at ludicrous speeds while it collects data about the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields. It’s moving a lot faster than voyager ever did, as it needs an insane amount of speed to orbit so low to the sun. It’s actually much cheaper, fuel wise, to travel to Pluto than the sun.

    So why waste billions of dollars to fling something out into deep space? We have barely even seen all Of the celestial bodies in our own star system, and there’s not much to be learned about the empty vacuum beyond the sun. The only justifiable reason would be to send a probe to another star system entirely. But that probe alone would have to be the largest, most expensive space craft humanity has ever built. It would need to be able to power itself for centuries, have a communication system capable of sending data over interstellar distances, and likely need a way to autonomously harvest its own fuel, as there’s very little point in sending a probe screaming past Proxima Centauri and taking a few hazy pictures of planets as it goes. We’d want the probe to be able to stay in and explore the new star system, and the only way to do that is to have enough fuel to move around an entire system, or create more fuel as it goes. Something like that has never even been tried before, and the risk is high when you won’t know if it worked or not for a few hundred years.