A friend of mine got heart surgery through his inner thigh. That artery is huge, so it provides easy access to the heart without needing to go near any organs. It still creeps me out to think about it, on the other hand it is pretty awesome that’s technologically feasible and provides a much safer procedure with a shorter recovery period.

Time to drink my own piss

True story I’m afraid

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/08/01/337078881/during-transport-a-giraffe-in-south-africa-hits-head-on-overpass-dies

No joke, when that picture went viral of a couple of idiots transporting a couple of giraffes on the freeway with a too low overpass in sight, I felt sick for a week. I still think about how horrible that must have been.

I bet I can make a bot that does that, I even have some tricks up my sleeve to make it smarter than anyone else’s AI. Oh noes we have fallen victim to the paperclip problem and are wiped out by a meme machine

It’s a very transparent corruption tool. When Trump was elected, he and his ghouls went around with the hat to get “donations” from all of the large companies. Especially the ones in big tech donated huge amounts for what turned out to be a very sad inauguration ceremony. After Trump gifted all of them huge tax benefits and removing restrictions and regulations, the time had come for the hat to go around again. But you can’t just donate directly to the president, then even the dumbest of the dumb would cry foul. So like the shitty landlord Trump has always been he destroyed part of the White House and announced plans for a huge new construction project. This allowed all of the assholes to once again “donate” to this project. A project that has caused a lot of damage to a monument in order to “own the libs” and has raked in millions in donations, but has done little else. All of this money is being pocketed by Trump and his goons.

As with many terrible things, it’s all out in the open and yet America does nothing. Checks and balances indeed.

Terrible Thunder Lizards!

Shopped? More like slopped

They’ve just been busy working on that healthcare plan, it’s coming any day now, two weeks at the most.

Yeah they are working on this for sure. The video series is available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZLsjPxmF1BE1BAAeJgF2A17pKxeIBGm8

I used to be a most people are good kind of person, then covid happened and people let the world see their true colors. Yeah so many people are assholes. There are a lot of good people out there for sure, but I went from 80% of people are good to 40% of people are good in a few years. And since covid it seems like the empathy bucket ran dry for a lot of people. People have become so self centered and selfish the past few years, just straight up assholes.

Well that would lump all user into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance.

Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance.

The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it’s a hard problem to solve.

This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it’s too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it’s similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.

Good advice about the 80%! But just to add: Check if this is really needed, I’ve seen a bunch of devices where 100% indicated actually means 80% of the physical cells. The BMS won’t allow charging over 80%, so that’s where it caps out.

Also, even if the BMS doesn’t self limit, check how you use the laptop. If it’s plugging in 99% of the time, just keep it plugged in and let it sit at 100%. The laptop will run directly off the wall power and the BMS will trickle charge the cells to keep them topped up. This prevents discharge-charge cycles, which is usually better for the battery in the long run.

I’ve seen people say to always fully discharge the battery before charging it, absolutely do not do that. Deep discharge cycles are terrible for modern batteries. Just use it as needed and as soon as there is the convenient option to charge, just charge it right away regardless of the level.

No such thing as a free lunch tho. It’s like saying solar energy on Earth is free, it’s obviously not. Sure, once the panels are produced and installed, the running costs are minimal. But that doesn’t mean that energy is now suddenly free. When I did the calculation on my solar installation, I took the costs of buying the panels, installing them, maintaining them and in the end tearing them down and properly recycling them. Then we calculated the estimated total energy produced during the lifetime of the system and thus arrived at a cost per unit of energy. Then we can compare that to what the cost would be as compared to other energy sources. At the time it didn’t make financial sense, as over the lifetime other energy sources (which might have been solar as well, just out of large scale installations) would be cheaper. But some government subsidies, plus a feeling the cost of energy in the future is unsure and wanting to contribute to sustainable energy production made me pay for them anyways.

It’s the exact same with launching a datacenter into space. Once it’s up there the energy might not cost anything and running costs per satellite might be relatively low (although there still are running costs for sure, often just spread out over the entire constellation), but that doesn’t mean the thing is free. Investers would want to see a return. So that means a lot of the costs are upfront, developing the system, paying the launch provider, getting the right licenses, etc, etc. Then during the lifetime of the system, it needs to sell the compute in order to make a profit. When directly competing with newer ground based systems that run cutting edge technology, it doesn’t really matter where or how the compute is done. It’s simply a unit of work being sold at market rate. Newer technology will push the price per unit down, as the new tech is more efficient. And it might make your compute less attractive as it’s lacking in newer capabilities, so it can only be sold at a lower price.

So even if the system would be designed for a lifespan of 10 years and put into an orbit that can last 10 years, the compute would be very hard to be sold for any reasonable price after 5 years. And as mentioned, operating a satellite is far from free, there are many running costs associated.

Plus when you build a datacenter on Earth you can use it for decades. You can swap out small parts (like the servers and networking hardware), which keeps it useful. Cooling and power setups are often good for a very long time and those can also be upgraded if needed. The building itself and all of the supporting infrastructure is good for at least 50 years. And a lot of the building is dedicated to easy access for humans to do stuff like maintenance. This is a design requirement for any datacenter.

When shooting shit into space, that’s it, you can’t access it for upgrades or maintenance. And we’ve seen these past years cutting edge AI hardware is good for maybe 3 years at best. After that it’s basically worthless, maybe useful for some niche uses, but mostly useless and definitely not profitable. Not that this matters much, as to keep latency down the orbits would be so low they deorbit within 3-5 years anyways, like with the current Starlink constellation.

But this is of course very useful for a cheap launch provider, as it keeps them yeeting shit into space non-stop. And what a surprise, Elon Musk is one of the people pushing this concept hard. No alternate motives there for sure.

Yes, it was sold as being one Starship in LEO, one Starship to refuel it and off it went. But now they’re onto this plan with a ship to do the mission, a ship with a different design to act as a fuel station and then at least 4 fueling missions, but more likely 8 to 12. It’s ridiculous really, to expect all of this to work out.

At the same time Nasa can’t get SLS to do what they want and that’s just a single mission. A more complicated one for sure, but still a single mission, not a dozen within two days.

A lot of the Moon mission hinges on Starship being a reliable machine that does all of the things Musk promised. I have no doubt that SpaceX in time could build something good, they do have a lot of good people working there. But the time lines given by Musk to the government in order to get the contracts weren’t viable. And as usual Musk overpromised about the capabilities.

One of the biggest doubts at the moment is about Starship being able to go to the Moon. The plan was to send up a Starship into LEO, then send up another Starship to refuel the first one. That way it would have enough fuel to go to the Moon and work as a lander there. It doesn’t need to do much, just get to the Moon, take the people to the surface and get them back into Lunar orbit.

The issue with this is, a lot of things need to go right in order for this to work. You’d need two functioning Starships, they need to both launch into the correct orbit and rendezvous. Then they need to dock and transfer fuel, undock and separate. This is pretty much never been done, so they would be doing something new, but in theory it can be done. Hard and experimental, but in principle achievable.

However when calculations were made, it turns out once you put a Starship in the right orbit it’s not possible for it to have enough fuel to fully refuel another Starship. So Musk said they would simply stretch a Starship and use it as a fuel station. Nobody is really sure if this stretching is even possible, as this wasn’t part of the original design, but let’s say it is. Now the mission become more complicated still, you’d need the Starship that does the Moon mission. Then you’d need the fuel station ship and another ship to fuel that station. And all of this has to work and be timed properly for the Moon mission to work.

But then further calculations were made and nobody is sure how many Starship launches would be required to fill up that fuel station. Partly because Starship isn’t finalized, so the exact specs are unknown. But back of the napkin calculations put the figure at something like 6 launches. A big problem is the fuel used is very hard to store for any amount of time. As it’s cryogenic, it needs to be kept cold. On Earth this is done by using very thick and sturdy pressure vessels, combined with a bunch of machinery and off-gassing. But in space this gets harder, since the pressure vessels need to be light, they can’t be as sturdy. And there isn’t room (both in volume and weight) for all of the cooling machines, which would require too much power and cooling themselves to even work. So we end up with only off-gassing to maintain temperature. This usually doesn’t matter, on Earth the fuel that’s lost gets replaced right away up to the point of liftoff. After that the fuel is used to fly the mission and usually the rocket’s main fuel tank is empty after that. This puts a lot of time pressure on the whole thing, that fuel station in orbit is losing fuel all of the time. So it’s a race to fill it up faster than it’s losing fuel. So those 6 missions need to be flown within a day or maybe two. And if it turns out the amount of fuel being delivered is lower than expected or the loss is higher, there would need to be 12 fueling missions within a day. Not strictly impossible, but not exactly easy. And the not knowing is making people nervous.

They are so far behind schedule, on a system that hasn’t been finalized, let alone tested, it’s very doubtful they could do it anywhere in the near future. Nasa has since asked other companies if they could build a lander if SpaceX can’t do it. But canceling the whole landing part is an option as well.

On the other hand, I can get really annoyed when writers get stuff like that wrong. Especially when it’s crucial to the plot and it happens to be within my area of expertise. So I do appreciate writers that do their research.

I’ve consulted on a couple of books and I’ve seen two kinds of fiction writers. The first one simply starts writing and only stops once the story is done. They might get writers block in between or reorder some stuff in editing (if they do editing, some don’t), but mostly the story is written from beginning to end in one go. The second one is the one that does plenty of research beforehand. They might have an idea of the plot, but it’s more of a concept and not finalized. They start building plot points, characters and story lines. They decide on things like structure, pacing and point of view. Small details crucial to the plot get thought out and researched before hand. They write the important stuff first, then fill out the rest and make sure there is a natural progression from one point to the next. They make sure everything fits within the designed character profiles and backstories. Often they edit a lot and entire chapters get deleted and rewritten. This is the kind of writer that works with others, sometimes multiple primary authors, often other people that do the editing. I vastly prefer the second kind and love working with those people. I feel like they write better books, regardless of how much time it costs them or how successful their books are. But a friend of mine is the first kind and he’s had some success with his books. He likes to let his creativity flow and outputs more books, so more chances of capturing an audience. But I do feel you sometimes need to turn your brain off a bit to read those kinds of books.