Have you taken a look at MITs SPARC reactor? I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years. The REBCO tape, and being able to get 10x magnetic field strength compared to ITER in a 3x smaller diameter seems like fairly significant progress to me.
> I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years.
Seeing as ITER doesn't even exist yet, I fail to understand how it can be old news or how we can innovate beyond it.
Have you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.
As someone who lived next to a busy road for about 10 years, I’ve always wondered why people do this, so thanks for the perspective. The apartment was about 10 feet away, with no isolation, and a 65mph speed limit, so, surprisingly, it was worse when there were fewer cars because people would throttle harder. So because of this past living situation, I’ve grown to hate the noise of loud vehicles at any time of the day, and if I were given the opportunity to limit the amount of loud vehicles on the road, I’d always take it. Eventually I bought sound panels and put them in my road-facing windows, and then also in my rooms closest to the road, but eventually I decided it would be best to just move.
It’s funny too, since some of those kids may eventually realize that they were brought here without their consent, and that they don’t actually like working and paying bills. You, suffering for them, then suffering for their existence, and a death of your previous self, in which you draw yourself as a type of martyr. No one’s happy on your road to Damascus, and yet you’re faith and community demand your consent to your animalistic urges to reproduce and maintain face within your community. Having children out of guilt and peer pressure from your religious community is no excuse for their suffering.
I think pointing out flaws in other people's reasoning is perfectly valid. You could argue the response was mean-spirited, but I actually enjoyed how well it articulated something I was thinking. Honestly I think we need more posts like the above, not fewer.
> I think pointing out flaws in other people's reasoning is perfectly valid.
Frankly my knee-jerk reaction on some of the above comments was to start picking apart their reasoning and thinking of ways to explain why they're wrong. I was gearing up to drop some bombs. I have done this a lot. The internet is full of it. And it sucks.
There's so much of "I'm just pointing out the flaws in other people's reasoning". It's more than just snootiness; it's exhausting for everyone, even the out-pointer and out-pointed. It saps energy and....damn it...I'm doing it right now. The end result is just a cloud of bad feelings.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could write something on the internet and people would just listen....fuuuuu...and maybe some people would agree, and you wouldn't have to have an argument? What a world!
Different people want different things. I hate when people feel that harsh criticism isn't nice. It starts to make everything feel like fluffy bullshit.
I wish HN was way, way harsher with its commentary. I understand your perspective and realize I'm outnumbered here, but basically we fundamentally disagree (and that's okay!).
I'd rather see more arguments about controversial topics from people with differing perspectives who bring data and logic to make their points. I hate that many things feel heavily censored on this site.
The older I get, the more I realize that endless nitpicking just sucks the joy out of life. 25 years online and I forget what life was like before every thought and attitude I or anyone ever had was raked over the coals. Constant peanut gallery. It's a chilling effect that you can't even measure. Endless criticism doesn't make everything better. It just puts everyone on edge, and it's absolutely asymmetric between those who want "fluffy bullshit" or whatever and people who can't for the life of them keep their commentary to themselves. I regret my own arguing more and more; I never feel better afterwards. Hell, I don't even like bringing this up because we gotta discuss it to death.
I hate when people feel that harsh criticism isn't nice
Kind of a bad-faith strawman objection, TBH. I don't see anybody saying the issue is that the post wasn't sufficiently "nice."
I'm extrapolating here, but it sounds like you may often have this misconception w.r.t. metacriticism?
IME the issue people typically have with unnecessarily "harsh" criticism -- at least in engineering circles -- is that such unnecessarily harsh criticism is often counterproductive or at least wildly unproductive. I mean, what was the desired outcome here? Is criticizing some rando's spiritual practice supposed to benefit somebody, somehow?
I'm 1,000% in favor of speaking out or better yet, acting out when folks' religious beliefs interfere with others' freedoms. But I think that pretty clearly is not what was happening here.
The set of "valid" actions is a superset of what's actually "useful" or "good."
I'm an atheist, but for the most part I enjoyed reading others spiritual practices.
It is useful to learn about others; empathy and understanding are incredibly valuable even if one views the world from a strictly Machiavellian lens (though I hope that folks do not).
There is also much that the non-religious can learn from the religious. What I got from many posts here was a sense of the purpose, meaning, and/or serenity that many of these folks derive from their spiritual practices.
Call me crazy, but those are qualities many of us would like to enhance in our lives. I think there is much to learn from them.
It's not really pointing out flaws, it's more of a "your worldview, superimposed on my personal ethical framework, creates inconsistencies", which isn't really an insightful comment.
If we stopped having children because some of them might suffer, then the human race would cease to exist. If that is your aim, then state it plainly, rather than hiding it behind a thinly veiled attack on somebody's religion and personal sacrifices.
Some types of tornado proof homes are not the big square concrete type, like shown in the sibling comment article, but dome homes made out of concrete. The obvious issues are that most furniture doesn’t fit well, wall hangings don’t work correctly, and putting in interior walls is wasteful, while modifying anything for electric or water is quite difficult without careful planning.
This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum.
I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair.
Cars already use larger slower lithography sizes, which are more resilient to temperature changes, but also can be lower margin profit, since they take up more space on a standard silicon wafer. Older fabs, when spun down, may not just sit there, and may have their hardware cannibalized or at least the space repurposed for something profitable. So the old machines usually can’t just be turned on. There’s also a people-problem where that specific equipment may be understood by a select group of people and they may not be available.
There are also problems surrounding qualifications of parts and the supply chain restrictions that suppliers are held to by manufactures. So, trying to replace even just one part on a design that is locked down can be quite painful for a company. We are having many types of parts shortages at this time though, which exacerbates that experience.
Even so, a much “slower part” usually won’t have the same feature set, and may not have the same memory peripherals pinned out, requiring further qualification. Hardware changes of that level are usually done 2-3 years in advance for all of the paperwork and qualification steps. You’d have to build today-cars with standardized qualified parts from years ago. An outrageous example might be trying to stick a cassette-tape head-unit in your latest 2022 car.
I had those same problems until I started using the Factorio calculator[1]. It took some time for it to be developed, and I only just found out about it earlier this year. So I understand where you are coming from.
To reference the top comment right now… I’d imagine if you are looking at the metric at all, you’ve already lost. This, coming from someone who’s mother was walking 10-20k steps per day for decades, and seeing them fully stop walking after a few weeks with a Fitbit.
Could not disagree more. Yeah, yeah, stop and smell the roses and all that, I get it. But there are a tonne of people, my mother included, who are spurred on greatly by the need to fill out the rings on their Apple watch. It's the thing that gets them out of the door, the metric. We bought the watch for her hopeful she would actually use it, and not leave it buried somewhere in a drawer, and it's worked an absolute treat. She's walked more, and more strenuously, since she got the watch. She loves sharing the graphs of her hikes/walks, and the km covered.
Even for me, as much as I hate giving away my medical data, I love compiling GPX files of hikes I've been on, or keeping streaks of commuting by bike everyday.
Metrics are great, and I don't think it's as simple as a dichotomy between being all about number crunching, vs all about feeling the grass under your feet. One can do both.
Why would the fitbit make her stop walking and how do you know she did 10-20k steps before the fitbit... And I have more questions after you answer this one :)
The steps are a proxy metric for activity, you can correlate it with how you feel or with the amount of backpain you experience in the evening. I don't see how I'm loosing looking at this metric.
