Echo Dot

To be honest I’m pretty certain that none of them have actually read the 1984 they dont strike me as being particularly book orientated.

I think Argentina was already there, but I get your point.

The problem is politicians tend to live in bubbles where they are protected from the consequences of their own actions and often are old and not particularly tech-savvy. So they get pulled in by things like AI and blockchain because they sound like having your cake and eating it.

The AI techbros go to them and promise them the world, they make it sound so great that the philosophers stone would be less attractive. The eagerly lap all this nonsense up and then we get announcements about pre-crime or something.

Are they?

This is the first I’m hearing about it and also it doesn’t sound very likely, I’ve never heard of anyone working longer than 12 hour days and that’s only in very particular industries.

The problem with ABC news in my experience is they assume their audience are familiar with the geopolitical situation in Asia and of course most westerners aren’t.

Like the whole toilet paper thing during the pandemic. The way they reported it made it sound like it was a global issue rather than an Australia issue. The situation that arose to create that problem simply doesn’t exist in other parts of the world, but because of the way they reported it, they made people think that it was an international problem. Then it actually became an international problem. Now granted, a certain amount of brainlessness has to be considered on the behalf of the people reading this stuff but still, it demonstrates the issue.

The BBC has been run as a business now and it’s absolutely stupid. It was never meant to make a profit that was never really the point. It was supposed to be a public service and a projection of soft power, that seems to have gone out to the window now.

I suspect a lot of the work at the BBC don’t actually agree with this, but management don’t listen to anyone.

I don’t know though papers like the daily mail will rags even back in the 90s. Those people will never journalists.

Space-based solar would generate orders of magnitude more power than we actually have a use for.

Yeah I know. Like I said it’s a stupid name, one only Microsoft would ever come up with.

Calling it visual studio is redundant now because visual studio code doesn’t actually have anything to do with visual studio anymore, it’s just an IDE for a load of different languages, none of which necessarily have anything to do with Microsoft or Visual Studio. Yet it still called VS Code.

At this point the VS effectively doesn’t really stand for anything.

Historical evidence would seem to suggest that Intel very much do like their blood money I would imagine they would like some more please.

Isn’t there supposed to be a phone OS from Mozilla as well. No idea what’s happening with that.

I’m sure there’s also something they do right.

VS code continues to be an amazing product. Of course it’s Microsoft so it has a confusing name, there is VS code and VS Code Studio which is a different, and terrible product.

The design of US cities has reinforced this.

Nobody actually lives anywhere near the places they need to work and shop so driving is the only option. Because everything’s so spread out public transport is terrible because it’s not possible to provide a decent service.

You have as a much denser population in Europe than the US by land area, so everything’s closer together and it’s easier to build public transport infrastructure in that scenario, because every stop serves a greater number of people. Plus there isn’t such a great distance between the suburban areas and the urban areas. Personally I can get from suburbia to urban the area with a 1-minute walk. I don’t understand why Americans have to be 10 miles away from their cities.

That’s irrelevant because as far as I know you don’t actually have to have the car in the garage to be able to charge it you can put the charger on the outside if you want.

Also I don’t know how it is in America but my garage is literally too small for the car, I can just about get it in there but then I’m stuck because I can’t open the door far enough to get out.

That’s not what they are talking about.

They’re talking about instability in the electrical grid. If we could just snap our fingers and have instant fusion power tomorrow we still couldn’t actually use it because the demand of electricity wouldn’t keep up with the supply.

Yes you can store power in batteries and via other methods but only to a certain point, you can consider that storage to just be demand, but beyond that you start to have issues with grid stability. You have to start inventing ways of wasting that power just to get rid of it. As more energy intensive technologies come online you make less and less use of that mitigating technology. Of course the better thing to do would be simply to keep supply roughly in line with demand, which means we don’t invent massive energy generating systems if we don’t yet need them.

Putting an entire Wikipedia article through it and then “fine tuning” it would be more work than translating it from scratch.

That depends on if you are capable of translating the language if you don’t know the language then the translator will give you a good start.

Yeah I’ve seen that. Microwave power beaming would work in theory it’s just electromagnetic radiation after all. But the vast majority of it is going to get absorbed by water molecules, because that’s what microwave radiation does, that’s why it cooks your food.

They’re probably going to bake a lot of seagulls as well.

You could build a circle of satellites on the dawn dusk line, just have them do polar orbits. I think there’s such a thing as a solar stationary orbit.

The thing is, 25 years isn’t really that far in the future. Not when you count all the lead in time. Firstly you have to invent the microwave power transmission array, that’s probably going to take it a decade, and that’s been optimistic, then you’ve somehow got to arrange to launch hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of solar power satellites, then you have to figure out a way for the satellites to transmit the energy to the transmission array, and you have to build the receiving array on earth.

It took them 10 months just to build our companies new building, and it’s the most generic thing you’ve ever seen. How are they going to do all this in 25 years?

Yeah this article is severely lacking in any concrete details.

I’d also like to know how exactly it is that they plan to deploy massive arrays of solar panels to space. Most earth-based solar farms are huge and take up entire fields, some are a few kilometres across in size. That’s many orders of magnitude more massive than anything we’ve previously ever launched.

Plus whatever power transmission system they come up with would have to be powerful to be of any use but if it’s that powerful would present an active danger and would effectively constitute a space-based weapon system.

It’s a cool sci-fi idea but it is all pie in the sky.

Solar energy gathered in space is less likely to be affected by cloud cover and is safe from natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes

You don’t say. However I suspect that the chance of being hit by a micrometeorite is significantly higher.

I think they just copy paste this stuff.

You can tell because it’s a completely non-sequitur. They don’t even bother tailing their ramblings to the conversation currently being had. They just control + c, control + v it into place, and then act like they’ve achieved something.