Make America Space Again

The Guardian gives some good context on trump’s public back and forth on Isaacman, but it’s disappointing not to see a peep about what Sean Duffy has done to NASA in the intervening months. NASA has been gutted. Climate science is, predictably, especially disfavored, but they’ve also dealt a major blow to graduate academia and really all of science in the US.

Maybe now that most of the house has been burned down, Isaacman can be trusted to funnel much of the public purse into SpaceX or other rocketry billionaires and focus on Mars like a good boy. It doesn’t matter if he once voted Democrat if it’s too hard for him to put the old priorities back into place even if he wanted to.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

This generation? Yeah, no.

System administration is a different skill than software coding, although there is some overlap. You should be technically minded and detail oriented, willing to read documentation and tutorials closely, and have the curiosity to dig into related details that you don’t understand. In many ways it’s “just” configuring and running software on a Linux server, but there are lots of details underneath all that (hosting, DNS, backups, security, etc). Of course it’s also then managing users as an instance admin, and presiding over deeply held opposing community views like whether to enable downvotes.

Edit: based on another comment I reread your question and maybe you’re just asking about creating a new community on an existing instance, not hosting your own instance. If so, then my above answer is irrelevant, sorry. Creating a community is very straightforward, you just have to be willing to be the head moderator and deal with everything that entails.

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Awesome, thanks!

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Software engineering is so often dominated by a move fast and break things mentality, driven by a rush to deploy and scale and profit, with the ability to fix problems with later updates. It’s a very immature process compared to every other engineering domain, because fix-it-later is much more difficult, expensive, and dangerous when it’s a bridge, building, airplane, or anything else tangible (although Boeing did a great job of destroying engineering process and accountability after the MBAs took control away from the engineers).

The work detailed in this Signal blog post is clearly slow and methodical, with continual checks for correctness and curiosity for optimal solutions driving careful experimentation. Building on existing proven PQ standards and keeping their refinements open for public academic feedback is wonderfully responsible. Building formal correctness proofs into CI and blocking trunk merges is spectacular.

They’re doing everything right, even years after Moxie Marlinspike’s departure. Bravo! Working this way is very expensive and requires absolute support from upper management. I’m definitely a fanboy for Meredith Whittaker and the direction she’s running the organization. Hell yeah!

Of course I don’t have any concrete proof.

serious discussion about security merits.

Those two don’t go together, bud.

It just comes down to if you trust the devs and those doing the hosting.

Ok so let’s talk about “ex-Meta” Brian Acton walking away from nearly a billion dollars due to his moral stance on private communication. Or Meredith Whittaker’s determination to pioneer a tech business model other than surveillance capitalism.

You’re absolutely right that it comes down to trusting the devs, which is why WhatsApp is a nonstarter even though it uses Signal’s E2EE. Europe’s chat control proposal doesn’t need to break E2EE, it just needs to demand that the messaging client app scans all content locally before encrypting and has a way to tattle. Meta could also be scanning everything you type into WhatsApp and feeding it into a local AI advertising interests summarizer or whatever else, and still claim E2EE. The open source client is far more important than an open source server when there’s proper E2EE.

That’s a feature. It’s showing you the title of the post in world, and the packaged up source of the cross post with its title in Canada. The two titles are not required to be the same, so showing them both is appropriate.

Singing Bowls

Congrats!

Hoover dam’s water release schedule is driven by requests from water rightsholders further downstream. Power generation is great, but the dam’s primary design purpose has always been facilitating agricultural irrigation.

That said, I bet you’re right that the water flow rate could be varied throughout each day to help balance electric grid needs. I assume that will likely come into play as we get further along the path to intermittent green power generation.

nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy

Solar and wind are cheap and easy to build now, and a huge threat to fossil fuel primacy, which in turn makes them a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency. That’s why the Trump administration has gone all-out to quash their momentum.

Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing is theoretically possible but not politically or economically viable at present. Neither is 100,000+ year storage that has been the concept of a plan of record in the US for decades. I’m not saying that nuclear is inherently unworkable, but your net viewpoint doesn’t seem to be based in reality.

The disaster response in Chernobyl was absolutely heroic but also incredibly lucky. If the melted core had reached the water underneath the concrete pad, the steam explosion would have spread the core atmospherically with devastating results. You’re making light of the disaster that was, and ignoring how close it came to being so much larger. Furthermore, the enormous irresponsibility of the Russian military’s damage to the sarcophagus cannot be overstated. If maintaining isolation for a few decades is difficult, there’s just no chance over 100,000+ years.

But I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith, so I’m done here. I hope you can find your way to more nuanced views in the future.

Pumped hydroelectric storage obviously works with the same kind of turbines as dams located on rivers, but the land use is far from “literally identical”. For one, I agree with you that damming rivers is generally a bad thing. Large dam sites are chosen to min-max construction effort and reservoir capacity, and usually double as flood control. A grid storage project only needs to hold enough water for its daily power use, and it doesn’t need to be located directly on a water course. That’s not to say that there are unlimited suitable sites, but it’s more flexible.

Pumped hydro storage is quite green in its lack of carbon emissions and ability to time-shift green generation capacity to match grid demand timing. Land use is a consideration, but large anything requires land. You haven’t actually attacked the weakest part of pumped hydro, which is that there just aren’t very many geographically suitable locations for it.

You’ve also neglected to acknowledge the pesky spent nuclear fuel storage problem, which is unsolved and distinctly not eco-friendly. There are potentially better paths available such as the thorium fuel cycle, but they all either have no economic traction or are actively opposed by various governments (which don’t have any good solutions for existing spent fuel).

Unclear if you’re misinformed or disingenuous.

Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.

A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.

Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.

There are plenty of other wacky energy storage ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.

Neither the article nor the RSL website makes clear how pricing or payment works, which seems like a huge miss. It’s not obvious if a publisher can price-differentiate among content, or even choose their own prices at all.

RSL makes an analogy:

Collective licensing organizations like ASCAP and BMI have long helped musicians get paid fairly by working together and pooling rights into a single, indispensable offering.

I’d like to get excited about this because AI companies suck, but if the best example they have is that ASCAP helps “musicians get paid fairly” I’m afraid this isn’t a solution that most content creators will celebrate.