NASA is getting there

It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns

You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-reviewed research from NASA" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.

We were flying balloons on Venus almost 40 years before we flew a helicopter on Mars. We directly sampled Venus's atmosphere 4 years before we sampled Mars. We successfully landed and transmitted data either 1 or 6 years (depending on your definition) from the surface of Venus vs. Mars.

Your incredulity about levels of difficulty doesn't translate to actual levels of difficulty.

It's also disingenuous to say it will be done in a decade for $12B.

There is zero chance of that happening.

Is it legal for LV casinos to offer odds on when public projects will be done and what they will cost?

I'd take this bet at a hundred to one.

California banned non-competes in 1874 when they were a solidly Republican state.

Indeed. Both employees and companies do better in jurisdictions that ban non-competes.

Employees do better for obvious reasons since they can hop to better jobs.

It is not as obvious for companies, but they benefit from more freedom to hire, ideas and innovation spreading faster, and more satisfied employees.

Non-competes are a prisoner's dilemma. An individual company benefits from a non-compete but is harmed even more when other companies do the same. They are collectively better off if none of them do it. But the only way to enforce that, is a legal ban.

The FTC finally did something I agree with. That hasn't happened in a long time.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..

That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes

In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.

Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that.

Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting with reasonably Earthlike conditions certainly is a good start.

Apple spent $10 billion on the car project.

I don't know the NRE expenses for the AVP, but Apple spends $70B annually on R&D. It's reasonable to assume a good chunk of that was on the AVP.

EDIT: Here's a link that says they spent $20 billion to develop it. It's from a VC, and they never lie.

There were no chains or whips. But an Apple sales rep sits with you and guides you through the script. There is no ability to just try stuff on your own.

But the demo is cool. You should make an appointment and go see it. It's amazing technology.

At half the price and half the weight, it'd be a huge hit.

I'll buy one eventually.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

The price is a big problem. I considered buying one but decided to wait for the next version at a (hopefully) lower price.

But another reason I decided to wait is Apple would let me try it. Dropping $3500 on a product I'm not allowed to test isn't gonna happen.

I did the in-store demo, but it is totally scripted and 100% focused on consuming content. Going off-script is a big no-no.

The demo does not include using the AVP with a keyboard and mouse or integrating with a MacBook.

I also wanted to try using the AVP while reclining or lying down. Not allowed.

The generators are cheap. Stick two pieces of metal in a bucket of water.

Running them is not cheap because they are voracious consumers of electricity.

But what we are talking about is when electricity of FREE or has a NEGATIVE price.

Counterpoint.