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Comment Re:Words mean things (Score 5, Insightful) 133

1) Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.

2) Increasing CO2 levels does help plants, via reducing photorespiration per unit carbon fixed. Not, however, as much as killing them with worsened weather harms them (in particular; a warming client sees the monsoon belts move poleward, dries out soil faster, makes rivers more seasonal, and increases the intensity of peak rain events - aka, both drought and flood become more common). Plants also have optimal cultivation temperatures, and most are C3 plants, which tend to not like hot weather. Higher temperatures make them less efficient, and again, to a greater degree than CO2 helps them. C4 plants are generally better at dealing with drought and higher temperatures, but they don't benefit as much from increased CO2 availability, as they're already so good at capturing CO2 and could grow in CO2 levels a tiny fraction of that which we have now.

3) This is a bizarre argument. So, say, if I dump tonnes of cobalt in your drinking water, that's not pollution, because the human body needs to consume billionths of a gram per day? Some bacteria produce energy from oxidizing arsenic or using arsenic compounds to conduct photosynthesis - you okay with me contaminating your food supply with it? Some bacteria consume uranium - okay for me to fill your air with uranium dust?

The post you're responding to is literally quoting the dictionary.

Comment THANK YOU JEEBUS (Score 2) 18

Red Hat has launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), described as a foundation model platform that allows users to more seamlessly develop and deploy generative AI models.

Hopefully whatever they do there will rub off on Fedora. It's always a massive pain to get setup...not least of which because NVidia usually develops one or two GCC versions behind (and you can't use incompatible versions with nvcc), and by the time they're caught up, the distro is already end-of-life.

Comment Re:Maybe we should have built Nuclear (Score 1) 167

But was the manufacturing capacity there to accomplish that?

The book "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" takes a neutral look at many options and what would be involved in each. For nuclear, I remember a bottleneck in pressure vessel development.

Even if we went same road as France we'd have more work to do, on things like agriculture and cement production.

Comment Re:Her. Just what we need. (Score 1) 21

To all these "AI simultaneously sucks and will also destroy the planet through overuse" - exactly who do you think will be buying all this power and all these GPUs to use said power, if there's no economic value to it and a competitor could provide as good or better of a service without said insane expense?

The electricity generation market was valued at $1,6 trillion per year in 2023 (just generation, not distribution, grid services, etc). If you're going to be meaningfully increasing that, you're going to need to have some sizable percentage of that in added economic activity to justify it. And then atop that, the even more expensive aspect of said datacentres to consume said power. How many hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars are you positing that the market will decide is worth spending, while simultaneously having products that non-AI competitors could perform as well or better than? Like, adding a whole new "entire GDP of Russia"'s worth of electricity consumption and datacentres for something that consumers are indifferent to, is that what you think the market is going to pay for?

The reality is: you can run Phi-3 on a bloody smartphone without any sort of AI accelerator aboard it, and so long as you steer clear of trivia questions (or redirect them to RAG), it's excellent.. LLaMA 3 IMHO outperforms ChatGPT in most tasks and can run on a good gaming GPU. ~5 second generation = the power consumption of playing a video game for ~5 seconds. These are not world-eating levels of power consumption.

And the efficiency level for a given set of capabilities is growing exponentially - both exponentially on the hardware side and on the software side simultaneously, with a very fast doubling time. Now, we can of course offset this by using exponentially better models. And sure, in many places we will. But for any given task, you hit a point where its capabilities are good enough for the specific task it's given. Wherein, you're going to choose to apply those exponential gains to "exponentially cheaper and more efficient" rather than "exponentially more capable".

The other side of the coin is training new foundations (not finetunes, that's easy). But again, you and your investors have to believe that there's an economic case on the other end that will pay for the investment. Want a trillion dollars per year worth of training resources? Better have a clear path to tens of trillion dollars in revenue coming out the other side. That's just not happening. And again, training, too, becomes exponentially easier over time for a given level of capabilities.

Comment Re: For anyone who cares about how it actually wo (Score 1) 175

The tube is not loadbearing, "jackass". It exists soley for its neutronicity.

The cost of lifting ~10t of fuel for a 10-50t spacecraft+cargo (e.g. depending on how extreme dV they actually want the spacecraft to be capable of) - aka, for a very large mission (the Apollo LM was only 4t incl. fuel) - at Falcon 9 prices - is 15M. At Starship prices, like an order of magnitude or more less. This is nothing compared to the billions of dollars you'll spend developing the spacecraft and billions more on mission hardware.

You have the most insane ideas.

Comment Re: For anyone who cares about how it actually wo (Score 2) 175

? It's not a fusion rocket.

It's a fission rocket - bloody close enough.

additionally, have you factored the weight and storage space lost on the fusion rocket, to make room for 2x the fuel,

It's an ISP of 5000, it doesn't matter.

If you want to get there quickly, you're always loading it fully with fuel. The only difference is in the transfer time. All of them are "very fast", just varying degrees of "very fast".

It's like trying to say we should only fly airplanes on the couple days per year when the jet stream is strongest. It's such an immensely stupid idea.

Comment Re: And Now (Score 1) 175

1) the 'now 2 months' is down from the 'best time of 6 months', caused by mars being literally closer to the earth.

That's not how Hohmann transfers work. Just stop. And a minimum energy transfer to Mars is 9 months anyway, not 6.

In order to achieve the 2 month travel time, it must launch WITHIN THE LAUNCH WINDOW.

Get this through your head: There Are No 'Launch Windows' With Nuclear Propulsion. You don't leave a craft that can travel to Mars a matter of months sitting idle rusting away rather than repeatedly ferrying back and forth, just because some times the trajectory is somewhat longer and others it's somewhat shorter.

There are launch windows with minimum energy Hohmann transfers because that's what you need to have Mars be at the right place when you intersect its orbit. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to intersect Mars's orbit regardless of when you launch a Hohmann transfer, but unless you time it right, Mars won't be there. Launching at any other time requires more dV to dogleg it - and dV is dearly bought when it comes to chemical rockets. It isn't dearly bought with nuclear rockets. So launch windows simply don't apply to them. You launch on an elliptic which doesn't terminate at Mars' orbit, aka you applied more delta-V than was necessary to get out that far, but that's happening by definition if you want to get there faster. A minimum energy elliptic can only intersect Mars orbit opposite its starting position, but the higher the energy of the transfer, the more rotated the interception point is.

I will repeat: your capital cost is in your rocket. You're not going to leave it sitting around waiting for 2 1/2 years when you could do 10-ish trips during that timeperiod, just because some are longer than others and some somewhat shorter, and thus raise your capital cost per kg tenfold. They're all varying degrees of "short", and you have flexibility; you're launching on all of them. Unless you're an utter moron who likes throwing away 10x more capital at a project. You do not have to intersect the planet at a specific location on its orbit in opposition to your starting point when you apply more than the minimum dV.

since the ships ARE NOT THOUSANDS OF KM APART, due to ALL LAUNCHING IN THE SAME WINDOW

Launching just days apart in the same window (which again, THERE ARE NO WINDOWS), they're MILLIONS of kilometers apart. Do you not even know how far Mars and Earth are apart, or can you not divide a travel distance by the number of days of the trip?

And for the last goddamn time, the exhaust doesn't even remotely resemble a collimated beam, even if it did it would still be orders of magnitude weaker than ambient radiation, and even if it wasn't all you had to do was microscopically off-angle it. This is such a stupid line of discussion.

Comment Re: For anyone who cares about how it actually wo (Score 2) 175

Yes, and you clearly don't.

Nobody is going to leave the capital investment of a spacecraft that can do such quick transfers sitting idle waiting for a "window" when they can head there and back repeatedly in the same timeperiod.

Your costs are in your spacecraft, not your fuel. You're not going to leave it sitting idle for years waiting for a "window" to make a single delivery when you could make ten deliveries in that same timeperiod. Doing the former would mean increasing your capital costs by an order of magnitude per unit cargo shipped. Which is a braindead idea.

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