Absolutely, there are cases when speed really matters and code needs to be well optimized. I'm just saying it's not universal, the 1980s weren't some golden age of efficient programming. Some code was really fast. Some was slow because it didn't need to be fast. And some was slow and really should have been faster. The same as today.

Why?

You're mixing up low Earth orbit (LEO) with geostationary orbit (GEO). A satellite in LEO is only about 1000 km up. That's much smaller than the Earth's radius, so it spends almost as much time in darkness as if it were on the ground. It's also useless for space based power because it's constantly moving relative to the ground.

Space based power requires putting the solar panels in GEO so they maintain their position above the receiving station on the ground. That's 35,786 km up. It is much much more expensive to put something in GEO than LEO. It has no protection from radiation or micrometeorites. Servicing is out of the question. There are people trying to figure out ways to service satellites in LEO, but there are no credible plans to do that for GEO in the foreseeable future.

If you still think you're right, prove it by making concrete predictions. Here are my predictions. 20 years from now, space based solar still will not be a thing. No one will be producing energy in space and feeding it into grids on Earth. There also will be no credible plans to change that. The cost of Earth based renewables will have continued to fall, and it will be cheap enough that it's impossible to make an economic case for developing space based solar.

What are your predictions?

Every programmer should know how to write fast code, but it doesn't mean they should do it all the time. Writing slow code is often the right thing to do. Programmer efficiency is important too.

Here's an example. People complain about Python being slow, but when it was introduced 30 years ago, the interpreter was no more efficient than the modern one. Probably less efficient. And computers were 100 or 1000x slower, but people still loved Python because it made them more efficient.

Go back even further to the earliest home PCs from companies like Apple, Commodore, and Atari. They all came with a BASIC interpreter built in. That was how most people programmed them. A 1 MHz 8 bit processor, and people made it even slower by programming in an interpreted language. That seems crazy. But it was easy, and it was still fast enough for a lot of things. That made it the right choice.

According to that logic, coastal flooding should never happen. Everything is built high enough that it never floods. Strangely, that isn't the case. Coastal flooding is common and becoming more common, which shows there's a flaw in your reasoning.

Here's a hint: infrastructure is located based only on the high tide line. The low tide line, and the difference between the two, never comes into it.

That sounds really complicated.

Really really really complicated.

Sure it's technically possible, but compare to the alternative: putting solar panels right here on earth where they're cheap to transport, easy to install, easy to connect to the grid, and easy to maintain if anything goes wrong. And when they reach the end of their useful lifespan you take them down, recycle them, and put up new ones.

They'll also probably last longer on earth where they aren't subject to intense heat from being so close to the sun, ionized particles, and micrometeroid impacts.

Simple solutions have a lot of advantages over complicated ones.

It's all the same thing. Sea level today is about 25 cm (10 inches) higher than at the start of the 20th century. That doesn't sound like a lot, but every time there's coastal flooding, it means the water comes up 25 cm higher than it would have before. You put roads and buildings high enough up that you don't expect them to get flooded even in the biggest storms, then find them getting flooded every few years.

And it's accelerating. For most of the 20th century, sea level rise was between 1 and 2 mm per year. Today it's about 4.6 mm per year. At that rate it would only take about 50 years to add another 25 cm. But it won't take that long, because it's still accelerating. Most models predict we'll get there before 2050, and we could easily get a full meter of sea level rise by the end of the century.

Here's a rule of thumb. If a place gets regular coastal flooding today, it will probably be uninhabitable 100 years from now.

It's a price increase, but they're increasing the price of something you already paid for. It's not like they're waiting until your subscription comes up for renewal. No, they're taking the subscription you paid for and making it worse, then saying you have to pay even more if you want to get what you already paid for.

It's the second time they've done this, first with Prime Music and now with Prime Video. You buy a subscription, then they take away something you already paid for and demand more money if you want it back again.

I am so done with them. Sorry Amazon, no more Prime for me. Even the "free" shipping, which was the original point, isn't worth much any more. Everyone has free shipping now, no subscription needed.

There certainly is a bubble going on right now, with companies dumping ridiculous amounts of money into training models. But don't think that bubble is the same thing as AI. It's just a bubble. AI was progressing fast, solving real world problems, and growing in popularity for years before the current bubble got started. The bubble is speeding it up by getting investors to dump lots of money into it, but it doesn't need them. When the bubble bursts and those investors lose money, AI will keep right on doing what it's been doing: getting better and solving real world problems.

https://signal.org/docs/specif...

That's what Google Messages and Signal both use for encrypted one-to-one chats.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/d...

That's the IETF standard for key exchange in group chats.

That's total BS. If their goal was to provide security, they would provide it when you communicate with people on other platforms. They don't, so someone else had to step in and provide it instead. And Apple tries to block it with the excuse, "We can't be certain their solution is really secure." Instead they want you to use the solution they provide, which is 100% guaranteed NOT secure.

Their goal is not to provide security. Their goal is to sell iPhones by making sure the experience is worse whenever you communicate with someone not on an iPhone.

Let's do the experiment and find out. Put a reminder in your calendar for ten years from today with a link to this post. Your prediction is that Germany will "fail hard on lowering CO2 emissions". My prediction is that ten years from now, Germany's CO2 emissions will be much lower than today. Let's put some hard numbers on it. I predict their 2033 CO2 emissions will be at least 30% below their 2023 emissions. Hopefully much less. I also predict they'll do it without catastrophic increases in energy cost. Let's say their change in energy cost will be no more than 20% higher than the global average.

Post more details of your predictions if you want. Either way, post back here in ten years and we'll see who did better.

Zooming doesn't work. If I open a page and the text is too small, I need to be able to enlarge it, even if some idiot web developer has set the flag to forbid changing the scale. When I do it, the text needs to reflow. Panning back and forth to read each line isn't usable.

That's a minimum feature a browser must have to be usable. Firefox on Android doesn't do it.

This is pretty much what I've suspected for a long time. Some calculations just require exponential scaling. You can push the exponentials down, but they keep popping up in new places. Proponents of quantum computing claim it isn't subject to them, but it's never been rigorously proven for anything that resembles a real physical computer. I suspected the exponential scaling would eventually reappear in a new place: either the energy needed, or the precision to which you needed to measure something, or something like that.

We'll see how this result holds up once more people look at it. If they're right, it means the whole field is based on a wrong assumption. Quantum computers would be bound by the same scaling as classical ones.

Just for the fun of it, I looked up some of the earliest stories about fusion on Slashdot. Take this one from 2002: U.S. to Rejoin the ITER Fusion Project. It reports, "The USA left the ITER consortinum in 1999 when it bulked at the 10 Billion dollar price tag." Here we are 24 years later: ITER still hasn't been completed. The official estimate of the total construction cost is $22 billion, but that estimate is considered totally unrealistic. In 2018 the US DOE estimated the actual construction cost at $65 billion.

Then there's this one from 2002: British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close. It mentions "a leading scientist saying that Fusion power is 'within reach' in the next decade, with commercial plants to follow within another 10 or so years." I think that's still about the time frame people are predicting?

Here's the very earliest one I found, from April 1999. It talks about "the pittance of money that is being put into the research, versus the known benefits of making advances in this."

It's nice that some things never change.

Shell shock was something much more specific. It referred to the condition soldiers developed after experiencing intense bombardment. We now recognize it as a special case of PTSD, which is a much broader category. PTSD can happen to anyone who's been through a traumatic experience: victims of violent crimes, patients who have recovered from severe illnesses, people in abusive relationships, etc. Most of them have nothing to do with being shelled.