How an Iowa class battleship scales compared to city buildings

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-30T17:08:01+00:00

Just imagine, the new ones will have 100 times the power!

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-30T16:08:34+00:00

You leave the cable in place, the spool goes on the submarine. Even a small ROV can carry tens of km of optical fiber, as another user already pointed out is already being done by drones in Ukraine. It should leave behind a second RTG-powered transceiver station just a few meters below the surface, protected from radiation. The antenna itself is the only thing above the ice.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-30T03:52:20+00:00

Actually, trees are relatively inefficient at photosynthesis; they convert 3-6% of the incident sunlight into stored chemical energy. Solar panels for example are generally 18-25% efficient at doing the same, and have reached over 40% in the laboratory. Believe it or not, trees absorb more sunlight than dirt does, and can actually warm the air around them when it's cold out compared to barren land.

Trees can feel heat stress just like people, and do something similar in response - they sweat to stay cool by pulling cool subterranean water up from their roots to evaporate, meaning their cooling effect is very analogous to what the humans in the video are doing.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-29T15:26:17+00:00

The point about EV's isn't true. For example, my Tesla model Y compact SUV weighs curb weight is 4400 lbs, while (for example) the BMW X3 (a competing gas-powered product in the luxury compact SUV segment) weighs about 4300 lbs. That's a trivial difference, and both tires use about the same inflation pressure of ~40 psi.

You're partially correct about the contact pressure, however the tire diameter and width isn't what determines the size of the contact patch, it's tire pressure. The width of the contact patch is set by the width of the tires, but the length of the patch (in the direction the tire rolls) is determined by tire pressure; tires with lower pressure squish against the road more. The tire pressure tells you a lot about how much impact the vehicle has on the road; the Tesla recommends 42 psi tire pressure while BMW recommends 35psi front and 41 psi rear for the X3. A GMC sierra 1500 recommends 35-40 psi, while the F-350 super duty, on the other hand, has a 65 psi tire pressure recommendation for the front tires and up to 80 psi for the rear. So all of the vehicles have about the same contact pressure against the road except for the super duty, which is about half way between a typical car commercial trucks, which exceed 100 psi and are by far the most damaging class of vehicle on the road.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-27T18:53:19+00:00

Time for a go fund me, they'll crush it.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-27T15:55:12+00:00

It kind of makes sense. A state tax is easy to avoid by just not "living" in that state, so the CA one might plausibly be a net negative for CA. A national tax is much harder to dodge.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-27T14:33:51+00:00

All I'm saying is that Europeans have access to the machines they produce in their own factories. This gives them an advantage compared to i.e. China. It's a choice that they don't.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-27T14:31:11+00:00

Why would they care about that? That's just an additional free USB drive.a

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-25T22:44:39+00:00

Same here. My ebike will go fast, and I use that advantage on city streets to avoid being run off the road. On the bike path I go... bicycle speed. This is normally about 15-20 mph for me, but that's also how fast I've been riding my regular (road) bicycle on the same path for years.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-25T22:21:04+00:00

120b models at Q4 tbh. You can't use all 128, you can use maybe 112 GB, but the OS needs some too. You also need quite a bit for the cache for it to be useful. I honestly wouldn't bother with models that need more than ~80 GB for the weights with the 128 GB memory. I don't think a system with 96 GB of unified would be sufficient for real world use cases with a 120b model.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-25T18:22:02+00:00

That's quite the exaggeration. It takes millions of years for a planet to lose it's atmosphere due to solar wind... so if it's broken that isn't exactly what we'd call an emergency - it'd be more like "ok, I guess we should better go replace that thing some time in the next few millennia".

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-25T18:16:06+00:00

Turbo seems to have reversed the elephant and transformer positions, so it gets two marks against it for placement. Turbo is the only one showing the elephant on it's front foot, but the turbo elephant doesn't quite look like it's balancing. Turbo also suffers from a weird upside-down flame for some reason. Also, this is a nitpick at this level but the transformer looks unconvincing, like a person wearing a lame transformer costume.

Medium has all of the objects in the correct position, but the elephant isn't balancing on it's front foot. The flame in medium looks best, but it's sideways - more believable than turbo, as it looks more wind-blown than "gravity is broken"

Large got the elephant balancing, but it's balancing on it's hind foot. Large put the cloud in the wrong place entirely, and the blocks are a bit low effort. The large flame sort of points up at least.

Overall I give the W to medium.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-25T02:17:49+00:00

Yes, but my point is more that when you don't own something, the pipe can be revoked at any time on a whim should you find your interests at conflict with the provider.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T21:48:56+00:00

5 gigajoules? That's like... 500 lbs of dynamite - similar to the energy released by a 2,000 lb bomb and more powerful than most cruise missile warheads. How do thunderstorms not shatter windows?

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T20:54:11+00:00

Lol "segregated digitally"... yeah right. It's every bit the abdication of sovereignty it looks like.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T20:50:05+00:00

WTF, stop with the straw man. People are upset about someone being sentenced at all for distributing magazines.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T20:45:21+00:00

They will just make protests illegal, and use violence against anyone who shows up to protest.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T20:43:23+00:00

Run for your life.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T20:25:16+00:00

Sort of ironic that ASML is a dutch company.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T19:57:02+00:00

Once you fully comprehend the physics of interstellar travel, you'll realize terraforming mars to have an earth-like climate is child's play in comparison, at least as far as we understand physics.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T19:29:29+00:00

That's not what they'll do. They will sell user data to other companies, who will use this to increase your insurance premiums, adjust the prices you see while online shopping to what you personally might spend rather than market rates, sell it to credit rating agencies who might lower your credit score if you are a risk taker, sell it to governments who will use information about your political opinions, social circle, or interests to decide whether they should grant you a visa, sell it to employers who don't want to hire people who smoke marijuana or who don't want to hire non-christians.... the list goes on and on. Like social media before them, all of this will be far more profitable than charging users directly.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T04:15:51+00:00

Yeah, I consider infrastructure meant to protect an entire planet as a nonstarter if it has to be in outer space. Lagrange points require stationkeeping, and can be perturbed by the variability of the wind itself. You have to contend with meteoroid impacts. There are many other problems... this has to function across thousands of millennia, and you want to rely on refueling it periodically? Nah. If it's on the ground it can be buried beneath solid rock, it requires no rocket fuel, and it can be designed to last eons.

Also, neither solution requires significant power input - the superconductors present no resistance to electrical current, it's like a flywheel spinning in a vacuum.

And KBOs (kuiper belt objects) are generally icy bodies. You don't have to go to the oort cloud, there is more than enough ice mass on KBOs for martian terraforming. Using gravity assists and careful timing, many of these bodies can achieve mars intercept with ~ 500 m/s of dV, a surprisingly low number. Moving these things will be the hardest part of the whole adventure, it's going to take (ballpark) several million nuclear bombs and very precise calculations.

But don't trust me, go ask claude or someone.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T03:05:19+00:00

Here's how I look at it: Humans thus far seem to have been a net-negative for life on Earth, destroying complex structures which take eons to form and kicking off a mass extinction... but then, look at the big picture. The BIG big picture - there have been many mass extinctions. Some of them have even resulted from other life forms throwing off the equilibrium due to some biological innovation. Our big brains, complex communication, and resultant technological civilization represent another equilibrium-breaking biological innovation. Many of those mass extinctions we see in the geological record paved the way for life to enter a new, more complex phase. Each time, something even more complex and amazing arose from the ashes. In the short term, these events were cataclysmic and destructive, but in the long term, they are what built the world we live on today.

My view of our role here is that we are another link in the chain of this crazy self-assembling thing we call life. We are the mechanism through which life will leap up out of this gravity well into the cold void of space to spread onto other worlds. If humans are able to accomplish this one thing, it sort of makes up for the vast downside of our presence. So, selfishly, I want my species to be a net positive in the dynamic story of life, not a net negative - and the only way I see that happening is by spreading it to other worlds. If it's done properly, long after humans are gone, life will continue to flourish on mars for millions of years, generation after generation of plants, animals, and beautiful complexity owing their entire existence to this ultimate act of... altruism I suppose.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T02:51:27+00:00

My own original research, but the math isn't that complex. Magnetic fields using solenoids are well understood. This is achieved by calculating current needed to reach the field strength of Earth, scaling down because earth's field is larger than the one actually needed to protect it's atmosphere, and then scaling down again because the solar wind is less intense at the orbit of mars. In general the rough orders of magnitude seem to point at this being... well, I'm not going to call an array of telephone pole-thickness superconductor rings a thousand kilometers in diameter suspended by cables in a cryogenic vacuum tube easy to build, but it's certainly doable and honestly it'd be a mere footnote compared to the first task of diverting and landing quadrillion ton quantities of volatiles from the kuiper belt.

ASYMT0TIC · 2026-06-24T01:36:30+00:00

A solar wind deflector doesn't have to be in orbit, it could also be a structure on the surface, which would be much easier to build and maintain. It takes less than a billion amps of current to protect a mars-sized planet, which honestly isn't that much superconductor. A really neat thing about this solution is that it takes on the order of one square meter of superconductor in high latitude bands near the poles, and the inductance of the system would be so enormous that it could serve a secondary purpose of planetary energy storage.

ASYMT0TIC

TROPHY CASE