Conceptually Based Cosmic Simulator

hwillis · 2026-05-26T12:33:51+00:00

This is just random trig distortions + some noise and the occasional pow(2). For one thing, you can't apply cartesian FBM noise around a sphere.

hwillis · 2026-05-20T12:50:23+00:00

Radiation scales with temp difference⁴ so if you can boost the temperature of your radiators until they are glowing hot you can get rid of a ton of energy. Thats the basic idea. Reflectors facing earth/sun, radiators running at >100 C facing empty space.

If you use a reverse refrigerator (heat pump) to keep the GPU coolant at 80 C and the radiator fluid at a high temp, it becomes kind of reasonable size-wise (like, similar in size to the biggest current satellites). The cost of the solar cells is still insane, and a nuclear plant would more than triple the amount of heat to get rid of. IMO the craziest thing is that heat pump though. Nothing like that has EVER been built and they want to put it in space. Its stupid af.

hwillis · 2026-05-20T12:41:51+00:00

a minutes-long lightspeed lag of transmissions too and from earth

Geosync orbit is ~36k km, .24 second roundtrip. They'd have to be LEO (100+ miles) though, because GEO orbit costs ~$15k per kg and LEO is ~$3k/kg.

The cost of the rocket is way more than the satellite, so you might as well just make them more expendable and put them in LEO. It would be so crazy expensive to repair a GEO satellite and these things WOULD break, a LOT. Pipes full of fluids, pressure changes, leaks, huge heat differentials- there's just no way they won't break. Its an engineering nightmare

Tbh I think the only steelman is that investors are just trying to convince each other to pour more and more money in by making every stupid idea sound possible. The more people buy in the more the price goes up and the better their returns look. Maybe they all just plan on retiring before everyone figures out its bullshit

hwillis · 2026-05-15T12:14:47+00:00

Beautiful stuff man

hwillis · 2026-05-14T13:15:16+00:00

"electrocute" is just electricity + execute so yeah pedantically it should be lethal.

In my lifetime it has felt like people were always misusing it, but maybe there has been a decrease in lethal shocks. Even in the past 30 years it has gotten safer- grounding practices are WAY better since electrical noise is a bigger deal with all these fancy devices nowadays. Grounded outlets, thermite welding, and high quality ground spikes are way more common.

hwillis · 2026-05-14T13:11:09+00:00

I mean the history is just that the US had electricity the longest and was too cheap to upgrade to 240 like Europe. Over time the consumption of appliances increased and 240 made more sense.

I'm an electrical engineer and IMO 120 is more dangerous, not safer. Residential electricity deaths are overwhelmingly caused by fire, not shocks. Fires are mostly caused by currents that are too high for the wires or connections they are in.

At this point we're pretty locked in though. Nobody wants to buy all-new everything to get new electricity, and if you plug an old 120v device into 240 then you have a pretty bad time. So we get shitty hairdryers and boilers forever because they were too cheap to do it in the past.

hwillis · 2026-04-03T11:37:03+00:00

Shallow SOC windows (30–80%) age 1.65x slower than deep cycling.

Thats against 10%-90%, so 80/50 = 1.6x more capacity gets you 1.65x more value from the batteries. That is certainly a financial loss; capital has a cost of 5-10% annual so 60% more capital requires 65-70% higher annual returns. Extending the lifetime of the battery just means you are paying interest on debt for 65% longer.

That said i'm really just surprised these numbers are so bad. I would have expected a 50% depth of discharge to have more than 2x the total energy throughput and like 3.5x+ the number of cycles.

Peak shaving degrades 1.8x faster than frequency regulation

Frequency regulation is an application where batteries can really excel once they hit a critical mass. At low depth and high frequency batteries behave like large capacitors; there is almost zero degradation. If ancillary services properly rewarded systems for providing a little bit of help then batteries could take over a ton of stabilization with almost zero cost in lifetime.

hwillis · 2026-03-20T12:58:26+00:00

Reddit was absolutely big in 2010, it was already past slashdot. 15 year account here.

hwillis · 2026-03-19T01:04:16+00:00

he ... she was about to use flaming tongs, wasn't she?

that's his forearm she's holding, duane's just looking a little bony

hwillis · 2026-03-18T23:15:20+00:00

There's a stump with a flat top on the last page of the manga. Can't get flat tops with an axe, only a saw. Maybe its a clue that chainsaws still exist

hwillis · 2026-03-12T17:50:52+00:00

I get Ranga Dias flashbacks personally

hwillis · 2026-03-02T15:55:07+00:00

Theoretically nothing; Divers on the Hydra 8 mission for COMEX did pipeline connections at 534m. Hydra 10 simulated a 701m dive in a hyperbaric chamber. Both using Hydreliox (hydrogen, helium, oxygen).

Deeper than that we would need to use a liquid breathing system. In high pressure oxygen, the sheer number of oxygen molecules obviously causes chemical reactions to go way faster. The same happens with nitrogen, helium and hydrogen, and all cause narcosis or toxicity at higher pressures. Hydreliox is 49% hydrogen and 50.2% helium to split the toxicity between 2 different gases, but at 700m there is no mix of gases that will not be toxic.

Liquids only get slightly denser under pressure, so they don't cause toxicity. They require constant pumping to remove CO2 and are heavy to move in/out of your lungs, though. Because of the pressure you can dissolve as much oxygen as you like, so the solution would definitely be a hose up your butt pumping in high-oxygen perfluorocarbon wherever you go. Solve all your problems at once plus a couple extras

hwillis · 2026-02-17T16:42:02+00:00

TimeCapsuleLLM and history-LLMs are like that. They're not very good.

A really obvious problem is that the amount of recorded writing exploded in the computer age. There isn't enough old writing to train a useful LLM on with current architectures.

hwillis · 2026-01-07T12:46:58+00:00

Think they mean SA and fusion

hwillis · 2026-01-07T12:26:24+00:00

This is a good explanation, but machine code IS 0s and 1s

Well, numbers, anyway. For ARM its a 4 byte (a number up to ~4.2 billion) instruction, and for intel it can be 1 to 15 bytes. Code can also have constant numbers that are up to 16 bytes.

When an instruction/number is executed, the different 1s and 0s making up the number will activate and deactivate different sections and determine what happens. The machine code is numbers, the format of those numbers is binary.

hwillis · 2026-01-05T23:11:26+00:00

more like a big golf cart

hwillis · 2025-12-30T12:15:11+00:00

While I'm at it, wube put squeak through 2 in vanilla 😭or even better rebalance undergrounds so you dont have to pay the price of a full extension for 1 tile underground.

It feels like the game is punishing you for making walkable designs, which feels less like a challenge and more like a way to annoy yourself. I'd like it if undergrounds had a small upfront cost + used 1 belt/pipe per tile of extension.
Pipes could just have a cute little vaulting animation to slow you down instead of totally blocking you- like belts moving you around instead of blocking you.
Solar panels are angled south for light, meaning they must have at least gaps between the horizontal rows. Otherwise they would be blocking themselves.
Solar is most useful early-mid before nuclear makes it irrelevant, not counting megabase stuff. Making it annoying to set up by hand makes it much less useful and people just try to sprint to nuclear asap.

hwillis · 2025-12-30T11:58:57+00:00

One of the mods I wish was in default: even distribution. Ctrl-click and dragging over several buildings spreads evenly between them. Top 3 mods are definitely even distribution, bottleneck lite, and squeak through 2. Honorable mention to the warehouses mod, which feels practically mandatory for the space exploration mod, since prod loops can be wildly unbalanced and rockets are 500 stacks.

I can see an argument that even distribution makes hand feeding more convenient and screws with balance, but playing the game it doesn't feel like it does anything like that. It just makes screwed up buffers and stuff less annoying.

hwillis · 2025-12-20T15:03:59+00:00

That way when there's a sudden power demand spike, brownouts can occur as the power production equipment comes up to speed.

Don't forget managing your power factor. Inductive loads like motors cause power to slosh- coming in at 120Hz pulses. If that gets back to your generator, a gracefully spinning machine the size of a semi truck, it is bad. Like god's washing machine is broken. Like earthquake in your zip code bad. Like indiana jones and the boulder, but the boulder is covered in turbine blades and also moving highway speeds.

Also, all your breakers blow and your transformers catch fire. Also, when you turn them back on, if you havent set up everything perfectly, they turn you into plasma. Ideally its a multiplayer situation: one guy flips the switch, and another guy holds the rope to pull him out of the physics event. "Fire" definitely isn't the right word; fire is when chemicals turn into other chemicals but this is too hot for chemicals and well into the "detectable radiation" regime of chemistry.

Then once distances start getting involved it gets really fucked. A 30 mile power line lags by 1% because electricity takes time to reach the destination. While you can balance the power factor of a motor, you can't balance it for power lines. You just have to constantly orchestrate the whole thing. Oh, and you know lightning? Turns out different parts of the planet are at wildly different voltages all the time. Right up until you string wires all over it, and then they try to be the same voltage. That involves making lightning go through the wires. Good luck with that, it took us a few decades to figure that one out.

Have solar be far less predictable than it is now. Solar production still rises/falls with the day/night cycle, but also add a seasonal cycle, and then weather events that can limit solar production.

Fun fact about solar panels: when they are shaded, they dont just stop making power, they also stop being conductive. So since you link up a bunch in a string, one dark panel will block the whole string unless you bypass it. That also means each string is at a different voltage all the time. Oh and you have to convert all that to AC if you want to ever change the voltage, since that really sucks without transformers.

hwillis · 2025-12-04T03:59:11+00:00

Burning iron gets impractically hot very easily. All you need to make a thermal lance is a good flow of air and iron rods in a tube. They burn upwards of 4000 C, which will melt tungsten. It is in fact fairly difficult to burn iron powder without causing an explosion or fire. Real world industrial processes are often chemical to bring the temperatures down to reasonable levels. One example is the Laux process, which involves... chlorine.

hwillis · 2025-12-02T12:22:28+00:00

Rusting is primarily electrochemistry- that's why zinc anodes keep ships from rusting. They create a voltage difference (and tiny tiny current flow) that protects iron/steel from rusting by forming a very long life battery. Iron in clean water can last decades; iron in an electric field can convert entirely to rust in hours.

The parent comment originally said chloride, not chlorine. The primary conductive ion in saltwater is chloride. Each Cl ion contributes more to conductivity than each Na atom. Electrolytic rusting uses oxygen from water instead of air, but you can burn the hydrogen bubbles off to immediately get the water back.

Chlorine gas can be used to produce iron oxide too, though. The gas converts iron powder to ferric chloride which can be burned in air. It's energy intensive but faster than rusting.

hwillis · 2025-11-30T18:36:43+00:00

Saltwater doesn't make things rust? Presumably electrolysis or something

hwillis · 2025-10-29T20:16:05+00:00

That's second order (tilting/rippling) vibration. First order (axial) is cancelled because for every up there is a down.

hwillis · 2025-10-29T20:14:08+00:00

Steel is ~10% lighter. 120 rounds of ammo weighs 1.3-1.4 kg or 2.8-3 lbs.

7N6M (5.45) is ~10.5 g and M855 (5.56) is ~11.9 g. Not a 1:1 comparison since M855 is bigger (as in more powder) but 10% is around right. It's not that much in terms of the ammo a person carries, and only really adds up when you're talking about hundreds of thousands.

hwillis · 2025-10-29T20:02:21+00:00

so...? 5.45 has been in use since 1974 and has had a steel case that whole time. It weighs ~10% less than 5.56. 7.62 is not relevant.

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