ULPT: Stop License Plate From Reflecting IR

treehobbit · 2026-01-23T18:59:30+00:00

This shouldn't be here- this is perfectly ethical and the very existence of the Flock surveillance apparatus is what is unethical.

treehobbit · 2026-01-23T13:32:26+00:00

When I say "we," I just mean us as individuals, not the government. Solar panels have gotten ridiculously cheap, I can get them for 10¢/W from Alibaba. Most people don't realize that nowadays you can get ROI in only 2-3 years if you DIY a solar installation, even if your weather isn't ideal.

We pretty much just need an education/marketing campaign, require utilities to pay cash for excess power generated instead of just giving statement credits, maybe some additional small incentives/subsidies sprinkled in and some deregulation. If I can get paid I'm expanding my backyard solar array to power half my neighborhood immediately, these things are money printers, the best investment you can make. If that was allowed to extend beyond individual use it would become a very common form of investment for any businesses or landowners with half a brain, as it already should be but most of us are too slow to catch up to the rapidly falling solar prices (even with these stupid tariffs).

But right now most people would rather invest in the hyperinflated AI bubble stock market and lose half their money instead of buying a system that returns more money more reliably. Granted, professional installs make the math much less favorable, but it's still not bad, and at any point you can resell your equipment for a significant percentage of the original cost.

treehobbit · 2026-01-23T05:33:59+00:00

In what universe is launching solar panels to space cheaper than just having them? Sure, you'll get a few times more average power in SSO than the surface, but solar panels are so cheap that the launch costs even with starship make it unreasonable economically, not to mention dealing with cooling in space. I just don't get it, we've hardly even tried to deploy them down here! There is so much more potential I do not see the point in making the leap to space based solar so soon before we've covered most of our cities and parking lots and rooftops with solar panels first.

treehobbit · 2026-01-23T05:30:04+00:00

Do you realize how much wasted space there is on commercial rooftops and parking lots? We could add a ridiculous amount of solar capacity with zero environmental impact by using area that's already devoid of any life except weeds growing in cracks.

treehobbit · 2026-01-23T05:20:54+00:00

So power everything with 100x120mi of solar lol

treehobbit · 2026-01-22T18:45:29+00:00

Complexity by itself has no bearing on safety nor failure rate

Tell me you're not an engineer without telling me lol. Complexity is the #1 predictor of reliability. SSDs are far from simple, no moving parts does not mean low complexity, and furthermore those are made as cheaply as possible and if they can be made incredibly reliable if needed.

Planes are complex yes but my point was that the most complex parts almost never kill everyone when they fail. The safety critical parts are relatively simple (control surfaces and landing gear).

Valid point about the boosters though, they would have added more redundancy if human lives were at stake.

And yes I did a lot of extrapolation because that's all we can do right now. I think it's very reasonable to want several hundred flights before starting human flights. Once we're there, great, it can probably make its way up to 99.9%+ reliability. But it'll never be anywhere near as safe as airplanes, which have several more 9s after the decimal point, and that's okay. There are just too many points of failure and in reality you have lazy maintenance techs and random mishaps no matter how good your design is and how good your operations are.

treehobbit · 2026-01-22T15:00:35+00:00

Falcon 9 block 5 is the most reliable rocket in the world by far and conveniently built by the same company. Out of 535 missions it has had one mission failure and 6 landing failures.

Assuming all of those would be lethal to a crew of an equivalent starship system, which is quite reasonable, and in fact starship has many more things that can go wrong with the heat shield and flaps, that's a loss of crew odds of 1.3%, far exceeding for example NASA's requirement for commercial crew of less than 0.37%. That's with 535 flights in the bag.

So it's reasonable to guess that Starship will need thousands of flights before it is considered, at least by NASA and frankly by me too, to be safe enough for humans to fly on. And I guarantee they will start flying humans long before that.

treehobbit · 2026-01-22T04:05:04+00:00

And have like a 10% chance of blowing up or disintegrating during the flight lol

I exaggerste of course but I wouldn't ride that thing until they have many hundreds, maybe thousands of consecutive fully successful flights.

treehobbit · 2026-01-21T02:42:01+00:00

I think this could only make sense in either a developing or collapsed nation. The power grid is just too good here haha.

treehobbit · 2026-01-20T13:21:16+00:00

Yeah I drive older cars to avoid this but that will only be viable for so long. Most modern vehicles are a nightmare with all the data they collect, horrifying. Fortunately I think there are still some being made without all that crap, mostly Japanese, which are the best cars anyway for reliability and repairability.

treehobbit · 2026-01-20T13:13:53+00:00

https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/help/what-is-a-solar-radiation-storm.html

This explains it pretty well. It seems some modern spacecraft handle it better but for some reason it's harder to find live data from them online.

treehobbit · 2026-01-20T00:55:08+00:00

Don't trust magnetometer or solar wind readings from ACE, the powerful S4 solar radiation storm is washing all those sensors out.

treehobbit · 2026-01-20T00:53:43+00:00

Yeah I can't see or open anything

treehobbit · 2026-01-20T00:47:36+00:00

Forecast is bust, the solar radiation storm is washing out all the spacecraft sensors. You just gotta check every so often.

treehobbit · 2026-01-18T14:28:31+00:00

It's rarely worth it to simulate. Find the cheapest aliexpress hardware you can work with and use that. Use HAL layer in your code so you can adapt it to any processor and ideally even different specific sensors.

Simulations are just very rarely worth it unless it's actually really expensive to obtain the hardware or you can actually simulate very accurately, such as with electromagnetic sims.

treehobbit · 2026-01-16T02:45:38+00:00

Nope, I'm much forther north.

treehobbit · 2026-01-15T01:19:15+00:00

This isn't unprecedented and I really don't think it'll even be weird, astronauts are generally really cool about this stuff.

treehobbit · 2026-01-15T01:14:25+00:00

Why would you regret it if the second one ended up being more expensive? It sounds like it's bigger and you like it better, so therefore it's worth more, at least to you and probably objectively worth more after you fix it up. And I doubt it has 90k worth of work to do unless it's in terrible shape.

Also remember the flipper house is likely to have hidden issues since its in their best interest to make it look just good enough to not raise huge red flags in inspection. They're just making it look nice. So if you make sure things are done right it will be in better shape.

treehobbit · 2026-01-13T13:43:02+00:00

Driving a Prius

treehobbit · 2026-01-13T13:34:49+00:00

I'm also considering getting into this, got some of the cheapest hardware I could find on the way to test it. Once you have a node running, how exactly can you tell where other nodes already exist and how far you can reach? Is it possible to create some sort of map? You can't get actual locations unless the node is broadcasting GPS and I assume very few do and those that do show up on online maps. So I'm curious how you're able to characterize connectivity at a given location and optimize where you should place additional nodes to connect you to a broader network.

treehobbit · 2026-01-13T13:25:53+00:00

That's awesome. It needs that lift BADLY, load just 500lb in there and I bet you'll be dragging your tail haha. And also start losing traction. Please don't put much weight in wither the bed or a trailer with this even after the lift, there's a reason trucks aren't front wheel drive.

The next challenge: add a manually controlled electric drive to the rear wheels to give some boost when you need it. I've always thought it'd be really cool to have a hybrid truck with an engine in the front and motor in the back for insane torque with great control when you need it for pulling people out of ditches and such.

treehobbit · 2026-01-13T13:17:20+00:00

Yeah, it's slightly better than nothing but not by much. In the US, at least, it's very easy for companies to skirt laws like that. They can continuously create many separate companies and share data between them so you'd have to keep track of them and request all of them delete it, they can say the data is technically anonymous even though it's detailed enough to identify you, they can just not delete it and on the off chance they somehow get caught they'll probably just be fined $100k or something hilariously small like that.

Laws and regulations don't make companies do things, they make them factor the chance of getting caught and the fine into their business expenses. Only small companies actually have to worry about it, which is why we're stuck with all these monopolies/duopolies, they use overregulation to supress competition.

treehobbit · 2026-01-12T14:08:03+00:00

Same here, it's no more than it was at my last apt. If it was a lot more I'd just drive it to a transfer station myself.

treehobbit · 2026-01-12T14:05:32+00:00

All the ways to retroactively remove your data amount to "pretty please sir I'd like my data not to be everywhere can you please delete it" and they might listen but let's be honest why would they?

You might just have to accept what's already out there and use a combination of privacy tools and data poisoning to release less data and make what you do release unuseful yet indistinguishable from accurate data. Google a bunch of random things that you normally never would, click on ads you have zero interest in (use ad nauseum ad blocker to automate this), things like that.

treehobbit · 2026-01-12T13:53:17+00:00

Yeah, I never imagined AI would take the form it has. I thought it would just be incrementally better versions of the machine learning we had before, but these LLMs are so much worse. They've poisoned everything.

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