I'm not sure why you're asking this or what you're insinuating. The site is called Hacker News, it should be open to anarcho- and eco- hackers too. Not all of believe in infinite growth.
Do you want to expand on why you're on this site?
I've been here for more than 15 years and I'm not the person I was when I signed up or when I went through life in a startup.
If you have do a lot of driving, $99/mo. seems like a decent price to have the car drive itself, especially if it got to the Waymo point where absolutely no driver attention was needed and you could watch Netflix the whole time. The issue with FSD isn't the price, it's that no matter what Elon and his fanboys say, it doesn't bloody work and Waymo is blowing them out of the water in capability.
As a paid YouTube subscriber, I’ve always wondered if that skip was only for us. It would be kind of bullshit if it was also for ad-based free viewers too as it would imply that google is free to show you ads they make hard to skip but they make it easy to skip embedded promotions and stuff.
You’re not getting $4 lunch bowls in Seattle when minimum wage is more than $20/hr. You aren’t getting affordable anything when labor is so expensive. (You also aren’t getting your 16 year old their first job either when labor costs more than your kid is worth but that is another topic entirely)
We are going to have to rethink power for smart dust. Like consider that no creature out there is powered by batteries. From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.
Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to stay active.
As for communication, we can’t go shoving antennas in them as then they’d be larger than dust. And you can’t use the optical part of the spectrum because of interference with basically everything. You can’t use wavelengths smaller either as you get into UV and high radiation. There is the terahertz radio spectrum [0] between 3mm and 30um that is pretty open and not utilized at all because we haven’t figured out how to make good transmitters. Plus the spectrum isn’t very useful as it isn’t very penetrating and water vapor absorbs it… and it requires lots of power.
Smart dust might have to be more of a distributed computer or something. Or a micro machine that uses chemistry and mechanical magic to do its operations.
> From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.
Batteries are chemistry. ATP is a chemical battery.
The difference between living things and our machines is primarily in manufacturing methods: we do things in bulk, because we reach from the top with crude, meter-scale tools; nature glues things up from lots of tiny biomolecular nanomachines, and each of those tiny machines has to carry its own power source!
Still, it's highly likely that any form of "smart dust" will resemble living cells as much as, or even more so, it will resemble miniature devices we build today, simply because that's the kind of chemistry that's efficient at smaller scales.
I love the term “high power” even though we are talking maybe a watt or two when that bad boy’s element is doing its thing!
I mean relatively it absolutely is high power. The quiescent current on that thing has to be microamps…
It’s just funny because to me “high power” is hundreds or thousands of watts. Like an incandescent light bulb or a hair dryer. Or at least it was until I started tinkering with battery powered microcontrollers and doing math to realize exactly how long an 18650 might power a small strip of individually addressable LED’s…
> I love the term “high power” even though we are talking maybe a watt or two when that bad boy’s element is doing its thing!
Your estimate is 1-2 orders of magnitude too low. Small vapes pull a couple amps, as I understand it. Larger vapes can pull over 50-100W. The modded ones into the 200W range. These things can use more power than most CPUs for the brief moment they're on.
The power draw is so high that vape fans compare and review batteries to show which ones can sustain the most power output.
It's an unexpected boon for those of us who use batteries for other things: The vape craze has made more high current batteries available with a lot of user contributed test data.
Vape wattages are more like 15 watts, which is an awful lot for a battery smaller than the tip of your pinkie! I believe the power density (not energy density) of those batteries is market leading.
“ When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?”
I’m no Harley owner but you and I both know the answer to that.
Honestly I'm not sure. Motorcycle interest might select against relevant personality traits/disorders. Maybe they bond over commiseration over Harley's decline (a narrative I've heard of)
Bingo. It’s pretty annoying. My tribe can do no wrong (in fact my tribe will freely point out its faults because again, it can do no wrong). Anything from the other tribe isn’t just wrong, it’s evil and all that is wrong with everything. Those guys are Neanderthals, not even worthy of telling the time to. My tribe is incredibly smart and gifted. We can do no wrong!
Unfortunately the only way to opt out is to basically stop participating at all. No more consumption of tribal news media and since most news media is incredibly tribal (even saying it’s not tribal is in fact tribal)… it basically means no more news media consumption. Which makes you uninformed instead of merely misinformed.
I dunno the solution to this. It’s a complex web of everybody playing to their incentives including the algorithms that aggregate things for consumption.
Again though, I’ll firmly emphasize that it is the other tribe that is wrong. My tribe isn’t biased or hateful or outrage driven. We say we aren’t so clearly it’s not possible.
One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!
“I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach.”
This is my trick. I simply take the monthly price and multiply am by ten to quickly get a crude imperfect annual cost (adding two more months if I wanted to be exact)
Then I’ll look and go gee is this thing actually worth $150 or whatever the value is and ask “or more” assuming I wouldn’t cancel?
The answer is usually no. I’m slowly teaching this trick to my elementary school daughter.
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