rook

He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.

Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…

It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.

instead of making little money (by making fuel) why not make more money? (by setting there energy intensive manufacture) this seems to be current meta, with places like iceland and norway making aluminum and nitrogen fertilizers respectively. this can continue in other places and maybe extended to some other industries.

Because now you have to establish a complex supply chain and potentially large worker base in a place that’s potentially quite inconvenient for both, instead of a much simpler supply chain and smaller workforce.

this requires massive renewables buildout, which means electricity is cheap for regular people

Well, not necessarily. Because as I said, there are places which are very sunny and/or windy which are also a long way away from the people and industries which would like to consume the power that could be produced there.

Long distance power transmission is an very expensive infrastructure to build, and unless you’re building even more expensive modern HVCD systems you can get significant transmissions losses to the point where your distant renewables aren’t really much good. If you can convert the power to something transportable, either on-site or nearby, then you can avoid the transmission losses and giant infrastructure projects.

Much as I do not like the oil industry, there is a significant amount of equipment and expertise out there for storing, transporting and converting flavours of hydrocarbons into other flavours. Some use could be made of it.

then you have to compete with biofuels

I’m not so sure about that. They’re a whole ecological catastrophe in and of themselves, and another cash crop that rich nations can extract from the poorer ones, ultimately to everyone’s detriment. They’re also going to be feeling the squeeze from climate change which is going to make them harder to grow economically as time goes on.

There might be a breakthrough ethanol-brewing algae which might suddenly change everything, but I don’t anyone has the bioengineering chops for that yet.

hydrogen costs

I strongly feel that hydrogen is even more of a dead-end technology than these e-fuels. It is a right pain to store and transport and has rubbish energy density. There’s no future in the hydrogen economy. I’d bet we’re more likely to jump to artificial photosynthesis and fancy fuel cells than we are to see any substantial hydrogen infrastructure.

So, the idea isn’t entirely as stupid as it initially sounds. There are two things that you gain from this approach:

• You can more easily separate your energy generation and consumption. Power lines are lossy, and there are a lot of very sunny and very windy places that are a long way away from where people actually want to live. Massive HVDC infrastructure buildout isn’t cheap or easy.
• Energy density of chemical fuels is higher than batteries. Being able to travel long distances without convenient nearby power sources is useful… long distance high speed rail isn’t always convenient to electrify, but also long haul flights and rocketry are Quite Difficult to run on batteries.

FWIW, I suspect the cost will end up being even higher, because you’ll start losing the economies of scale that modern vehicle infrastructure has, because normal people will just use EVs.

It can only ever be an intermediate technology anyway. Artificial photosynthesis and more sophisticated fuel cells seem like much more plausible longer-term futures.

I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

I feel this is an artefact of the near complete collapse of mainstream journalism, combined with modern tech business practises that are about securing investment and cashing out, and every other concern is secondary or even entirely absent. It’s all just selling vibes.

People only ever report the hype, the investors see everyone else following the hype and panic that they might be left out and bury you in cash. When it all turns sour and people ask pointed questions about the exact nature of the magic beans you were promising to grow, you can just point at the blog post that no-one read (or at least, only poor people read, and they’re barely people if you think about it) and point out that you never hid anything.

Moltbook still going great. Even the enthusiasts are feeling that the shine may have worn off.

eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

So just to clarify: You created a thing that you now realize you can't control, and you can't do anything to secure it, and people that use ClawdBot... err sorry.. @openclaw, are own their own to deal with the consequences?! Did I get that right?

Turns out that combining unsecurable vibe-coded web services with unsecurable chatbots and combining them into an unmoderated public platform can be bad. Also, shrugging off problem reports with “i unno” is a bit of a bad look.

“despite”

Looks like they zapped it. Possibly unhappy that it was being spread.

Anyway, the gist of it is:

• Allen Hsu is a founder of notbyai and the website includes a photo of him
• modomodo employs someone called “Allen Hsu” who has a photograph that looks remarkably like the notbyai guy
• the modomodo about page says

  Artificial intelligence (AI) is cool and we embrace it. But when it comes to solving complex business problems, we don’t just press a few keys to generate answers with ChatGPT.

The don’t just do that, so it’s ok guys!

The suspicion that notbyai.fyi was in fact a pro-ai techbro highlighting scrapable data has prompted comment from the founder: https://mastodon.social/@notbyai/116004178899556722

Hi, Allen here! I never thought I’d need to say this but, I am not an AI bro. I don't work for an AI design agency. We're not in the AI industry, nor do we sell your data.

…which seems like a load of cobblers. Imbl brings the receipts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/116014455337112737

I’ll assume the argument will devolve into weasel words over what “ai bro” and “ai design agency” will mean, and I suspect the conclusion will be that actually he’s working for and with ai bros, with an interest in selling ai bro-related services to further the goals of ai bros in general, but somehow that wont’t be precisely the same thing.

Remember there’s the bit of spacex that runs a successful commercial rocketry program, but also the bit of spacex that keeps blowing up stupid giant rockets.

All of musk’s companies have to support one of his idiotic pet projects… tesla got the cybertruck, x got grok, spacex got starship. None of them can be stopped, because they’re his and he’s personally invested in them. His flunkeys can only make questionable financial decisions around those projects, because he will fire them if they don’t.

Tesla is struggling and is trying to sidestep into humanoid robotics (a different kind of stupid idea), x was always a money sink, and now elon is concerned that his ai waifu might die without an injection of sweet government cash. It isn’t clear he’s capable of giving a shit about the consequences of any of this.

We use starlink at work for communicating with some remote customer sites, and it’s been entirely adequate. As a super-subjective latency benchmark, i didn’t notice any particular difference in interactive ssh sessions to the starlink sites, and to the 4g lte sites in the same country. It’s been easier to set up and more reliable that some of the 4g links.

I don’t like the fact that we’e paying elon money, but in the absence of a non-evil, non-ecologically disastrous, reasonably priced alternative, I don’t really have anything to offer management as a replacement. Everything else is either much worse, or more expensive and still worse, or vastly more expensive.