Cocodapuf
@Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
- Comment on Nokia to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon 7 hours ago:
Nah, it wouldn’t do much damage. The tether’s whole job is to be strong, but light. And being a long, thin fiber, it’ll have a pretty low mass to surface area ratio (high drag in atmo). If it did come down, it would likely mostly burn up, or mostly be slowed down by the atmosphere.
Additionally, the length of tether with the most tension on it will be the section nearest to the ground. If the tether snaps near the ground, the whole thing gets hauled up to orbit for good.
To be clear, I’m actually not in favor of space elevators in general, I think there are many much more practical ways to get to orbit. I’m just saying that a broken tether should not be the end of the world.
If you really want to build something like a space elevator though, you should check out the tethered ring concept: youtu.be/8B2iqiKehyM?si=9IM8FU-uI7CIoPtX
- Comment on Nokia to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon 9 hours ago:
Uh, well truth be told, you could probably use steel cable or carbon fiber for a lunar space elevator cable, but you would need some really insane quantities… Like I said, I wouldn’t recommend it, just go the mass driver route instead.
But why are you even bringing up Musk? Nobody is suggesting involving him…
- Comment on Why it's so hard to build a jet engine - by Brian Potter 1 day ago:
Heh, yeah they should have kept trying to get the Delta clipper to work. But they notably ended development of the program…
Nobody thought it was impossible
Everyone thought it was infeasible, especially after the Delta clipper proved unproductive. After that, nobody even tried because it would just be an endless money pit there certainly wants any active development in that area I know of when SpaceX started.
Elmo fanboy detected.
I explicitly said the opposite. I’ll admit to being extremely impressed with what SpaceX has accomplished, but don’t confuse that with musk worship, the man needs to just stop doing… anything.
- Comment on Why it's so hard to build a jet engine - by Brian Potter 1 day ago:
No… That doesn’t add up. The falcon 9 didn’t get as many subsidies as you might think (and it only got that during development, it gets no subsidies now). And Arianne Space has some extremely expensive rockets. SpaceX is launching for 1/10 the price of their competitors (literally), and then they’re reusing the first stages…
Anyone who thinks SpaceX isn’t in a unique position right now isn’t being honest to themselves. They’re doing what was previously thought to be impossible, about twice a week.
I mean don’t get me wrong, Musk is a monster, an irredeemable human being. But spaceX is not just Elon Musk. And what they’re doing is something nobody has been able to do before and they’re doing it very well. If they can succeed at making a fully reusable rocket with their starship, they’ll have accomplished something truly transformative. The first fully reusable launch vehicle will usher in a new era for human civilization, I’m not exaggerating to say it’s one of the most important things happening on the planet right now.
- Comment on Why it's so hard to build a jet engine - by Brian Potter 1 day ago:
I mean… That’s basically how you accomplish this kind of thing. You throw educated people and resources at the problem for as long as it takes. Often you can do it faster with more people working on the problem. How is that not how it really works?
I mean you can certainly save time by looking over someone else’s shoulder, espionage and defecting engineers have of course led to local advances, but the process is generally the same. Development takes time and effort, and that equals money.
- Comment on Nokia to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon 1 day ago:
The moon rotates too slowly (about once every 30 days), you don’t want a space elevator for the moon, the tether would have to be ridiculously long.
But there’s no atmosphere, so you have another good option: a linear accelerator, or mass driver. Basically you make a very long, very straight rail and use magnetism to accelerate a craft right up to orbital velocity. The only complicated part is constructing 50 km of rail, but I mean, it’s more time consuming than complicated. This is actually way more feasible than a space elevator.
- Comment on Nokia to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon 1 day ago:
I’d do that… give me a letter of mark, a capsule and some inertial impactors, I’m ready to go.
- Comment on Itch.io California Fire Relief Bundle - 422 items for $10 1 day ago:
This is… A whole lot of games.
I did love tunic, fantastic game, easily worth that price on its own.
I’ve never played cook serve delicious, but it’s been on my radar. I’ll have to give this a shot. Heh, there are some tabletop games and rulesets on this list, could be some hidden gems in there. Honestly, this is big enough to be worth just buying on principle, sort it out later.
- Comment on In Vermont, an ultralocal social network is as popular as Facebook 1 day ago:
Yeah, it makes me think of Blizzard, now Activision Blizzard.
For decades Blizzard was a shining star, it had literally never made a bad game. They famously released games “when they’re done”, rather than just in time for Christmas. As a result, they had a perfect, spotless record of releasing only top quality games that players loved. But that streak ended with Diablo 3 in 2012, it was their first major release since Blizzard was purchased by Activision in 2008. For the first time their release was controversial and the game just wasn’t fun (in its current form).
- Comment on Life isn't easy if your last name is 'Null' as it still breaks database entries the world over 5 days ago:
Thanks, I missed that
- Comment on Life isn't easy if your last name is 'Null' as it still breaks database entries the world over 5 days ago:
Unless you’re coding from scratch it’s hard to not do this with any modern framework.
I think that word modern is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
A lot of systems simply aren’t modern. There’s always that mentality of “well, it’s been working for the last 12 years, let’s not mess with it now”, despite all the valid objections like "but it’s running on Windows2000” or “it’s a data beach waiting to happen”…
- Comment on All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair Legislation 5 days ago:
Hey, that’s not a bad name…
- Comment on Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery 6 days ago:
The brand seems to be “Tricklestar” (I have to admit I’ve never even heard of the brand, but it’s been working for years now).
- Comment on Every package you receive has the chance of being a bomb 1 week ago:
Yeah, lithium ion batteries are a real danger.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 1 week ago:
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that’s the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
I understand that, it can’t be. Because fusion power generation hasn’t all been worked out yet. Unlike fission. That’s my point.
Also, once fusion does work, it will still be the most expensive way to generate energy man has ever devised, so there’s that too.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
Well, the first ones didn’t fly at all, they usually just killed the inventor.
That’s basically where we are today with fusion, they don’t work at all yet. Luckily it’s not killing people.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
Well, really it’s the opposite, nuclear works already. So why not just build nuclear plants at 1/20 the cost? (and actually get some net positive energy)
Just saying…
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
Agreed
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
Eh, fusion isn’t that complicated. You push things together and heat them up until they get even hotter on their own. That’s all that’s happening.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
I feel like the awesome back to future reference was missed completely.
- Comment on Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery 2 weeks ago:
I also learned that PC’s draw a lot of power lol. I used to sit on my PC all day, now I know how much it cost. Even the monitor turning off splits the power draw by half.
My state has a green energy initiative that gives us free home energy audits, mostly it means we get a lot of free led lights. But it also got us these nice automated power strips, you plug one item (the pc) into a control socket, and when that device turns off, it cuts power to the other managed sockets (monitors, speakers, etc). A really simple solution that must save a bunch of power.
- Comment on Got myself some energy monitoring Zigbee plugs and made an interesting discovery 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’ve actually been pretty disappointed as of late with the power consumption of my custom PCs. I actually can’t remember the last time I had a PC with sleep states that actually work, maybe it was 8 years ago?
On my last motherboard, whenever you woke the machine from sleep, some board modules wouldn’t power up correctly, you had to restart to get full functionality again. I have a second PC as a home media server, that one never fully wakes up from any sleep state (luckily it’s a server, so it’s always on). My current gaming PC regularly crashes whenever the machine is (ironically) at low processor load. (That’s the amd automatic energy saving features totally failing)
I don’t know whether to blame the motherboards, the processors, or the OS, but any way you slice it, my computers are only happy if they’re consuming 300 watts all the time…
And on the other hand, I gather chest freezers are actually decently efficient.
- Comment on Postiz v1.35.1 - Open-source social media scheduling tool (Signatures, Webhooks, Repeated Posts, etc.) 2 weeks ago:
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what this actually is.
I followed your link, and read the “how it works” page and only then realized that this is for “scheduling” in a programmatic sense, not scheduling in a calendar events and appointments sense.
- Comment on Apple is once again advertising on X after more than a year 2 weeks ago:
But that’s all changing the subject.
His point was, at least Apple made a stand to begin with. Sure, they didn’t stick to their guns in the end, but if Apple left, while Android manufacturers continued on Xitter this whole time, then isn’t Apple still showing more spine than the others? Does it really make sense to leave Apple for Android over this?
- Comment on Gulf of Make a Report to Apple 2 weeks ago:
Why not both?
- Comment on MIT builds swarms of tiny robotic insect drones that can fly 100 times longer than previous designs 2 weeks ago:
The MIT engineers agree. They said something to the effect of “If you could make a robotic bee, it wouldn’t replace bees. It would be a terrible idea to try to use them for pollination… Just put that same amount of finding into conservation and researching bees, you would have a much better result.”
- Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off 2 weeks ago:
Great post! Thanks for doing the math and explaining the concepts!
- Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off 2 weeks ago:
So why won’t taller Germans get solar? I don’t even see the connection to height… Oh, maybe they hit their heads on the panels… No, rooftop panels are already on the roof. I don’t get it.
- Comment on xkcd #3047: Rotary Tool 3 weeks ago:
TIL, I can totally enrich uranium with a modified dental drill.
Well, I’m off to start a new project, I’ll let everyone know how it goes.