All the thrust to weight ratio tells you is what percentage of the craft is the engine.

The next component is the propellant mass you eject to get your thrust. To escape the Earth’s gravity you need 11200m/s of acceleration which with the best nuclear thermal rocket specific impulse of 900 means 72% of the ship is propellant. If the rest is engine with no payload at 28% of the mass and thrust to weight of 7:1 you get a max acceleration of 1.8Gs at liftoff which is… Okay… Again that’s with no payload.

Basically your options would be to invent a way to propel the exhaust at a higher velocity to increase your ISP (maybe you could ionize the propellant, use the heat to generate electricity and then use the electricity to blast the propellant to ridiculous velocities), or make your rocket engine much lighter to improve thrust to weight and make room for payload. But my favorite option is just make a monstrously huge rocket with a small command module at the top of it and the rest is all engine and propellant. These things could replenish by consuming massive amounts of mass from nebulas or small meteors or something. Just giant nuclear punk monstrosities that take a chunk out of the solar systems they operate in and create jets of high speed ionised exhaust that obliterate anything that happens to pass by.

That is literally the opposite definition to scalable. Scalable things don’t require twice the resources for twice the capacity.

Buy two instead of one is exactly the worst case scalability you can have.

95% of the world grid storage capacity is pumped storage hydro and batteries will literally never be able to compete because water is the cheapest energy storage medium we could possibly have at grid scale. North America was the world leader on PSH in the 1970-2000 but now China is eating our lunch and our governments no longer have the ability to start real infrastructure projects because of crony capitalism.

I can’t believe we’re watching China become the world leader in renewables while we pretend like batteries are a smart way of storing GWhs of power because that’s the most profitable solution to the private sector.

Grid scale batteries are only a solution for transients, if that. Actual energy storage needs to be scalable like pumped storage hydro which accounts for 95% of all storage capacity worldwide.

Yes, I also have a girlfriend, but you don’t know her, she lives in Canada.

These fucking conservatives crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches anytime the government does something heinous and use their piss poor understanding of EVERYTHING to try to justify the heinous actions. It happens every time, and I wish just once to see one of them use real and relevant facts, just so I can pretend that these people live in reality for just one second.

Hasn’t happened yet though.

This guy has no fucking idea how the law works. Destruction of evidence requires a primary crime, the one you’re destroying the evidence for. There is no crime, therefore no destruction of evidence. Only an incompetent or corrupt judge would let this even go to trial.

Unless the chainsaw manufacturer explicitly said “surgery grade chainsaw, perfect for operations, better than a scalpel, surgery tool of the future”

Which is what medical AI companies say all the time. Sue the Dr, sue the hospital, but most of all sue medical AI companies until they’re bankrupt and banned forever.

I literally went onto the comments to post this exact comment about that exact paragraph. Love to see another enjoyer of side fumble prevention.

I work in transportation regulation. I understand your fear and frustration. What is happening with self driving cars is probably as stupid as you believe. However regulations are pretty reactive and in some ways good regulations should be. You can’t regulate what you don’t understand and you can’t understand what has never been done before.

The best approach is to start small and work directly with a regulator to create an initial trial and evolve the regulatory framework that ensures safety for the trial period. Then that framework can be used for future trials by other companies before being finessed into an official regulation. Then you have something which you know CAN be successfully implemented by companies AND does produce good safety outcomes.

Is that what’s happening? It probably was, initially. But as you said the public service is gutted and now corpos are having a wild west free run at this AI car thing. Good luck on the streets, we’re soon all gonna need it.

Very cool use case. Even though I hate it on the whole, I love to see what can be used from it like improving accessibility for neurodivergence.

3d printable IUD! Who’s first?

That’s a very interesting use case. Can you tell me more about it? Sometimes I write emails and then ask llms to “rewrite this like an nt”… But I never imagined using it in dating.

Notepad ++ does that. It’s syntax highlighting and does great comparison of two nearly identical files. I’ve never used it to code though. I just use it for comparing text. But it is syntax highlighting.

Look, not everyone has the desire and capability to fight. I will say that I’ve had good success these last few years being vulnerable with other “woke” men and it’s been very freeing to share things I thought I experienced alone but to see that other men have gone through similar things.

I haven’t had a lot of success being vulnerable with women, but I’m getting to the point where that is a boundary for me. I’m not going to pursue friendships with people who can’t accept me for who I am and who reinforce toxic gender roles.

I’ve personally witnessed a lot of progress on this end and I’m excited to seeing more and being part of it when I can.

I’m glad you have a therapist, everyone needs someone they can share with.

Sorry you haven’t met someone who isn’t an asshole on this front.

??

Yeah that’s what toxic masculinity is. People (men and women) hold toxic views of what a man should be, and punish men for staying from this ideal.

You were a victim of toxic masculinity when you shared your feelings and were then victimised because of it. The people you shared your feelings with were toxic assholes.

I actually didn’t believe you but it’s literally true. First post, immediate apology.

You don’t find and report bugs because the open source project is the highest bidder… You report to contribute to the project. Miss me with that free market mindset!

I love the idea. The math works out a bit different though. After 100 days it’s a 63% chance of getting caught so the fine would be 100/0.63= 159 million plus the additional fee. After 1 day the fine would be 1 million /0.01= 100 million plus the additional fee.

I love the actuarial precision of the fine so that all the probability of profit is priced in. Calculating that probability will be complex though because they could argue there is a 100% chance of getting caught after you caught them lol.

I came here to say this.

The first chapter is strange in a meta way, where they take too seriously that this book is an oral history and talk about its formatting etc… I almost stopped reading lol

But it’s a great aspirational post apocalyptic rebuilding book and the rest of it is weird in a very good way. Highly recommend!