Neat, but nanotubes have been around for a long time now. The problem has always been scaling up, which this article mentions is still an issue, sigh.

Although, the 86% connectivity of copper seems relatively low, I think with higher quality nanotubes, it would be higher than copper, right? I’m stretching my memory a bit. I feel like I haven’t read about manotubes for a number of years. The high strength they mentioned later in the article, sounds the same as I’ve heard before. A well-formed nanotube braided properly should be basically the strongest rope we’ve ever made.

This was really insightful, I liked the concrete examples, thank you!

Hell yeah!

Yeah, even Apple had to walk that one back. Although you do have to pay for the more powerful machine to get those ports. It’s just an Apple thing to do. Take away a cheap thing for everyone and then make you pay handsomely for what you used to get by default.

After thinking about it for a while, not having any special knowledge, but being in the tech field, I feel like this is the most likely scenario.

In the States, where can you find old stuff from the 90s anymore? That was before I was using the internet heavily, but things like GeoCities and other meta websites have gone down or basically only exist in archives now.

I realize that the article never said that China is purposefully pulling these websites down just that they seem to be disappearing. This is conspiracy theory code for we’re just asking questions. But if I had heard an American say, hey, why are these old 90s websites coming down? Isn’t that suspicious? Isn’t our government being totalitarian? I would definitely just say no, that’s just how the internet really works, Things come down, nothing lasts forever.

I’m always suspicious of these tech farms because it costs a lot of electricity to run those LEDs to produce the amount of energy needed for food.

In America, these would just be used to make more corn that would be used to create biofuels that would be used to run the generators that would be used to run the LEDs. The whole goddamn thing would run at a loss, but a lot of people would make a lot of money in the meantime.

Oops got mad at capitalism again haha.

Anyway…

It does seem like they’re doing it the right way. Producing foods that they can’t normally produce year-round or producing foods that They can’t produce much of normally.

They also talked about using it for starter plants which is a good idea. And I’m sure experiments are much better in a consistent environment like that.

Woop woop!

Okay, I can get behind this idea if it means building the things in space because we actually have the ability to extract resources from asteroids or something. The science side of me is hella tickled by that.

I mean, logically, we probably have everything on our planet to sustain ourselves. We would never actually need to do that. But still, tickled by that idea.

Can we all get on the same page that this is pretty dumb no matter who pitches it? I don’t need the equivalent of ICBMs but for a book or whatever.

As we still technically measure company’s success via revenue, and in a lot of ways we still measure progress with GDP, things like this still matter in the short run.

As China transitions into full socialism, I think that things like this will matter a lot less than simply resources and quality of life for employees.

We’re already starting to see China care less about GDP compared to other countries, although they’re still compared using GDP from a lot of sources, even internal to China. And while the success of companies is still dependent on profits, it’s still technically important that they have them.

A base on the moon by 2030 is pretty amazing of an ambition already, so I’m looking forward to how that develops. Any sort of Maglev tunneling system would be pretty amazing to witness, even in video.

Back to on Earth. Yeah, that makes sense. Replacing flying is a really big deal. I’m just really worried about the engineering implications of this. If it’s not actually feasible, then they’re gonna waste a lot of time trying to make it happen. Then again, they do have trains pretty much figured out and they can walk and chew gum at the same time as opposed to any Western government which can’t even get the basics right. So at least they have the expertise to at least attempt it.

I guess I just had it in my head that it was basically a big scam and was so infeasible it wasn’t really worth trying. Then again, their public infrastructure is all state-owned, right? So it’s not like there’s some capitalist who’s making bank on selling this idea with no possibility of a product.

Then again, it would be funny if China succeeded in this, where everybody else has failed. Hey, they’ve got the smartest engineers, so I guess I’ll sit back and watch the development.

Okay, so this breakthrough was just Maglev. But they do plan on using a Hyperloop eventually?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Musk releases the Hyperloop thing to try to prevent California from getting high-speed rail? The whole thing is he wanted trains to die so that cars would remain popular so that he could push for self-driving cars for high-speed highway travel that would normally be boring to drive. He always knew that the Hyperloop was basically impossible.

And hasn’t hyperloop been basically discredited as a realistic form of long distance travel? Outside of a kilometer or two of distance, keeping even a moderately low pressure environment is Too difficult, cost ineffective, and a maintenance nightmare.

Sorry for so many follow up questions. I am perpetually away from a high quality research machine, so I can only yell at clouds right now. But this just seems strange to me.

Ahhh, Okay.

So I would normally say ‘gen zee dong’, but its really ‘gen “zed”-ong’.

As an american, I’m now confused. How should it be pronounced?

if the admins saw something messed up, it was gone, with your account probably soon to follow. I never had the chance to take part in forums on the “old internet”, but from my understanding it was similar to them, where the moderators knew a troll when they saw one, generally didn’t take much shit, and the members mostly were fine with it.

Does the lib finally understand how to build healthy communities?

This, as you can guess, scared off most right-wingers. I saw plenty of people from r/RedditAlternatives go there and come back complaining about censorship or commies.

This probably saved Lemmy.

Ooh, he might have a point 😉

you would maybe see a text post of someone mocking western reporting on the Uyghur genocide

Nah, he still bleeds fascist

Honestly the owner , though definitely right wing, was a pretty chill guy, and he believed in federation and stuff. Kinda unfortunate the instance died

Yup, still a fascist

But yeah, that’s how Lemmy’s devs, through no fault of their own, probably saved lemmy

God I wish Libs could hear themselves the way we do. The fucking conspiratorial way they sound. “Well the devs accidentally saved lemmy by actually being progressives and caring about a healthy communities… Dumb tankies…” I don’t want to be all stereotypical but OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES LIBS

Edit: Sorry got fired up about this one. I’m calming down as soon as I posted. I still think libs are dumb tho.

Ugh, Liberals. One day MLs are ultra-leftist tankies, the next we’re not even really that left. I feel whiplash right now.

That’s a fair point. I’m not sure where the power usage will bottom out, but low-powered devices might get useful fairly soon.

Ah yes, science journalism is pretty bad no matter who’s making the science. At least it’s not all signaphobic and crap.

But it starts off talking about the Terminator. Weird. And then it mentions that these batteries can be used in AI applications at every opportunity that they could. But these would be terrible for AI applications! AI takes a ton of energy.

But we’ve been using radioactive batteries in niche applications for years, and this is a great innovation in that space. Low-powered satellites and things like that might see a lot of use of these!

They did, but from the sounds of it I’m guessing they’re just gonna be a physically bigger one. This is a very very small battery, but produces very little energy. But easy enough to just slap a few of them together.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the power density or anything like that.

This specific technology will never be in charge of running a smartphone or anything like that. But maybe a tweak or innovation on these radioactive batteries could get them to be a few watts and you could get a super low-powered cell phone device that could be used in emergencies only and last for like 50 years.

But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

Eh, still a liberal answer. good luck hitting them in their paycheck without effectively taking their entire business away from them.

Damn, I bet that pretty much applies to what YouTube is doing right now too. They’ve basically saturated the market and have very little room to grow. So they need to start making money as soon as they can, by ramping up advertisements and blocking ad blockers.