>The first time I saw a dystopian situation of a mass of people all with their faces on smartphones was last year in Japan, every time I took the metro everyone, as if it were an unwritten rule, from when they got on until they got off did nothing but stare at their phone.
Whatever world the author looking to return to, presumed lost due to technology, where people were present and engaged in a crowded social situation, never existed.
I've spent a cumulative total of four years in Japan, most in the 90s. Here is a video that demonstrates the typical pre-smartphone Tokyo metro riding experience, which replicates my memories precisely: https://youtu.be/hyK3-w1TIyg?si=uXzm0G5pUvrvkw78&t=270
Based on the other blog posts it appears the author is too young to remember a time before smartphones.
I want to assure them that smartphones are much better than the alternative, one of which was (having forgotten my book) sitting staring at the seconds hand on my dive watch, spinning the bezel over and over again until realizing that the barely-audible clicking may be disturbing another passengers, and then stopping and just staring at my shoes for 30 or so more minutes.
Every time an article about airport security is posted the comments are the same.
To prove that I'm sane and my memory has not been corrupted by time or cosmic rays I google "airline hijackings by year", I look at the graphs in google images, and I briefly wonder what happened in early 1970s and 2000s before remembering what happened in early 1970s and 2000s.
Then I murmur "that's some fantastically effective theater".
can you find any stats on yearly hijackings that are limited to only flights where hijackers made it through american security, though? all I can find are global aggregate stats and its a bit unfair to credit TSA with preventing the hijacking of a flight from Heathrow to Dubai
Most TSA, FAA, and airline operator policies and procedures are harmonized with ICAO and IATA policies and procedures. Of course, there are regional variations and differences between international and domestic flights within those regions, but for the most part things are consistent among all of the members of both signatories of Convention on International Civil Aviation (ICAO members) and IATA members.
The whole shoe thing was proposed someone who wasn't the US (I think the UK, but my memory is fuzzy-- damn cosmic rays), submitted to ICAO, voted on, and enacted by the US as a signatory.
Why not? Comment thread is about TSA. Article is about TSA. The policy is a TSA policy. Why expand the discussion to include things no one else is talking about, and why do it surreptitiously?
HN has censorship that makes those apple rules look like anarchy.
Write a spicy comment and a mod will memory-hole it and someone, usually dang, will reply "tHat'S nOt OuR vIsIon FoR hAcKeR nEwS, pLeAsE bE cIvIl" and we all swallow it like a delicious hot cocoa.
If YC can control their product (and hn IS a product) to annihilate any criticism of their activity or (even former) staff, then Apple is perfectly within their rights to make sure Siri doesn't talk about violence.
Do you mean that HN censors topics/comments which it detects based on advanced filters which search for meaning even when people self-censor and use language to avoid simplistic filters like regex?
HN also has a flagging system and some people really, really hate some kind of speech. Usually they get more offended the more visible it is. A single "bad" word - very offensive to them. A phrase which implies someone is of lesser intelligence or acting in bad faith - sometimes gets a pass, sometimes gets reported. But covert actions like lying, using fallacies to argue or systematic downvoting seem to almost never get punished.
The good old days sucked. I have a large collection of CDs that I "own" and they're in a box in the basement because the medium is irrelevant.
For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78. And some of that stuff has an EXACT AND PRECISE 0.00% of having ever been carried in a physical shop on physical media such as: a DJ set consisting mainly of remixes of The Hacker tracks from the late 90s, recorded by a Canadian DJ in a Frankfurt Studio in 2025.
We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.
They didn’t suck. Like many situations that were resource constrained they had unique positive attributes even though you have a strong preference for the alternative strictly speaking.
Sometimes being constrained forces you to have a different and better experience, like when you’re young and broke and have adventures, or there’s a power outage and the city turns into a party, or when you miss the bus and have an interesting walk.
I was and am a musician and massive music fan. I miss the experience of being on a long train trip with only 10 CDs and really deeply connecting to each of them with no distractions. I miss discovering something on a record store clerk’s recommendation. And it’s not fair to say I just miss being younger those were specific experiences and they were pleasant.
I’m not saying I’m going back, or that we all should. I am happy with unlimited access to everything that’s also great. But back then it didn’t suck, it was great in a different way.
> For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.
> I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78.
Counterpoint: I haven't bought a record in over 10 years. That is, I have added exactly zero full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2014. Even though I stopped spending money, I didn't have to stop (legally) listening.
If your numbers are correct, this (being able to play the music that I've listened to over the last 10 years) is something would have cost me over $1500.
Honestly it was better before, in france most of pop songs are utter s*t now, it used to be a blend of various degrees, from laughable dumpster fire to nice to great timeless pop music (goldman, cabrel, balavoine). You could say the same about brit pop, I still dig the police, dire straits, in ways that surprise me even today. There really was, afaik, a higher base floor.
USAID was charity in name only. It is, or was, more of a marketing and not-quite-coercion-but-something-softer-and-gentler-than-that body.
And it was a pathetically small attempt at it, too.
Bureaucracy is irrelevant. What matters is bribes. China and Russia are bribing the shit out of everyone and everything.
USAID was practically our only way to do that quasi-morally and almost certainly on the order of their masters the administration destroyed it.
All to save a rounding error’s worth of annual spending we fucked ourselves and its absence will only benefit our adversaries.
Edit: it could just be stupidity and not conspiracy. These are the same people who think vaccines cause autism and don’t understand how space research leads to cordless power tools, a hippie studying lizard spit in the 70s leads to GLP-1 drugs, and nuclear warheads lead to microprocessors. The simple clay of the new America. You know, morons.
I worked for A Large Government Agency that was deeep into the Sun ecosystem and was using a Sparcstation 5 workstation well into early 2000s running GIS, RF analysis, and report writing tools. It was a 24x7 operation with shifts of users logging in and out every 12 hours and those systems were never not in use and never powered off. They, and the software, were practically flawless.
Then we switched to Sun Rays. For "security" and "cost". It was a disaster. The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible. They spent more on titanically large, best-of-the-best, fantastically equipped servers and immediately the several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
My memory is starting to fade but I recall there being absurd amounts of downtime, with weekly briefings about capacity upgrades and equipment installs and the constant presence of network and server installers dragging pallet jacks and ladders around the facility.
"Oh the servers were underspecc.." NO. They were not. They were literally and actually millions upon millions of dollars of the absolute best and most capable servers Sun sold. We had Sun employees working in our facility. They had an open spigot of cash flowing from the Large Government Agency directly into their accounts to do carte blanche whatever they needed to do to make it work.
If the servers were over-subscribed it was because the ability to deploy that much capacity did not exist for any, infinite, amount of money and Sun knowingly and willingly ripped us off.
It never worked. The experiment made my professional life a living hell for several years.
In 2005-2006 they gave up and moved to Dell workstations running Windows XP professional using thrown-together Java or X11 versions of all of the applications.
Except for capacitors exploding at random intervals, it was "fine".
Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Maybe here, but in other discussions surrounding Sun Rays there were decidedly mixed sentiments.
> The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible.
That sounds odd. In my experience, latency over public Internet (using the built-in Cisco compatible VPN client) across town was perfectly usable (much better than VNC over SSH using Linux hosts). The protocol they are using tries hard to minimizes the effects of network latency.
> several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.
Yeah, that's much easier to see. Imagine thin clients being used these days with servers having many dozen GiB of RAM and NVMe storage ...
> We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.
I dimly recall having read about such. I wonder, whether that ever got fixed.
> Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...
Yeah, Sun Rays weren't a good fit for 3d graphics nor movies (which wasn't much an issue twenty years ago, but won't do today). Sun (Oracle?) produced an video clip advertising their use in a hospital. That (and call centers) is were they could have shined.
> edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.
Moving between "data center" (next to the office), office and home and taking my session with me, made my work (mostly performance tests then) easier. Never got to yank out someone else's smard-card and session though, as I was the only one using those ;-}
And yes, wanting to be able to climb Machu Picchu without taking time off is both an "economic reason" AND a "material improvement in one's livelihood".
A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU does not seem within humanity's current technological capabilities.
Parker at its highest velocity could make it there in a century, but it doesn't have to slow down and stop. Or station keep.
When we have a power source that can do 5kW (I just doubled Hubble, 542 AU would probably require much more for communications) for 100 years I'll agree that its design can be refined and its lifespan extended to 200 and 542 AU is within our reach.
With distances that big, is it even necessary to slow down much? The depth of focus is probably a couple dozen AU? Even if it takes the probe a century to get there, if you can squeeze a decade or two of observation out of it without slowing down, there's no reason to bother and instead send a new upgraded telescope every decade or so.
As far as power requirements go, assuming a doubled power demand from Hubble might be a bit excessive. A telescope that far out would have to be nuclear powered, so thermal regulation is 'free'/passive and RCS load is reduced (don't have to constantly adjust to point away from the Earth), which I expect are the biggest power draws on Hubble.
If we assume a 150 year lifetime, with a 3kW draw by EOL and current RTG tech... RTGs have ~6% efficiency, so for 3kW electricity, you need 50kW in heat. RTG electricity output drops ~2% per year, so after 150 years, you have 5% of the initial electrical output, and you get ~0.57W/g of Pu-238. Meaning, you need ~600kg of it to power the telescope this way [https://www.mathscinotes.com/2012/01/nuclear-battery-math/].
That's not a politically feasible amount, but it's not technically impossible with current/near future tech whose development could be spurred on by serious interest in this kind of mission.
'Proper' fission reactors can also do the job, you get higher efficiency and don't have to run the reactors for the entire 150 years besides accounting for decay (e.g. an RTG that needs to provide enough power to keep some clocks running, the electronics and batteries warm, and trigger whatever mechanism would start up the reactor). Probably less than 100kg of Pu-238 just by better reactor efficiency.
It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.
When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.
That's what "current level of technology" means. The lego bricks exist, now, today, preferably in stock ready for immediate shipment on Digikey, and can be snapped into place.
Producing 600kg of Pu-238 is entirely technically feasible with current level of technology, as it has already been done when the US and USSR built their stockpiles.
Current level of technology means things we are capable of achieving right now, it does not mean that the pieces literally exist ready to use, unless you genuinely believe that the thousands of satellites orbitting our planet are not part of the current level of technology because they're purpose built without using off-the-shelf parts.
> It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.
Oh come on, we used to make so much more of it.
I see estimates that it costs 4 million dollars per pound, plus some scaling costs?
A trillion dollars is not even close to "spherical frictionless cow" when the benchmark is "humanity's current technological capabilities", and a few billion is basically nothing at that scale.
> When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.
Is a bunch of stuff lasting 50 years not good evidence? What is your threshold for "demonstrate", do we have to wait 200 years before you can be convinced?
Wouldn't there be a problem putting 600kg (or even 100kg) of Pu-238 together, because of supercriticality? I couldn't think of a plausible design, but I know next to nothing about this area. Basically I've heard that if you put a lot of this stuff together it'll make a big explosion
Criticality isn't hard to avoid, just split it between e.g. 344 units arranged in a 7x7x7 cube with 10cm gaps each way. Or more, I picked that separation and mass division based on guessing.
Yeah, I thought about doing something like that, but that would make many parallel power-generating units that would only last as long as one unit wouldn't it? Maybe the individual units could be subdivided further and the subunits could be brought together only when a previous unit runs out of power. I don't know enough about how it would actually work
I don't think so. The radioisotope itself is an exponential decay, and only goes faster when critical, not when subdivided; the part I'm not sure about is the thermocouple and why that decays.
I see. So the maximum time these units could provide power is the time it would take a subcritical mass to decay to the point that it's no longer useful. So the idea is unworkable for powering very long journeys
Very long journies, eventually everything fails. I suspect that we don't have enough practical experience to be confident of any space mission lasting 100 years even when the power supply is fine.
But also, there are other radioisotopes besides the one currently used. The ~90 year half life of the current normal radioisotope is great for current missions, not the only option.
i don't think modern semiconductor device will last more than 100 years, even without all the radiation. making something last more than a few decades is very hard.
> Does encasing electronics in lead help against high energy cosmic rays?
Makes them worse unless and until you make the shielding several times thicker than anything you'd be able to launch from the ground. Watched one science program that demonstrated it beautifully where the interviewee stuck several balloons on a board and shot at it with a high-powered rifle, popping just one. Then he stuck a metal plate in front of the balloons and shot it, and the resulting shrapnel popped all the balloons behind it. That's a cosmic ray hitting shielding.
That's also an unsolved problem with any Mars trip. Electronics can be built redundantly to recover from cosmic ray hits. Humans not so much.
Project Orion-type space craft can archive 1000 km/s and can travel within 3 years 542 AU. And this is absolutely feasible technically, just not politically.
Hertz used to be a business, run by businessmen who wanted to build and run a business.
Hertz is now a financial instrument run by private equity and investment bankers.
Businessmen want money the same way you or I want money. They just want to run a business in order to make that money. The same way novelists want to write novels to pay the bills. The book has to be good, people have to like the book so that they buy the book and tell other people to buy the book. So goes business.
Financial instruments are disposable, to be squeezed and wrung of every available cent until it becomes untenable and then the owners drop it and move on. If they can cut, squeeze, and extract they will. If they cannot-- they will destroy the instrument and the trick is they never lose money doing the destruction. People who run financial instruments masquerading as business don't want money like you and I. They want money the way addicts want heroin.
Whatever world the author looking to return to, presumed lost due to technology, where people were present and engaged in a crowded social situation, never existed.
I've spent a cumulative total of four years in Japan, most in the 90s. Here is a video that demonstrates the typical pre-smartphone Tokyo metro riding experience, which replicates my memories precisely: https://youtu.be/hyK3-w1TIyg?si=uXzm0G5pUvrvkw78&t=270
Based on the other blog posts it appears the author is too young to remember a time before smartphones.
I want to assure them that smartphones are much better than the alternative, one of which was (having forgotten my book) sitting staring at the seconds hand on my dive watch, spinning the bezel over and over again until realizing that the barely-audible clicking may be disturbing another passengers, and then stopping and just staring at my shoes for 30 or so more minutes.
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