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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Memory leaks are often difficult to deal with, and many contemporary languages basically encourage them. I know many applications that suffer significant performance issues due to memory leaks, and way too many that simply don’t care about memory footprint.

    A language that treats memory management differently from the start makes all these problems much easier to deal with, if they appear at all. The real question is if the other costs of using the language are worth the somewhat niche performance gains.


  • You need that living habitate to survive 6 months in 0g minimum, plus move it planetside without breaking anything.

    You could expand the habitate to a larger area later, true, but there’s still like 7 mass cycles that need to be maintained long term, and this system needs to be robust enough to trust a few dozen people to. Otherwise, it’s just an extension of Earth’s biosphere and is dependent on regular resupply.



  • Ceres would be a way better start. Lots of water for shielding, consumption, and fuel; easy access to asteroid orbits; and a shallow gravity well to make transport easy.

    Similarly, many of the icy moons around the gas giants would be good, also with decent mining, but better science opportunities too!

    Our Moon is good too. Close, big enough to not need zero gravity setups. That’s actually about it really, it’s just right here. May as well do Orbit I guess.

    Start with Antarctica and the ocean floor. That’s still 80% as difficult, and rescue can take 30 minutes, not 3 days or 10 months!



  • 1kg of oxygen is a good estimate, humand need 0.5-1kg per day.

    Astronaut calorie budges is a bit higher than average, as would be for labouring humans. About 3000kcal, or 12 MJ.

    I think more important than the raw energy and oxygen is sourcing the water, cleaning the water, producing the energy to electrolyse and heat, and maintaining the equipment necessary to do so. And that’s assuming all food is shipped in.



  • If the language makes common but dofficult to deal with error impossible, that’s nice. Not critical, but nice.

    If the language introduces easy to make and hard to deal with errors, that’s an issue. Not a deal breaker, but an issue.

    The idea does exist, but it’s stated with way more confidence and finality than it deserves. That’s social media I guess.







  • LEDs are so efficient that even microamps can power them. If your LED driver is cheap, it’ll run on basically nothing, or charge up enough to start for a fraction of a second.

    The microamps come from a hot wire running next to a switched wire behaving as a capacitor when carrying AC voltage, letting microamps leak through. (It’s not required that the light is on the hot side of the switch as I said previously, my bad).

    This can happen if the switch box is a terminal box with hot and switched wires in the same cable, which is rather common. Probably some other configurations too.


  • Honestly, I “upgraded” my phone to the 8 year newer model, and besides the easy numbers like CPU speed, RAM, and storage, it’s a straight downgrade. No headphone jack, slower charging, 50% chance of worse battery life (something slurps like mad sometimes), a hole in the screen, fewer buttons, a bunch of my apps don’t work anymore, fewer sensors, worse case selection, fatter & heavier, and the big G won’t stop pestering me to install malware.

    I still use my old mobile more. It really just needs a new battery and some extra RAM.