year 2042: When your Neuralink chip gets hacked

Source: x.com/nfkmobile/status/1824951121758056833

Okay but real talk my roommate bullied me into getting a Brother and it’s been pretty good. It kept forgetting my network when I changed routers which was really annoying. Solid 7.5/10.

(Affiliate) link

Source: x.com/t3dotgg/status/1825162071484608925

Crazy how we invented AI before we made a working wireless printer

Source: x.com/t3dotgg/status/1825040969156427794

Learn how to get rich.

All you need to do is buy my course ‘Get Rich by Selling People Courses on How to Get Rich.’

Source: x.com/TheJackForge/status/1824888261569138971

Socialism begins with the simple idea that you can take money from the people who earn it and use it to buy votes. Eg, student loan forgiveness.

Now, of course, this inevitably leads to government interference like subsidies for green energy. They’re just buying votes from those concerned about the environment — a concern that they intentionally amplify in order to create that cohort of voters to buy votes from.

But you can never buy enough votes. So then you get really serious and offer free money, like 25K to first time home buyers, or 6K for having a kid, or the utterly absurd notion of UBI.

In the end, after exploring every possible avenue for buying votes, the government finds itself in control of all means of production and distribution. With economic collapse threatening, and poverty, hunger, and crime on the rise, they desperately need to find another way to buy votes. So they create enemies to blame for the disaster they have created. This allows them to buy votes by peddling hate. And, of course, this leads to war and genocide.

And then the system completely collapses in civil war, famine, disease, and death.

As history has repeatedly shown.

And as we know, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

Source: x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1825135459497861410

Out in the vast interstellar emptiness float huge clouds of dust and gas -- mostly neutral hydrogen, H2 molecules that are loosely bound together by their diffuse gravity. The masses of such clouds are sufficient to create hundreds of stars like our Sun; but the thermal energy of their temperature, and their weak but non-zero angular momentum, are sufficient to prevent their gravity from collapsing them. They are stable structures that will last hundreds of millions, if not billions of years, if not disturbed.

But disturbance can come in the form of a shock wave from a distant supernova or stellar explosion. That shock wave can compress portions of the cloud into densities with sufficient gravitational potential to enter a runaway collapse.

As the collapse proceeds it can stall if the collapsing fragment has too much angular momentum. The cloud, now spinning much faster because of the collapse will often assume a dumbbell shape and the two lobes will separate. With most of the original angular momentum having been shed into their mutual orbit, the two lobes are free to continue their collapse into a binary star system.

Most of these new stars are small, and will collapse into an object roughly the size of Jupiter with little or no internal energy. We call them brown dwarfs. They have been heated by their collapse to glow in the infra red, but will gradually cool.

Some clouds are larger and will collapse to the point where fusion reactions will begin in their cores. First it is the deuterium that fuses, generating quite a bit of heat. But deuterium is rare and that fuel is rapidly exhausted. If the new star is massive enough it may begin to fuse regular hydrogen into helium. Many of these objects are one tenth the mass of the Sun and glow in the red, and near infra-red. We call them red dwarfs. They burn slowly and will last for tens of billions of years.

Some have about the mass of our Sun. They are comparatively rare, but will shine brightly in the visible spectrum, fusing Hydrogen to Helium, and then eventually Helium into Carbon. In the final stages of their live they will become red giants, and will end their lives by repeatedly ejecting their outer shrouds of hydrogen, until only the white hot carbon core remains. These are White Dwarf stars.

But as noted earlier, stars often form in binary pairs. And sometimes the two partners are as massive, or even more massive than the Sun.

The first to die will spread into a Red Giant and disgorge massive amounts of material into the space around it as it pulsates through its death throes. Sometimes that material reaches the partner star, adding slightly to its mass, and reducing the distance between them through friction.

When the Red Giant finally become a White Dwarf, it may be close enough to the partner star to gradually steal material from it -- especially if the partner enters the Red Giant stage.

Matter, mostly hydrogen, builds up on the hot surface of the White dwarf. The White Dwarf may have half the mass of the Sun, and be only a few thousand miles in diameter, roughly the size of the Earth or Mars. Thus the gravitational potential at the surface is huge, and the infalling hydrogen is strongly compressed and heated.

This process continues until the hydrogen accumulating on the surface of the White Dwarf reaches the temperatures and pressures sufficient to ignite hydrogen fusion. This results in a massive thermonuclear explosion called a nova. The explosion is strong enough to blow all the accreted material off the White dwarf and re-expose the carbon core to begin the process again.

From our point of view the binary pair will brighten by many orders of magnitude every few decades. We may just see one of these this Summer or Fall in the constellation of the Northern Crown (Corona Borealis)

Source: x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1825197580323631495

Many such cases. “Social distancing” was the result of a middle schoolers science fair project

Source: x.com/Valuable/status/1825209487697064443

Hard to grasp how one bad election can reverberate consequences so far into the future.

The damage done from the Biden presidency will be causing disaster for decades to come

Source: x.com/Valuable/status/1824766117228990917

What is Antarctica hiding?!?!?!

Source: x.com/nfkmobile/status/1824704037326921862

"We would build a rocket ship and then we'd fly it far away" - Elon Musk

Source: x.com/nfkmobile/status/1824668909137506664

Is it possible to have a decentralized dead man switch?

I can conceive a smart contract that only allows a process after a certain block and an owner account can push back that block arbitrarily..

Yet everything on chain is visible so it’s not like it can reveal a hidden state

Source: x.com/Valuable/status/1824685483018031604

People tend to look at budgets the wrong way, IMO. The cost of software development per unit time (your engineering-dept. budget) is trivial to figure. Number of people * salary * load. There. You're done. You'll pay that out even if everybody sits around playing Canasta all day. So, the question is NOT what engineering it will cost; it's how best to use people's time to get the maximum benefit from that investment. Instead of a project, think in terms of what to work on. Bring people to the work, not work to the people.

Source: x.com/allenholub/status/1824620155928039596

Software development is an investment, not a purchase. Treat it that way.

Source: x.com/allenholub/status/1824521194554659119

This is how Elon Musk loses his mind when he spots a wild meme YOU posted on X!

Source: x.com/nfkmobile/status/1824492147107627069

The children yearn for the Zune

Source: x.com/t3dotgg/status/1824551493938356662

Websockets!

Source: x.com/wesbos/status/1824541638313885844

Uh oh

Source: x.com/wesbos/status/1824535348598411772

There are 137 days left in 2024.

It’s not too late to start a new project and abandon it a few weeks later.

Source: x.com/TheJackForge/status/1824491684719366396

The Sun, our local star, is just under a million miles in diameter. The surface temperature is about 5,000K, and the power output is about 4E26 watts.

All that power is coming from the innermost 10% of the star -- the core -- where the temperatures are around 17E6K, and the pressure is ...um... crushing.

At those temperatures the Hydrogen atoms cannot hold onto their electrons. So protons and electrons are free to zoom about without binding. The velocities of the protons are so high, and the pressures are so great, that every once is a great while two protons will get close enough that the strong nuclear force will bind them together into Helium. This happens to about 500 metric tons of Hydrogen each second. In that reaction a lot of high energy gamma rays are released.

Those gamma rays are trapped within all those charged particles in the core. They bounce around in the core, doing a random walk for thousands of years. But eventually they reach the outer shell of the core where they can heat the Hydrogen gas outside the core.

The bouncing around of all those gamma rays creates an outward pressure that keeps the core of the Sun from collapsing under the weight of the Hydrogen above it.

The hydrogen outside the core, heated by the gamma rays escaping the core, rises to the surface of the star in a massive convection current. Upon reaching the surface, the heat of that gas is radiated at 5000K and reaches us ~8 minutes later.

This process has been going on for nearly five billion years, and will continue for another five billion or so. However...

The Helium building up in the core takes up space. This impedes the fusion reaction. Fewer gamma rays are produced, causing the core to contract. This heats the core driving the fusion rate back up, but at a slightly higher temperature.

Thus, the Sun is gradually warming. It is about 10% hotter today than when it formed, and it will continue to get hotter and hotter as the eons pass. In about 200 million years, it will be too hot for water to remain liquid on the surface of the Earth.

So, I guess we'll have to move the Earth a bit farther out.

Source: x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1824467064074985623

Well, I finished the first draft of my Go chapter. It was fun to fiddle with the language again after so many years. It's remarkable how much of a help, and how much of a nuisance, co-pilot can be.

Source: x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1824505131347648725