This is do-able on the moon without humans.
Just keep sending teleoperated robots and parts. Tesla already has semi-teleoperated robots - balance and locomotion are automatic and onboard, manipulation is teleoperated remotely. Eventually build enough that humans can visit.
Readit NewsAnimats commented on SpaceX shifts priorities to Moon city instead of Mars colony twitter.com/elonmusk/stat... · Posted by u/d_silin
Animats commented on The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster insideevs.com/news/786509... · Posted by u/andrewjneumann
Is there some particular relevance to this article?
There's a lot of reasons to think that that battery might be a scam... unlike most batteries, including sodium ion ones... If it's not a scam it will certainly upset the battery market eventually.
It's another battery that you can't buy right now.
"Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026."
CATL is more credible than Donut, but both are making forward-looking statements.
Animats commented on The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster insideevs.com/news/786509... · Posted by u/andrewjneumann
Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.
(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/786388/verge-motorcycles-donut-la...
Another one of the greats gone.
The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?
For a single organisation, a list of vouched users sounds great. GitHub permissions already support this.
My concern is with the "web" part. Once you have orgs trusting the vouch lists of other orgs, you end up with the classic problems of decentralised trust:
1. The level of trust is only as high as the lax-est person in your network 2. Nobody is particularly interested in vetting new users 3. Updating trust rarely happens
There _is_ a problem with AI Slop overrunning public repositories. But WoT has failed once, we don't need to try it again.
> The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?
It didn't work for links as reputation for search once "SEO" people started creating link farms. It's worse now. With LLMs, you can create fake identities with plausible backstories.
This idea won't work with anonymity. It's been tried.
How can Microsoft legally do that? Notepad++ is GPL-licensed open source. It's on Github.[1]
Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone.
That's the future for maybe half of programmers.
Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
Animats commented on Where did all the starships go? datawrapper.de/blog/scien... · Posted by u/speckx
Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre) and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young readers.
Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance.
I mentioned this to one of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies. The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment.
Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now, dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on the shelves.
The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
Animats commented on Where did all the starships go? datawrapper.de/blog/scien... · Posted by u/speckx
Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it.
Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.
It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now.
Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they are.
There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can detect some of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale