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It might make more sense to put data centers on the Moon.

It's fairly close, about 1.3 light seconds away. You wouldn't use it for anything realtime, but it would be fine for long AI training jobs.

You could bury the servers underground to shield them from cosmic rays. That would also be good for any people living there.

You could get power from solar panels on peaks near the poles that get light almost all the time. For example, some ridges around Shackleton Crater are sunlit up to ~90% of the time, with short periods of darkness. Use batteries to smooth out the power supply.

For heating and cooling, just use the standard techniques. It's not easy, but it's a solved problem. As a bonus, near the poles, the temperature extremes aren't as bad as at the equator.

You could also sell tickets to tourists. People will pay to see the darndest things.


People who develop software have to understand what "open source" means (technically, not just some sloppy interpretation), because using a non-open-source package in an otherwise open source project can contaminate the whole thing. License violations can pose high risks, both financial and reputation losses.

Because of that, a lot of effort goes into helping make sure that software stacks are using consistent licenses. There's a whole industry of standards, audit processes, software and companies to help with this; for example, see:

https://licensehawk.com/software-license-compliance-audits/

https://spdx.org/licenses/

https://www.flexera.com/products/flexnet-manager


People who develop software have to understand the difference between FOSS and Open-Source. We already have a term for what you want to describe as open-source, it's called FOSS.

Words have meanings they're collected and recorded in dictionaries, these are the source of truth for the definition of words. It's important that we have them so we can all talk and know what we mean. This is at the very core of languages.

This open source has to be FOSS is some straight-up bullshit by people who spend all their time in the FOSS community.

By every definition other than the FOSS community, this is open source. That is a fact.

Btw: FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. Even the FOSS community fundamentally says that open source does not neet to be free.


My current favorite option is Quarto [1]. It's basically a friendly wrapper around Pandoc [2], letting you write in Markdown (+ lots of Quarto-specific extensions) and render to LaTeX, Typst, multi-page HTML, EPUB, docx, and more.

[1] https://quarto.org/

[2] https://pandoc.org/


It's mentioned in the article.


That was fast. So 2025.


TY! I have been waiting for this for a month or so now :)


Another example akin to the proof of the 4-color map theorem was the proof of the Kepler conjecture [1], i.e. "Grocers stack their oranges in the densest-possible way."

We "know" it's true, but only because a machine ground mechanically through lots of tedious cases. I'm sure most mathematicians would appreciate a simpler and more elegant proof.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_conjecture


I never understood that quote until recently.

The story goes that the (royal) pharaoh of Egypt wanted to learn geometry, but didn't want to have to read Euclid. He wanted a faster route. But, "there is no royal road to geometry."


The last Egyptian pharaoh was Nectanebo II, who ruled from 358 to approximately 340 BC. Alexander founded Alexandria in 331 BC as the crown jewel of his empire where Euclid wrote his magnum opus, The Elements in 300 BC!

Unless the royal pharaoh of Egypt, refers to Ptolemy I Soter, Macedonian general who was the first Ptolemaic Kingdom ruler of Egypt after Alexander's death.


Yep, exactly. Here's a translation of Proclus:

"He [Euclid] lived in the time of Ptolemy the First, for Archimedes, who lived after the time of the first Ptolemy, mentions Euclid. It is also reported that Ptolemy once asked Euclid if there was not a shorter road to geometry that through the Elements, and Euclid replied that there was no royal road to geometry."

Source: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/Euclid.html


Also known as "treknobabble."


I was rather hoping that a "Telegraph Simulator" simulated the electric and magnetic fields along a telegraph line. This is more of a Morse Code toy.


Still very cool.


The French definition of the meter can also be described as "such that the distance from the equator to the North Pole, through Paris, is 10,000 km." This is a handy number to know!

It means, for example, that the circumference of the Earth is four times as big, or 40,000 km (roughly speaking; I know that the Earth is smooshed due to its rotation etc.). And then to estimate the diameter, you just divide that by pi:

40,000 km / 3.14159... ~= 12,732 km

and half that is the radius of the Earth:

r_Earth ~= 6366 km


One use case is to estimate the minimum latency for communications between two points on opposite sides of the Earth, which would be how long it takes light to travel halfway around the Earth:

= 20,000 km / (speed of light)

~= 66.7 milliseconds


Not quite the minimum. :-)

Beams of neutrinos can be sent through the Earth and detected on the other side.

https://www.livescience.com/19075-neutrino-particle-communic...


This is true. Using a neutrino beam, the minimum latency would be approximately:

(diameter of Earth) / (speed of light) ~= 42.5 milliseconds

Some high-frequency traders might actually be able to justify the investment needed to enable such low-latency communications!

Come to think of it, you could also use gravitational waves...


the earth is flat everyone knows that it's how our lord and savior jesus christ made it


Maybe that's true, but maybe the average cost of a new car in Asia is quite a bit lower, so the overall effect is still declining total overall sales (measured in USD)?

Here's a fascinating video about a city in China that's full of cute electric cars that cost less than $5000 USD each:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AomxytSwrkY


I looked around some more and it seems that it is, in fact, the total number of units sold that peaked, not the total dollars of sales.

I found a good video that outlines all the reasons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsXxfx_UsVI


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