I wouldn’t want to live next to one, but they’re cool as shit to fly over. When I fly from the east coast to LA, at some point when I’m over Nevada I’ll be able to look out the window and see what looks like a bright star shining in broad daylight, out in the desert in the distance. After thinking about it for a while I decided it could really only be one thing, that’s a concentrated solar plant. It’s truly impressive how far away you can see it from.

The thumbnail tricked me, I thought this was going to be an XKCD, disappointed.

As someone who lives in a region that gets a lot of snow, I know that basically any vehicle can get stuck. When you get unlucky, or do something dumb, you can end up in a position where you simply don’t have any traction.

But that’s the thing, you can usually avoid the situation by not doing something dumb, like driving right up onto the beach. And if you are driving on an unstable surface like sand or snow, accelerate slowly and decisively, don’t floor it and then stop or you’ll roll back into the rut you just made.

Well I hear those complaints, I feel like I used to be a gamer, and now that I have a family and a whole bunch of responsibilities, these days I’m more of a guy with a fancy PC.

I read some other posts in this thread saying it was too easy, and I guess I can understand that. There weren’t a lot of places that had me stumped for long.

I think they do need to consider adding in some new mechanics to the puzzles, I think they lean heavily on the light beams and I’d love to see some weirder stuff. For instance, the way that portal 2 added liquids, and the liquids had cool interactions with the existing mechanics. Cubes could bounce or slide on them. The streams of liquids could flow through portals, etc. In Talos, they add new mechanics from time to time, but they don’t always interact with each other in interesting ways. I know that’s difficult to do, but that might be the key to a good puzzle game sequel.

I really enjoyed the second one as well. Out of curiosity, what didn’t work for you?

What counts as NSFW when you work in porn?

Well using water for cooling is a way to save money in some regions, but it doesn’t even work everywhere, most data centers don’t use a lot of water.

When it comes down to it, you can have a datacenter anywhere, including in space, but you do need to keep it cool. Cooling can be harder or easier in different environments, space is probably one of the hardest environments to keep electronics cool in.

I but I guess the most direct answer to your question:

How are they going to cool these in space

They’ll do it with radiators, lots of radiators. And they’ll do it at 50x the price it would cost on earth. With that in mind, I welcome the space datacenters, build as many as you want. I can’t think of any better way for an AI company to drive itself to bankruptcy.

I think I played this mission in cyberpunk 2077.

If you’re afraid of this kind of thing, then don’t use escalators when they aren’t moving, that’s fine.

According to a quick Google search, there are 2-3 escalator related deaths per year in the US. That’s not just counting malfunctioning escalators, it also counts morons doing dumb things on escalators (and “within the US” includes every Florida Man out there).

You can worry about this if you like worrying, but it’s probably not worth it.

Sure. But if the brakes have not failed… Then it’s safe to use for a reasonable period of time.

They’re also more expensive than regular copper or aluminum wiring, and in this case I suspect that their required proximity would be a downside.

I think I’m going to have to say “citation needed” here.

There are different grades of fiber optic cable, but for short distances you can generally use the lowest grade, so that’s probably what would be used if they were just components in a device, and that stuff is dirt cheap.

On the other hand, currently audio equipment tends to need higher end copper wiring, shielded cables, gold plated connectors, etc. digital interfaces are much less demanding of course, s/pdif or HDMI for example.

As for your comment about being vulnerable to drops and bumps, yeah I think you’re certainly right about that. And honestly, there are some other potential issues with the idea too. Foremost, a microphone like this would probably require a whole lot more analysis and signal processing than you really want for a simple audio input.

Oh no… You absolutely can’t be doing maintenance on an escalator while people are walking on it. Not only unsafe, that’s just not going to work at all most of the time. The maintenance crew and the public would be in each other’s way.

On the other hand, when it breaks on a Monday, and the crew says they can be there to do the repair on Thursday, that means that it’s safe to use the escalator as stairs for a couple of days while you wait.

Honestly, why not investigate the utility of this? Could one develop a fiber optic coil based microphone? It would probably result in a microphone immune to RF and magnetic interference.

Well, it’s more novel than that…

A coil of fiber is not meant to be a listening device, so they almost certainly exist in places where it wasn’t previously deemed a risk.

That said, exploiting this in the wild seems like a pretty difficult job, I can’t imagine how to do it without already having access to a target computer.

TIL Some Florida Men are also surgeons. I mean, in retrospect, it always had to be true, I’d just never really thought about it before.

Oh wow… a whole bunch of Florida Men are rocket scientists… I think my brain just broke.

Wow, yeah, that sounds really hard. How’s his family taking it? Must be like a super bummer for everyone.

Also sucks for the patient too I guess, wonder how he’s feeling…

This is more of a leak like… They forgot to seal the bottom of the boat, now they “have a leak”.