No, there isn’t any atmosphere to keep in the water. If you heat up the ice, it will sublimate directly into gas. Since the gravity is so low, it will stream out and create a trail all around the orbit. The solar wind would blow it away from there.

There’s more to having liquid water than just temperature, pressure is needed as well.

Also Ceres might be small for a planet/moon, but it’s still huge. The amount of energy needed would also be huge. And without an atmosphere you’d also be losing a lot of energy due to it radiating out into space. I’m not a 100% sure, but I think Earth is actually an iceball from where it’s located in the solar system. It’s only due to the atmosphere it’s mostly non frozen (and if we keep pumping the CO2 and methane like we are, in the near future it won’t be frozen at all).

One of the most important ones that a lot of people use every day are the huge advancements that have been made in creating modern chips. It might not be something new and exciting, but it actually involves very groundbreaking work and huge breakthroughs. Not just the crazy machines that ASML makes, thought to be breaking the laws of physics just years ago. But also advancements in manufacturing, being able to create super advanced 3D structures and large scale manufacturing at a very high level, yet with a surprising consistency in quality and low cost. Not just for ever bigger, more efficient and faster chips, but also things like MEMS at tiny sizes and low cost.

Often it’s taken for granted what we have. People saying stuff to the sentiment that this isn’t the future, everything is boring, we haven’t got flying cars or people living on Mars. But the fact we all got this ultra powerful computer, with a high resolution high framerate self emitting screen, no active cooling, a bunch of sensors, lots of memory and storage and hyper connected to all sorts of networks, all powered by a high capacity high power low wear battery should be mind blowing. And not just that, but it fits in our pockets and they are so cheap everyone has at least one. Just because we’ve chosen to spec our tech tree into the small stuff instead of the large stuff, doesn’t mean we haven’t come a long way.

I think people look at the past at new “inventions” and think that’s the way progress is. New revolutionary stuff. It’s why people often invest in crowd funding of obvious scam products. They want something that changes the game. In reality it’s a lot of little steps that create a big change over time. And imho this has always been the case. We always hear about the Wright brothers “inventing” the airplane. Like they had some magic sauce and thought of something nobody else thought of before. Then made it and bam the world was changed. In reality they didn’t invent anything, they developed it. They made prototypes and iterative refinements. And they were far from the only ones working on the exact same concept. If they didn’t finish first, someone else would have within the same time frame. But the romantic story of two American blokes with the right stuff changing the world all on their own just sounds good.

So let’s also celebrate the thousands of smaller breakthroughs that got us where we are today.

Trans rights are human rights!

3060 TI was a midrange card when it released, I wouldn’t expect it to still be viable. You might have bought it 3 years ago, but it released at the end of 2020. So almost 5 years old at this point. With GPU development rates being what they are, that’s a long time.

If you still want to get the most out of it: Lower the resolution, this helps a lot. Running at 1080p should probably work just fine. Also check out your memory bandwidth, that is usually the bottleneck for getting the most out of an 5600x. Overclock it if you can, the higher the memory clock, the better it will be.

For the future, my experience is the 70 TI holds up a little bit better than the 60 TI. But this can differ per gen of course. And because of “AI” GPU prices have gone through the roof, so fuck AI.

I recently read a cool book and wanted to know what other people thought about it. I had no idea how to find out, probably obscure forums or something. But with search engines being shit these days, I could only find one line reviews. I was looking for something a little more in depth.

So I thought hey let’s try some kind of LLM based solution, this is something it should be able to do right? So I told Chatgpt hey I read this book and I liked it, what are some common praises and criticisms of that book? And the “AI” faithfully did as told. A pretty good summery of pros and cons, with everything being explained properly without becoming too verbose. Some of the points I agreed with, others less so. Wow, that’s pretty neat.

But then alarm bells started ringing in my head. Time for a sanity check. So in a new chat I posed the exact same question, word for word. However I replaced the name of the book and the name of the author with something completely made up. Real sounding for the context, not obviously fake, but weird enough a human would give pause. And of course, not similar to anything that actually exists. The damn thing proceeded to give a very similar result as before. Different points, but the same format and gist. In depth points about pacing and predictability of a book I made the fuck up just seconds earlier.

I almost fell into the trap thinking LLMs could be useful in some cases. But in fact they are bullshit generators that just happen to be right some of the time.

Your mom’s so fat, she pushes the barycenter of the solar system outside of the diameter of the Sun

My keyboard these days is much much stronger than the keyboard I had in the 90s. In the 80s the back was full metal and some had the case be metal as well. Then in the 90s it went all plastic and super fragile. For the past 15 years or so I’ve had a keyboard with a thick metal frame. I’ve smashed it lots of times and it doesn’t care at all. If you’d pick it up and smash the monitor with it, it would totally destroy the monitor. My desk is a metal frame with solid wood, but the average IKEA desk probably wouldn’t stand a chance.

Tell me Legolas, what do your elven eyes see?

Fucking pixels Aragorn, it makes me want to puke. And what the fuck is up with these compression artifacts? What tier of Netflix do you have?

Sorry Legolas, could we just enjoy the movie?

Maybe if the dwarf stops stinking up the place. And don’t think I didn’t see him take that last chicken wing, fucking dwarves.

We only live in this world to serve our cat overlords.

D

Yeah, it would be a pretty big task to move the Stargate and the entire Stargate project to another state. It makes zero sense to have Space Command be that far away from our primary access to space.

digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like.

As someone who was alive for gaming in the 80s and 90s, it was nothing like that at all. Unless you were very rich, most people would have less than 10 games for the one console they had. It would be a small stack by the side of the console, next to the controllers. Games were usually around $70 depending on the game, which is like $160 in today’s money. NES games were cheaper, especially once the SNES was released. So people did wind up collecting NES games (2nd hand) once the SNES released. The NES moved to the oldest kid bedroom, with the SNES taking the place of the one console in the living room. They might have a shoebox of older games at some point.

We did play a lot of games tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, the other games people had varied. Downside was, the easiest ones to borrow were often the ones that weren’t any good. We all know that one kid that had the Star Wars SNES game and hated it, but you’d only very sparingly get a new game, so you were stuck with it.

Another thing we did was rent a lot of games, you would go to the rental place and they would have so many games, it would blow your mind. They’d have posters up, often large set pieces for some games and movies. It was like kid heaven. Then you’d have about 10 mins to figure out which game to rent, otherwise your dad would get annoyed and tell you to get a move on. People even rented the SNES when it was just released for a weekend, so they would know if it was any good before buying it for the family. It was a big purchase, so you’d better make it worth it.

Talk about a low bar

Wow that’s crazy! I’ve also gotten an XP key burned into my brain, but it’s a different one. I had no idea there were multiple people memorised:

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

It used to have it’s own Wikipedia page, but now it’s just a mention on this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_licensing#Leaked_keys

I highly doubt space elevators for Earth are decades away, more like centuries if they are even possible at all. Even if technically possible (which is a big if), they also need to be environmentally, politically, culturally and economically possible.

It’s a cool concept, but it ain’t going to happen on Earth. Maybe on the Moon or some other place perhaps.