People keep saying that but the queue at my library is ridiculously long so I’ve never been able to read most of his books

Yes, and that is one of the huge problems with it. One developed country can do geoengineering that affects everyone, for better or worse. One developed country can decide to take the risk regardless of the rest of the world.

If my relatively well off country decides to spread some aerosol in the stratosphere to reduce incoming solar, for example, it can likely afford to make a difference in the rate of climate change. But just by calling it climate change, we’re recognizing it could affect everyone. Whatever I’m pumping into the stratosphere will not stay within my borders. If I’m able to change climate patterns in my country, those changes do not stop at the border

And of course a related issue is that any intentional change in climate systems will have different effects in different places. Even if you succeed, there will inevitably be those worse off. You can easily picture this turning into an out of control conflict. We all know about historical atrocities around resource exploitation of less developed countries, so what do you expect will happen if weather patterns are intentionally changed to benefit the climate of the wealthier countries at the expense of those who can’t afford it?

The dangers of geoengineering cannot be overstated

Certainly the risk of geogineering is potentially more catastrophic than anything else humans have done, including use of nuclear weapons (short of all out Armageddon). However we’re screwing up our response to climate change badly enough that we’re already heading there. That last desperate hope is starting to appear like our only hope, even among those who think they understand the risk.

5-10 years ago, I would have agreed: just say no to geoengineering. The risks are way too high. But we keep getting worse at climate change, not better. A lot of the technology we need to reduce output impact on the climate has been developed, is affordable and practical, yet there are still so many obstacles to building it out. As a tech guy I relish the challenge of figuring out a tech solution, but we have many partial solutions yet society won’t budge and I don’t know how to fix that. It’s so frustrating and hopeless.

It’s time to consider our last desperate hope. Time to try to figure out a way. Time for serious investigation, including pilots. We may never want to take that risk, but it’s starting to look like we’ll have to

Great!

Sounds like a great improvement!

But presumably just the symptoms, right? Not the cause. So you’d be more comfortable while your immune system destroys your digestive system

That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass

What if it is the accumulation of filters that no one can pass?

• we evolved as intelligent and successful and passed many tests of natural selection, so far
• we’ve survived nuclear weapons, so far
• we’ve survived plague/biological warfare, so far
• were still approaching climate catastrophe, so far
• we’ve survived evolution + nuclear war + plague/biological + early climate change, so far

People get wrapped up in speculation about which stage may be the great filter, but it’s not as if they end. They just keep adding up. We need to keep passing all the filters we already pass plus all the filters yet to come

Ah yes, rtfm. My bad for relying on the summary.

That’s amazing. The guy is 90 now and went to space!

Am I misreading this somehow?

the United States’ first-ever Black astronaut candidate

In a few seconds search …. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Watkins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Wilson

Maybe. I do more DevOps these days, so tend to have many small changes that can’t even be tested without checking them in and running in CI. I’d have hundreds of “fix unit tests” commits alone

For some definition of interesting …. The quashed commit whose message is a Jira ticket number and title?

Maybe. We all (here) wish fusion power was funded better and understand how useful it could be for humanity if we can make it happen, but ….

• yesterday I read about the Stellerator using 3D printed parts
• in this thread, someone commented on using ai to drive containment
• I’m sure teams must be using the latest materials.

It’s quite possible that we would have always needed the rest of the world to catch up

I still find it a dream for the future.

Do I want one? No. Do I want what it may turn into? I can’t wait to find out

Hotter than yo mama …. Wait a minute

This is kind of my worry as well. We’ve seen fission become impractical by cost and renewables are much cheaper, so even a successful fusion generator has a high bar. I dream of controlled fusion to not just be successful, but practical

And of course you said “sorry but I can’t do that right now” and went on with your life , rather than jumping down his throat, then holding a grudge for 11 months?

So is the real analogy …

You gave some old clothes to charity, expecting nothing back. However you spotted a lawyer wearing your old clothes so walked up and demanded money?

If someone abuses my bug tracker to act like a clown

From what little we know, it looks like they used it correctly

I have every right to decline their support requests

Priority is guidance from the user. The maintainer always has the decision how they’ll respond. You could have said you don’t have time, you could have said it’s on my queue to look at later, you could have said you don’t provide support.

Ok, this time I read the full ticket, so ….

• They used the software in compliance with provided license
• opened a bug report on the provided system
• cooperate with the maintainer to diagnose
• then when it was user error, they asked where they should have found the doc?
• then some asshole pasted a huge graphic in the bug report demanding money

I love to hate on Microsoft too, but I only see one asshole here

Maybe OP didn’t share enough context, because this whole thing looks like a big over-reaction on their part.

• There’s no accusation of misusing the license, so they’re using it properly
• there’s a bug tracker, which they used for a bug report
• OP demanded money when there was no expectation of it

So what’s going on here? With the information given, Microsoft did what they should have and OP is acting the huge asshole