> "You can edit it in a text editor" which feels like a monkeys-paw wish
Yes :) Although I will note that some editors are good enough to maintain the structure as the user edits. Consider Emacs with `csv-mode`, for example. Of course most users don’t have Emacs so they’ll just end up using notepad (or worse, Word).
But before you judge the fix too hashly, I bet it’s just a quick and easy fix that will suffice while a proper fix (to avoid depending on external state) is written.
of course it is just an easy fix. it's the kind of solution that even someone like me could write who has no understanding of the code a all. (i am not trying to imply that the submitter of the PR doesn't understand the code, just that understanding it is unlikely to be necessary, thus the change bears no risk.
but, the solution now hides the problem. if i wanted to get someone to solve the problem i'd set the new date in the near future until someone gets annoyed enough to fix it for real.
and i have to ask, why is this a hardcoded date at all? why not "now plus one week"?
There’s a lot to be said for simplicity. The more logic you put into handling the dates correctly in the tests, the more likely you are to mess up the tests themselves. These tests were easy to write, easy to review, easy to verify, and served perfectly well for 10 years.
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
Yes. The land is wealth, the house is wealth, and _living in_ the house is wealth. Like it or not, not everyone can afford to buy a house. Maybe they don’t have a down payment, or can’t get a good interest rate on a mortgage. Instead of renting money and using it to buy the house, they need to just rent the house instead. If there were no rentals available of any kind, they would go homeless¹. Having them renting something instead of going homeless makes wealth for both them and for society as a whole.
¹ We’ll just assume that homesteading is impossible these days.
I really enjoy a good bug report like this. More people should write up their fixes and publish them!
But the really weird thing is that I could basically copy and paste that code into an open–source game that I occasionally work on. I have an open bug or two about game items with long names that cause the UI to look weird where ellipsization is the obvious solution. With only a few trivial tweaks Enlightenment’s code would just work. It’s almost like we should have a library for that sort of thing.
Yea, the paper discusses a probe with a mass between 50g and 500kg using a diamondoid data storage medium that holds ~6,250 exabytes per gram. Plenty of room for any blueprints you want to include, up to and including a planet full of humans. If not actually today’s tech, it is but a few years into the future. I’m sure my next computer will have a few hundred grams of that diamondoid storage.
Blueprints are the last of my concerns. What I think will be hard to do is to implement a full supply chain into a single space-travelling factory, including sourcing and refining of raw materials. But, regarding the blueprints, it now occurs to me that our "recipes" are made to work on our planet. Another one may lack some "ingredients" or have atmospheric conditions that could mess with the chemical reactions we use here. So we would need an advanced AI able to adapt production to the environment it finds.
Sourcing and refining materials are just blueprints. Adaptations for other environments are just different blueprints.
But honestly most of the work would be done in vacuum. Skip the planets, build the daughter probes out of asteroids. Most systems should have plenty of easily accessible material even if they don’t have a prominent asteroid belt, even if the probe has to scavenge the system’s oort cloud.
Right, but it’s only a feasibility study. By definition these only study the minimum system that could accomplish the goal, which was to visit as many galaxies as possible. Given the mass budget and density of the data storage contemplated there’s no reason the probes couldn’t carry enough information to create real human colonies in the process of replicating themselves.
> Sure, but you then can't access the computronium, because communication is so bad.
Who says all the computronium has to stay far away? Just move it all closer together as you build it.
Second, you can spend much of it running parallel tasks that don’t need to synchronize or communicate often. You could run quadrillions of humans instead of enlarging yourself to fill all of that new computronium.
Yes :) Although I will note that some editors are good enough to maintain the structure as the user edits. Consider Emacs with `csv-mode`, for example. Of course most users don’t have Emacs so they’ll just end up using notepad (or worse, Word).
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