This is Showerthoughts, not iam14andthisisdeep

I might have some bad news for you about cops my man

Many many proposals have been made in the past to utilize waste heat, some with success, others not so much. One of the few that have worked is taking waste heat from industrial processes, connect that to a regular heater (usually gas powered) and connect that up to tens of thousands of homes as a central heating source.

One of the big issues is waste heat is usually in a very low energy high entropy form. The way we normally use extract work from energy is by moving it from a high energy low entropy state into a low energy high entropy state. This is due to the laws of physics and can’t be worked around, so extracting anything useful from waste heat is very hard. Most projects involve simply transporting the heat and using it as heating, that way no transformation is required for it to be useful.

I don’t know if this dude is onto something, but with the laws of physics being what they are, I would be surprised if what he has actually works very well. Like enough that it’s worth doing.

It’s for example very easy to plop a tec (peltier) device onto something a bit warm, cool the other side with the surrounding atmosphere, and out comes electric energy. Useful energy and with a lot of devices you get out a lot of power. However it is not worth doing, those devices cost money to produce and install and would need some maintenance. This makes the power it produces more expensive than what we get from even expensive regular power sources. And the power is only there locally, transporting electric energy is pretty hard. So it isn’t all that useful and not economically attractive. So it’s never done. Usually it’s better to put that time and money into making the thing producing the waste heat more efficient, that pays off a lot more often.

Yeah I think around the Pentium 200mhz point was the sweet spot. Powerful enough to do a lot of things, but not so powerful that software can be as inefficient and wasteful as it is today.

Good news everyone! You now also can’t buy new hardware because of this.

Ah but have you tried burning a few trillion dollars in front of the painting? That might make a difference!

Another big issue with these modern huge cars is how isolated the drivers are from the outside world. It’s like being in another world, completely cut off from the rest. This means if they are even a little distracted or not looking around properly, they are going to miss stuff much more easily. And it doesn’t help these new cars usually have terrible touch screens which make you look down to do something. Plus because of the size and shape of the cars they have huge blind spots. With how safe they feel, how high the driver sits and the sound isolation, they also lose their sense of speed, which causes them to always drive way too fast for any situation. And all of the new driver aids make it easier to slack on proper driving as well. Phone distraction was already a huge issue before we got these huge cars.

I was riding my bicycle in a crowded city on Friday and the amount of huge cars is terrible. These days they are all electric or hybrid as well, which means they accelerate like crazy. We had one street with a lot of pedestrians and bicycles about and those huge cars were darting all around. Accelerating like crazy and then braking hard when the next “obstacle” aka other human beings neared. It was outright dangerous.

I’ve been riding my bicycle to work for decades now, but the amount of near death experiences per day have gone up and up the past few years. People drive like maniacs and cars seem to be designed specifically for them to do so. I feel less safe every day and wonder if it will be the end of me. But I like the fresh air and the outside, plus free exercise.

I hate cars, so even tho I have a car, I try not to ever use it unless I absolutely have to. It sits rotting in the driveway for weeks on end. And it’s only because I sometimes need it unplanned I still keep it around. Lots of times I’ve gotten a call from a friend who needed help with some job around the house. I’m handy and I have tools, so I load up my car and drive over. I like to help people, so I guess I’ll keep the car.

Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.

Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.

It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.

Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.

Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.

So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.

And thus Nvidia keeps the money faucet running. Sorry AI companies, we’ve just created the latest and greatest. We know you have invested trillions already, but you need the hot new thing or the competition gets it and you are obsolete. Time to invest some more!

Can’t we just talk to the humans

A little understanding could make things better?

Can’t we talk to the humans and work together now?

Yes there’s also a mechanism in our brains that if a food is high enough in nutrients like calories, fat, etc. we don’t feel full and just keep eating. In the past such sources were few and far between, so when one came upon them, we needed to eat as much as physically possible. The issue is, these days we have a lot of food like that. Our brains can’t handle it, so we overeat very easily.

How does this work, if one person is sharing their screen, does the client get to see? Because it seems more like remote gaming kind of thing? Where the client controls the game/app running on the server?

Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

Isn’t he just like a rich douchebag now? Why do we care about this asshole? And why does he do this kind of thing? I’m sure the injured people will be happy some rich fuck in his castle says he cares.

The current US economy is completely dependent on two things. One: low unemployment and steady growth in available jobs. Two: AI getting a return on investment by replacing millions of jobs with computers.

And somehow we are still going about our business like this is totally normal and won’t blow up any second now.