Andrew Côté

I can’t believe how you can still hear that’s it’s a V8. Too cool.

Seems entirely possible Life on Earth was accidentally seeded by some super advanced nanobot weaponry from the Great Galactic War that made the night sky quiet. Probably a bunch of nascent civilizations about to encounter empty Ark ships and abandoned wormhole networks etc

There's a huge risk to orbital datacenters which I'm surprised I haven't seen discussed anywhere. All SSO datacenter operators need to align their orbital direction: strictly prograde (dusk-dawn) or strictly retrograde (dawn-dusk). If even a small number of players decide differently from the rest then head-on collisions are essentially guaranteed. A single collision would release 40 tons of TNT, quickly turning this very special orbit into a debris field. The good news is - the solution is very simple. There are few benefits of mixing dawn-dusk with dusk-dawn. Everyone just needs to choose dawn-dusk. Starcloud is working hard to make this happen. DM me if you are a dawn-dusk SSO user and would like to help.

The absolute non-takeoff of VR and AR is probably one of the big upsets in consumer electronics history Pretty much everyone thought this would be huge and it sort of just isn't

Did you know… The 1978 NASA mini-BRU (Brayton Rotating Unit) and the Garrett Racing Turbocharger, are actually the same technology? Can you guess which is which in the images? Did you know that the mini-BRU is a compact power conversion system developed for space applications intended to be paired with a nuclear isotope heat source? Mini-BRU was designed to circulate Helium-Xenon in a closed loop with a Plutonium 238 heat source. The mini-BRU was 88% efficient which is much more efficient than the 12% efficiency achieved by the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator RTG. RTG flew, mini-BRU did not. But what’s also cool is that Garret Racing turbochargers use the same turbomachinery impellers as the mini-BRU, and not a lot of people know that. Why would anyone know that? Anyway, mini-BRU is actually a viable power conversion technology. It’s fairly accessible and can be put together, and is probably a great power conversion technology for some particular applications. Partly because it is constructed from systems, subsystems and components that car factories can build (quite literally the Anduril-method-solution to a growing industrial bottleneck), but also because it is a Brayton machine. Turning heat into electrical energy is a fun problem, people think it is solved and that boiling water is the way to go and that this is proven and the best way to convert heat to electrical power. Steam is OK, but it’s not that hot and the biggest part of a steam Rankine cycle sucks. Brayton cycles are hotter (and cooler), and if you run them closed and politely and without combustion they’re kinda easy. If you know your technical and industrial history and you know where to look, and who to talk to, the future is already here, and in many cases it’s been here for decades, it just isn’t evenly distributed because every bozo wants to buy the mainstream thing and only misfits and weirdos ready old NASA manuals and Soviet rocket papers. But if you want to actually solve things, and build things, you can do incredible things with stuff that is already here.