troyunrau

I am fortunate in that I took a very niche applied science in university, and was successful in that career as an employee/consultant -- geophysics. So I have high value, rare technical skills. I blew out my knee in the high arctic doing scientific surveys -- so I decided to try to parley those skills into something where I could be my own boss. Fortunately I also picked up a business partner with a similar background (former coworker) who wanted to run the business side of the business.

During COVID I started an equipment business to provide the required specialty tools to other geophysicists -- things like ground penetrating radar and such. There was exactly one business already operating in this space in Canada, so there was room for a second player. It's a high capital business -- I'm basically taking the capital risk of buying rare equipment and spreading it out across the continent. (People don't want to buy a $50k device to use for a week.) But it was a huge risk -- I have one business partner, and we both wagered out houses on the startup loan. We're past the hump now and our revenue is directly funding growth, so huzzah! (It took six months to get our first client -- but now it's about six hours between clients, without having to do any marketing bullshit.) I have real world hands on experience with all the gear and am not just a sales robot, which keeps everyone coming back for advice, opinions, networking, and we are growing by word of mouth.

My boss is a hardass though. ;)

If later in life means, more recently... I started my first business during COVID in my late 30s. Doing great!

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn't owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch... But it's still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

It isn't all the users. It's localized outages across several networks. Also, this is solar flare related, which is cool :)

Not to be argumentative, and I generally see your point :)

I do occasionally write software that will have zero users -- not even myself. Because it's fun to play with the code. "I wonder if I can prototype a openscad type thingy using Python set syntax..." Or whatever. It's the equivalent of sitting in front of a piano and creating song fragments to pass the time.

Naturally the benefit here is that you're developing skills, passing time in an entertaining fashion, and working the ole grey matter.

I've worked on open source software projects, some of them pretty major. And we had a sort of similar debate. In a non-capitalist software product, the users are not strictly required -- particularly if they aren't paying, you don't really need them. Except that open source has this user->contributor treadmill that requires that some users become contributors in order for a project to grow. So you want to be as pro-user as possible, hoping and dreaming you'll get patches out of the blue some day, or similar.

But what happens when your users become hostile or entitled. What if they do the equivalent of calling tech support and demanding satisfaction. The customer is always right, right? How much time and effort can you devote to them without detracted from what you were doing (coding). Eventually as a product grows, the number of hostile users grows. What do you do to manage this at scale?

Suddenly you're facing the same problem Home Depot faces in your article, except your capital is not measured in dollars but time, motivation, mood... And you start putting up barriers in a similar fashion.

I hate to alarm you but... What is a file system except dynamically allocated memory. ;)

Probably this is captured equipment within the geofenced operational zone. Likely the geofence isn't responsive enough to changes in the frontline position (being more responsive might actually breech opsec). And likely Ukranians are having trouble with inventory control on their Starlink dishes -- knowing which ones are captured or not. Very likely the media is making this a bigger story than it ought to be, from a technical and logistical perspective. Practically speaking, this is like connecting to the enemy's civilian cell network while within range.

As much as cyberpunk is an aesthetic, it's as much about late stage capitalism and the corporate dystopia. Fortunately for us, the Apple VirtualBoy will flop, so we will get neither in this specific case. ;)

That would go a long way towards solving the range anxiety barrier. 1000km is close to the maximum that same people can do in a single day. Yes, you could push further in a day in a pinch, but not comfortably unless you're rotating drivers. It's pretty close to the limits enforced on long haul truck drivers in Canada or the US (depends on speed limits and traffic density and a few other things).

We can't just imagine some additional physics into being. Newton's laws and relativity were conceived as explanations for observed phenomena. We have no observed phenomena that allow us to create, for example, reactionless engines, or allow us to violate thermodynamics.

So my assumption is that our understanding of physics is relatively complete, and there are no hitherto unknown forces to exploit for travel purposes. Thus any interstellar approach must adhere to these basic principles.

Newton's laws have withstood every attempt to be worked around. Relativity didn't throw Newton's laws out -- it just special cases them (Newton's laws are a subset of relativistic laws where speeds are low).

Basic principles:

(1) Thermodynamics: Engines require energy to produce inertia/momentum changes, and using that energy produces heat. (2) Newton: To change your velocity, you need to apply a force, and that requires something to push against. (3) Mechanics: To slow down requires time, even at the highest levels of deceleration (and faster deceleration makes the first two more visible).

There are potentially some stealth approaches: (1) Using a heat pump to create a cold shield on the front facing side, and radiating your heat behind it. (Circumvented if we have any sort of probes behind it looking back towards us.) (2) Using directed energy (photons or similar) as your reaction mass and pointing it at an off-axis angle (at a loss of efficiency, and circumvented by detecting secondary illumination or by probes that are in line with that light). (3) But these still require stopping time. And the total energy to stop is literally astronomical.

Perspective. To decelerate a single kg that is approaching earth at .99c, the amount energy needed is approximately equal to converting 6x that amount of mass to pure energy. Basically to decelerate 1kg, you'd need to bring 3kg of matter and 3kg of antimatter and have them perfectly annihilate in such a way that 100% of that energy were put into deceleration. This is roughly equal to 6x the size of the Tsar Bomba explosion (largest nuke ever detonated). If you have a spaceship of any realistic size approaching earth at .99c, it's putting out a shittonne (technical term) of energy to stop.

Seriously, any alien looking to destroy us wouldn't bother with slowing them down. They'd just ram those 1kg objects directly into earth at .99c and obliviate us without ever being detected.