https://youtu.be/N5Rs8zdEHJw?si=jFusKJdAzHXCaTBh

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.

Sure, but it would be less efficient than a sail, and since the incoming radiation would impart inertia on the solar panels, you would still be limited on where you could steer.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?

Ironically, it didn’t break, but when I was on the road and needed a power drill to fix something, I didn’t feel bad about dropping $500 on a new Milwaukee from Ace hardware.

Power tools. If you are not a professional and need to buy a tool (if you can’t borrow one), buy the cheap one.

I used a $30 Ryobi drill for over a decade and it was fine.

(For the US market. They still make sedans for Europe)

One of the temporary fixes for the Chevy Bolt fires was to update the software to detect if the battery was about to go up and then honk the horn to warn everyone which I think is hilarious.

If you sidegrade to a Casio F-91W, there’s a fun open-source project called Sensor Watch that repolaces the PCB to bring some nice features.

My watch can now tell me sunrise/sunset times, run 6 different count down timers, and act as a full dice set for DnD.

Full list of complications: https://www.sensorwatch.net/docs/watchfaces/complication/

Like half of the water in the US goes to grow plants to feed animals that we eat. Fuck those animals, I want that water.

Nuts in brownies. Fucking don’t.

I mean to paraphrase Brenan Lee Mulligan: “if you have magic that can teleport things instantly, giving the task of delivering letters to Earth’s slowest bird is animal cruelty.”

With very few exceptions, that popular TV show you like with either end bad or get cancelled before it gets a chance to end bad.

Bilbo says he feels like butter spread over too much bread.

Just don’t eat all the bread! If I have too much bread, I freeze it. I don’t butter it with a tragically small amount of butter.

The line should be like “too little butter spread over bread” or something.

Haven’t watched this particular video, but we watched the iPhone 14 one when my wife was shopping for a new phone a year ago.

He only does landscapes, so he won’t answer the question for indoor lighting.

And I guess I can walk my claim back a bit. I’m just a bit frustrated since I had a hard time finding a purpose built camera that could match an iPhone while being remotely pocketable.

Ricoh does alright for my purposes.

I mean computational photography is exactly how you beat physics. And it’s shockingly good.

https://youtu.be/3EFW_dAX9lQ?si=LvaoeAG6h9HQoKc4

Highly recommend this guy’s videos on the matter. Can’t find a good comparison at very low light, but even dusk conditions are fine for a new iPhone.

What I don’t get is if you have to pay actors, camera crew, rent on sets and equipment, etc, how much can you save on a writer by using AI? Especially since the expectations are already so low?

Is this just a way to avoid hiring union work? I assume these actors aren’t union?

Poor Quibi. Totally ahead of it’s time.

Yeah way too big for my purposes. I needed a camera that’s with me literally all the time (as much as a phone would be).

He GRIII doesn’t have interchangeable lenses, but it’s still a 24MP APS-C with an f/2.8 prime. I’d argue it’s as “real” a camera as any other.

I bought a Canon T2i in 2010. 19MP, APS-C sensor. Had it fitted with a $1200 17-55 F/2.8 IS lens. Used to bring it to family Christmas every year for the group photo until around 2016. My cousin handed me her phone to get the family on it as well.

Between improvements in sensor technology, whatever post processing was happening at the time, and the lenses on the iPhone, it blew my camera away.

It’s actually pretty hard to find a midrange camera now because phones are so good. I switched to a dumb phone last year. Best pocketable camera I could find to complement it that wasn’t a toy was the Ricoh GRIII which came out in 2019. Got a 4K camcorder. Best I could do was a Sony AX700 from 2018.