From 7b5007ccb919927037259fcce334451b4620837c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thanh Vuong Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2019 23:21:06 -0600 Subject: wip wip --- test/comments.html | 1728 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 1728 insertions(+) create mode 100644 test/comments.html (limited to 'test') diff --git a/test/comments.html b/test/comments.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..33c95a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/test/comments.html @@ -0,0 +1,1728 @@ + + + + + + + + Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf] | Hacker News + + + +
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+ 		Can we survive technology? (1955) + [pdf] (uchicago.edu)
+ 62 points by aidanrocke 7 hours ago + | hide + | past | web + | favorite + | 35 comments
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+ "The carbon dioxide + released into the atmosphere by industry's + burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during + the last generation—may have changed the + atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account + for a general warming of the world by about one degree + Fahrenheit."

"Even in an airplane the + number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a + thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 + vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and + possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate + faultlessly over long periods, performing many + millions of regulated, preplanned actions per + second, with an expectation of only a few errors per + day or week. Many such machines have been built to + perform complicated scientific and engineering + calculations and large scale accounting and + logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will + be used for elaborate industrial process control, + logistical, economic, and other + planning" +

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+ "The carbon dioxide + released into the atmosphere by industry's + burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during + the last generation—may have changed the + at­mosphere's composition sufficiently to account + for a general warming of the world by about one degree + Fahrenheit. "

edit : this PDF looks like it has + been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I + have seen this before. +

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+ + IceWreck + + 5 hours ago + + + + + + +
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+ This is done with OCR, + specially when digitizing things.

The Internet + Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book + that I needed but they never made an electronic + edition. So the internet archive, scanned and + digitized it with character recognition to make a + select-able PDF like this, as well an epub that can + be read on your phone like any other ebook.

Now + that book is available for anyone to borrow and + read. (its still copyrighted so you gotta access + it via their DRM controlled app/website, but + that can be easily broken and its better than not + having access to that book at all) +

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+ Thanks for the heads-up. Of + course I do know what OCR is. Just hadn't seen it + combined in the wild like this. +
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+ Acrobat has had this as a + built in feature forever. +
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+ Didn't know that either. + Makes me wonder if my browser ( PDF.js ) is doing the + OCR? Anybody knows? +
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+ He means that Acrobat Pro + includes an OCR system that you can use to add a + searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers + like Acrobat Reader and PDF.js do not perform OCR. You + won't be able to use them to search scanned + documents if the document creator did not run OCR.

+ Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF + documents in order to index them better. It can be + annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as + a search result and then find out that it + doesn't include a text layer, so you need to + run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the + relevant parts. +

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+ True, but as parent, I + realized that only very recently. +
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+ Guy's login is + "the-dude," he's been around for a + while. +
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+ It's called Optical + Character Recognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition +

One of the few applications where ML-based image + recognition actually works reliably enough for + real-world applications; the USPS has been using + neural nets to read zip codes for decades. +

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+ You see it a lot in academic + databases +
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+ "Consequently, a few + decades hence energy may be free—just + like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly + as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to + which, as experience has shown, their properties are + best suited."

I am wondering why this + prediction is so off given how other ones are spot + on? How the situation back then made John von + Neumann believe it, and what happened differently, + moving this into the realms of fantasy.

Perhaps if + an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan + Project had happened, the concept of the + "free energy" would have been more + realistic. +

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+ "Too cheap to + meter" was a common assumption about the future + of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look + at the amount of power available based on the raw + materials, it's a reasonable prediction.

They + simply didn't take into account all of the + associated costs and complexities that would be + involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not + to mention the political and social complications. +

That doesn't mean such a future can never + happen, it's theoretically possible. + We're simply in a place right now where + it's hard to imagine with our current level + of technology and our current energy + economy. +

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+ They didn’t expect that + government regulation would kill innovation in the + nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been + regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, + clean power today. We may have had hundreds of + thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that + would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved + by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate + change. +
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+ > They didn’t expect that + government regulation would kill innovation in the + nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been + regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, + clean power today.

The regulation is basically a + liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants + more, not less, of it to build plants. +

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+ That doesn’t mean that + regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by + eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. + Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means + there is a high incentive to stick with older designs + that have already been reviewed by the government. + (Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer + designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive + to deploy them.) +
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+ > If nuclear plants had + not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have + abundant, clean power today. We may have had + hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear + accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the + tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier + and pushing off climate change. +

And if wishes were horses .... It's hard to + imagine how any democratic society could have gotten + past the salience bias to make that happen. (Also, + there's the better-the-devil-you-know + familiarity bias working in coal's favor, to + say nothing of the political influence of voters + depending directly or indirectly on coal for their + livelihoods.)

EDIT: This also brought to mind the + trolley problem [0], with the added wrinkle that + it's not possible to predict with any + confidence which specific persons would actually + be injured or killed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem + +

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+ If nuclear plants had not + been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have + abundant, clean power today. +

Are African and Latin American countries with less + effective governments and less regulation are + leading the world in innovation, cheap nuclear + power, genetic engineering and so on?

A casual + disregard for the living and a "happily ever + after" fairy tale correlates pretty well with + a lot of cult and religious behaviours, and + associated human tragedies, but not very well with + actual happily ever after, I think. + +

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+ Low regulation is a necessary + but not sufficient condition for innovation. You also + need the predicate technologies, precision + manufacturing capabilities, etc. But within the US, + where we have those things, loosely regulated + industries (like the Internet) have consistently + evolved faster than heavily regulated ones. +
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+ Yea, that is of my + understanding too. There was no need for any great + advance in that matter at the time. Now however, the + situation is different, and yet, not as pressing as + the global conflict back then to fund another + "Los Alamos". +
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+ I wonder if they had the + 'capacity paradox' in mind, where the more + you can have, you more you will use. In the 50s energy + usage were quite minuscule compared to today I + think. +
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+ > We're simply in a + place right now where it's hard to imagine with + our current level of technology and our current energy + economy.

...and the fact we have about 4bn more + people here than we did in 1960. +

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+ We have far fewer people than + growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that + time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling + period of ~35 years, had it continued the population + would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it.

So, no, + population (at least high population) + isn't something that was unforeseen. +

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+ The sequestration of atomic + technology (not just power) is one of the rare areas + where the interests of the good guys and bad guys + coincide.

Energy is free: we have a fusion + generator that runs 24/7 with no maintenance + and is so powerful it can burn out your retinas from + 150 million kilometers away. +

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+ This was before Chernobyl, + and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would + probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now.

+ This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy + was theoretically possible but before half a century + of research has labeled the problem 'very + hard'. +

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+ Sounds a bit like the Jevons + paradox - we improve the efficiency of energy + consumption, but it does not result in it being free, + because demand increases to counter. +
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+ Demand increased + dramatically.

If federal mortgage rules empathized + solar, you’d see near free energy production in + residential in a decade or two. +

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+ He made other incorrect + predictions in the same document. We continue to + (incidentally and carelessly) change the climate, but + have yet to achieve anything like the reliably + controllable weather he anticipated.

He also + incorrectly anticipated that atomic transmutation of + the elements would become a bigger trend than + chemical rearrangement of existing elements.

+ "It is worth emphasizing that the main trend + will be systematic exploration of nuclear + reactions — that is, the transmutation of + elements, or alchemy rather than chemistry." +

As for why he was mistaken about nuclear power, + it's possible that he was extrapolating + from the fantastically rapid progress of nuclear + weapons technology. Fission was demonstrated in + 1938, the first chain reaction in 1942, the + first fission weapon in 1945. The first megaton + scale thermonuclear explosion was demonstrated + in 1952 and serial production of thermonuclear + weapons began in 1954. Between 1944 and 1954 the + explosive power of the largest military bombs + went up by a factor of roughly two + million [1] [2]. There was a 2300-fold + leap from Grand Slam to Little Boy (6.5 tons TNT + equivalent to 15 kilotons) and another + thousand-fold leap from Little Boy to Castle + Bravo (15 kilotons to 15 megatons).

The + challenges of making useful power reactors for + electricity production are much different. + Civilian power reactors have to compete with + other electricity sources on cost. They have + to produce power for decades rather than a + fraction of a second. They are expected to + fully contain fission products rather than + disperse them widely as fallout. Recall that + at the time of this writing, 1955, no country + had yet built a power reactor comparable in + output to large coal or hydroelectric plants. + There had only been some small demonstrations + like the 2 megawatts of electricity produced + by the BORAX-III reactor. The actual + difficulties to be encountered at larger + scales were not yet known.

Finally, + "affordable" electricity was a + moving target. In constant dollars, large + American industrial buyers were paying 40% + less per megawatt hour in 1970 than they + were in 1950 [3]. Concerns about acutely + hazardous air pollution were not yet + widespread enough to justify a cost premium + over fossil-generated power. Widespread + concerns about greenhouse gas emissions were + even further off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb) +

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb +

[3] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/histstats-colonial-1970.p... + - page 827 +

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+ Within the U.S. - we live in + a profit-maximizing capitalist structure. Why would + any economic entity give something away for free when + a profit can be made? +
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+ Competition pushing price + down to a near-zero cost base? like the $1 + microcontroller you can buy today. +
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+ or the one cent + microcontroller you can buy today. +
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+ I remember the immortal words + of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being able to + master technology and yet not have have grown + comparably enough in spirituality to live as + brothers. +
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+ For the kind of explosiveness + that man + will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe + is dangerously small, its political units + dangerously unstable.-John von Neumann +
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+ I'm not sure if there + ever existed a man as ahead of his time as Von + Neumann. +
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+ Da Vinci? Bucky Fuller?

+ Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the + Completeness of the Logical Calculus" von + Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's + program) on the spot. +

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