Works fine on my phone, Firefox+GrapheneOS.

Yes I was wondering why they mentioned those numbers without mentioning their practical significance.

> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.

This sounds like the original internet.

Before adtech took over.

The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.

No because any attempt at interference would in that case trigger article 5 of NATO.

> ideal spacecraft fuel

If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.

I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.

> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.

Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.

It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...

Antimatter is a completely different story.

The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.

At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.

A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.

So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.

But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.

Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.

You can easily put it into an antimatter tank ;-)

Only if you wear antimatter gloves while doing it.

Also, now your tank is just fuel as well.

Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.

They are; something with no energy content can have no volatility either.

Surely you understand there's a difference?

Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.

Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.

And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.

Any compressed gas fuel is inherently dangerous. There's a video of a CNG-fueled bus falling off a lift and sending a fireball through the maintenance facility.

Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.

Which is why we generally don't use highly volatile fuels in vehicles, like I just said?

And, no, batteries can have outbursts but they're nowhere near as catastrophic as compressed, explosive gases or an antimatter bomb.

If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.

Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.

Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.

Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.

The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.

But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.

For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.

Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.

You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.

The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.

Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most common cause of launch delays.

With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.

Maybe the author was aware of all this, but with "Apple Just Lost Me" they wanted to say that this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

It would be great if all open source required payment of at least 1 dollarcent for enterprises, to make sure the purchase accounting layers are working in case anyone wants to send more money.

For 1 cent, we can still call it "free" even as in beer, the amount is small enough for that to be fair.

And if the penny isn't paid, no source? Then it's not open source. And practically speaking, no one will pay that.

Going after them with legal claims is an odd definition of "can".

Nobody is going after them.

And remember this is only for enterprises.

And in order to pay that 1 cent, you have to pay 23 cents or so to a payment processor.

It's only for enterprises. They should have no problem with that.

You need thick cables if you want to power a rack with 48V.

But there was an equivalent: a mechanical switch. Or an electromechanical relay. Or a spinning wheel with electrical contacts.