Nah, skip the garbage and jump straight to brainrot videos.

Switched to Qwant about a month ago, and it seems fine so far. I guess it’s time to expand this experiment to my other computers as well.

As if being shredded to atoms wasn’t harsh enough, you don’t even get keep your neutrons and electrons in this process. I guess it still counts as “exiting” the black hole, but just barely.

That is also true, but low output production doesn’t get the benefits of economies of scale. That means that the number of people we need per amount of stuff produced will be higher if we do things small scale. If we have a city of a million people, you can totally arrange various things in a more centralized way, which brings the benefits of large scale production.

Ever wondered why waste water purification or energy production tends to favor large scale facilities? Same applies to farming wheat, grinding it to flour and baking bread.

If you have only small towns, everyone will just focus on making the basic necessities happen. Who has the time to design new electric motors, when you need to spend your time milking your sheep and harvesting berries for next winter.

Restarting production chains and manufacturing facilities is going to be the biggest bottle neck.

If we imagine something like climate change wiping out 99% of the population, there just aren’t enough people to do all that. It’s going to be all hands on deck just to produce enough food for everyone. It will take a few centuries of rebuilding to get to that point.

Speaking of laptops, many years ago, I saw a huge laptop. I thought 17” was big, but this one was just ridiculous. May have been something like 21” or something. Those things have been around for years, so finding a used one should be possible.

Kids and elderly people are already doing all of that, so it is technically possible, but inconvenient. You would also need to outsource your smartphone activities to someone else to actually make it work.

Option 1 seems semi-feasible, but it is getting harder every year. Also, certain activities are already beyond your reach if you’re in this group. As long as you don’t want to do any of those things, you should be fine though.

Option 2 is impossible unless you outsource your phone needs to someone else.

Option 3 is hard, but possible. You would need to limit your activities quite significantly. BTW some homeless people have a dumb phone as their only electronic device. You kinda need to have a phone number in order to barely survive.

Option 4 is the most extreme one. Children and elderly are living like this, but they are also outsourcing everything, so does that count?

Don’t introduce anything too radical, so no tunneling electron microscopes just yet. However, you should be able to use empirical science to debunk BS ideas and move things along that way.

For example, the phlogiston idea was proven wrong in the 1770s when people started burning metals and realized their mass increased in the process. Also, certain compounds can release oxygen, which can maintain a flame in an otherwise empty container. Sounds simple to us now, but back in those days, it was revolutionary.

The idea is that you have to work within the framework available at the time.

Yes, that helps to lower the total energy cost of boiling the water. It’s better than nothing, but still pretty far from ideal.

Waste heat recovery is a thing, and the economics usually work out in your favor if the feed material is really hot. If it’s only mildly warm, you’ll need a lot of machinery to concentrate the heat and raise the temperature to a useful level. At some point, the investment just gets absurd and the idea gets scrapped.

Using heat as heat makes the most sense, since there are fewer steps where you lose some of the heat. Theoretically, you could boil water with server heat, but the massive investment is probably the reason why that isn’t happening everywhere. Running reverse osmosis probably won’t work, because you need electricity for the pumps, and converting heat into electricity comes with significant losses.

Speaking of the north, the answer is yes. You totally can, and should, use the heat for something like district heating.

Besides, having your own FS is pretty bad ass in the same way as running Linux From Scratch.

Doesn’t have to be world changing or even practical. A project like that would still teach you a ton about storage hardware, how file systems work, programming, mathematics etc. Some of these lessons could even be useful, but above all, a project like this should be fun and interesting.

Why do you think people install Linux and run Doom on all the weirdest hardware they can find. This is the spirit that drives innovation.

Don’t let expectations hold you back. Make your own FS, and have fun.

I think I’ve read about a similar project where someone would send packages across the internet, and use the delay as a form of memory. The capacity wasn’t great, but the idea was really cool regardless.

Reminds me of something a coworker once told me. If you had a time machine and went back to the year 1825, there would be an absurd amount of basic chemistry you could discover. Some of it doesn’t even require any fancy equipment, but if you had a proper lab at your disposal, you could become famous in no time.

Making something comparable with ext4 would probably take an autistic genius who dedicates their every waking moment to this project. Someone who eats, drinks and breathes numbers.

Other people can hope to make a fun little project that teaches them about file systems and storage hardware. Might not be a competitor to anything, but it doesn’t have to be. People like to tinker with all sorts of weird stuff, like installing doom on a toaster or something. The way I see it, this FS project is probably in that category.

But we’re on Lemmy, and that comes with a huge selection bias. In fact, you don’t really find that many typical individuals here. A significant part of the population here uses Linux as a hobby, or does something technical for a living. Possibly both!

I really don’t think it’s that far fetched to imagine that it’s possible to find someone in here who has the time, energy, enthusiasm, patience knowledge and intelligence to build a new file system. I’m pretty sure you can also find more than one person capable of writing their own drivers or libraries.

Throwing money on lottery can make you rich. Or it might not. Honestly, the odds are stacked against you.

What doesn’t kill you, may make you stronger… unless it maims you for life. People who have survived wars aren’t necessarily stronger. Quite the contrary actually.

LOL. I knew I should have read it 4 times before posting.

Some factories have public tour days every year. Just look it up on their website.

If you have some kind of an organization behind you, it’s also possible to arrange such tours during other times. You could also make your own industrial tour association, get a bus full of people and start arranging tours with different companies. Just contact the PR department in advance, make some phone calls etc. and you should be able to visit a whole bunch of interesting places.

Edit: I swipe too fast