Many of the “no” comments here are very focused on the current state. The author seems to be looking at a longer time horizon of computing paradigms, for example invoking ENIAC. On that scale I tend to agree. Vibe coding has only been around a year or two and look how big of an impact it already has. Imagine what another 10 years of progress will look like.
> Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.
As someone who trained in chemical engineering in the 2000's, we never really discussed the fact that reactor waste streams were pollution, just another effluent to put somewhere. I'm pointing this out since I don't think that the relative performance profiles of petrochemical plants is going to be common knowledge.
> Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.
I don't disagree that the regulation in California is burdensome, but these refineries seem to have a really poor track record. I live in the bay area and it's a repeating story about excessive flaring or a gas leak from the east bay refineries and that communities should shelter in place. There was even a big fire at Chevron El Segundo this month that took several of their units offline. In the last 5 years that facility has had 46 air quality violations, and in the last 10 years 17 OSHA violations.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2025/10/refinery-explosio...
Then let's not forget the Aliso Canyon gas leak in LA in 2015.
In hard sci-if settings like The Expanse, would we expect that all of the electronics in space to be a few generations behind the state-of-the-art planetside to account for radiation hardening? Would the electronics be more likely to be installed inside of ships where presumably there is already radiation shielding for people (thinking sensor packages and hard points)?
I expect it'll be an ecosystem answer. Given that even personal devices might be expected to go to space or work in a dock or asteroid base, I'd expect most chips are defacto rad hard, probably by a combination of redundancy and lots of hardware accelerated software checks.
If the market demands space ready processors, and the military is primarily focused on space applications, I'd expect most of the best chips to support that radiation tolerant ecosystem.
If an environment is safe for humans, then it's safe for machines. Unfortunately this is a pretty high bar to clear and shows like the Expanse greatly undersell just how hard it will be to thrive on non-Earth locations in the solar system.
Machines can be a lot more fragile than humans though, mainly due to cost reasons. NAND flash memory chips now routinely code three or four symbols into each buried gate, which means that even a very slight disturbance can change its state. Without error correction (like most consumer hardware and software), it can cause real issues.
Not sure if I understood your comment correctly, but there is certainly not ECC in every CPU and main memory. The majority of RAM sticks you can buy do not support ECC. The NXP i.MX 8 application processors and Raspberry Pis that I was using do not support ECC memory. Also, all Cortex-M MCUs older than Cortex-M7 have no ECC in the core, and even with Cortex-M7 it is an optional extension used by STM32H7 but not NXP i.MX RT1160, 1060, 1050, etc
I don't know what you've done but that information is not correct. Standard iPads and ThinkPad laptops are used on ISS. The problem on ISS is not ionising radiation but that in zero gravity cooling by convection does not work anywhere near as well as on Earth. Without forced air circulation they just sit in a bubble of hot air.
I ran a bunch of code on standard servers lifted onto iss. Eventually we couldn't because the machines broke. I never said anything about radiation (but I was probably thinking that), just that this case refutes GPs claim that anywhere a human is safe, a computer is too.
I was wrong about ThinkPads, and I'm fine being wrong about that since ThinkPads are surprisingly robust.
Aren't humans already reasonable radiation hard? Cells are full of error correction. I would have thought with greater tolerance than an off the shelf chip.
I'm being rather vague with my defitions admittedly.
Yes, we are "reasonable radiation hard" optimised for the conditions on earth and the quite low radiation we get here.
But even so, cancer is a real threat, so increase radiation dosis and you will increase cancer rates. Along with long term dna damages and other perks.
There was the scene in the final season where Holden had to extract information from one of the bad guy belters satelites, and he had to open the box that held a computer. I've been wondering what computer chips from 250 years from now would look like... surely they hit a wall as far as miniaturization goes at least a century back. Anyways, radiation hardening even near cutting edge silicon probably comes easy, maybe because the materials they make the chips out of are radiation hardened themselves?
I’m not sure how effective signal jamming would be against COTS quadcopters. It’s relatively easy to provide on-loss-of-signal instructions to the navigation microcontroller. Perhaps it could be a return to set location command or a home in on signal jammer and explode command.
You're saying all we need to defeat these drones is lure them into a jammer and destroy them all at once with conventional air burst munitions? If you want to be fancy use a helicopter to make your air defence solution mobile.
I think you have an interesting product, but I'm having serious issues with your marketing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How many of your estimated treatment effects have been supported by experiments? Do you have experiments demonstrating that your model generalizes? How accurate are your estimates compared to experimental results?
It's ironic that you're marketing a causal + analytics product without any data. Generating a narrative and basing it off of observational data is the typical trap that many causal claims fall into. Portraying yourselves as statistical experts and pushing unsubstantiated claims is misleading bordering on unethical.
I'm less confident that a mass migration wouldn't result in millions of deaths. An example might be the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Only 14 million displaced, yet an estimated 200k-2 million deaths and another 2 million people missing[1]. In many ways, this planned displacement was a more favorable scenario than a chaotic climate refugee situation.
If we don't have a good answer to the relatively simple refugee migrations now (eg. Central America, Syria), then I have extreme pessimism that we will be able to manage a larger-scale, persistent event. Whereas with economic + political refugee situations we can always hope to resolve the root cause, with climate change it is simply the new normal.
This reminds of the abandoned practice of women being prescribed Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for menopause. Essentially the reasoning was "why not, it seems to improve patient health and we don't see any ill effects". It was such common sense at the time that it took over 30 years before a clinical trial was performed. That trial demonstrated a much higher rate of breast cancer and heart disease in HRT patients.
