Comments by "seneca983" (@seneca983) on "Thunderf00t" channel.

  1. If he starts drilling from both ends he can do it in 250!
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  2.  @pt8306  I don't quite agree. I do agree that in cities it makes sense to increase the share of public transit, walking, and biking of all trips made. However, cars will still likely play a part. Self-driving cars are not a silver bullet but they can likely still be useful. They can e.g. allow car users to more easily also use public transport. A self-driving car can drop you off at a railway station or a bus stop and drive elsewhere. If you're driving the car yourself you can't all that easily do something like that. Developing self-driving cars doesn't come at the expense of investing in public transit.
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  3. "South Korea has a different population [...] density" It's almost 14 times higher than that of the US which works against them yet they've been more successful in containing the epidemic. (The number of people per km² isn't that good of a metric because population density varies a lot, but the fact remains that this is a metric where the Koreans face a greater challenge but have fared better.)
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  4. "If the battery were part of the structure, what happens when it can no longer hold a charge? If it isn't easily replaceable, the whole vehicle would have to be scrapped." And this doesn't only waste the vehicle but the battery too. A battery that has lost too much of its capacity to work in an EV can still e.g. be used as an energy storage in a home etc. However, if the battery is a part of the structure it can't easily be removed for such usage and might have an inconvenient shape if you still try that.
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  5. "it's doing exactly what YouTube wants it to do" Unlikely. A much simpler explanation is that making an algorithm do what YouTube wants is very difficult so it fails often.
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  6. I think that autonomous vehicles can eventually become safer than human drivers but it might still take a long while before we get there.
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  7. "At a kilometer per year, I expect Musk's tunnel to reach Los Angeles in about the year 2450." But he can start drilling from both ends so it can be finished in half the time!
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  8. I think Nile Red had a video of making soap and he demonstrated that it's relatively harmless to dip your fingers into a solution of lye. Though I'd assume you'd want to rinse your fingers before the skin starts to get irritated.
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  9.  @TheStarBlack  He's a professional photographer and films stuff like this to license it out. The simplest explanation is that he wants money from people who use his footage and that he deemed that this wasn't fair use (whether he's right or not in that regard). Is there anything "between the lines" that speaks against this explanation?
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  10. "He already screwed himself by not using a DMCA takedown" What? Isn't it more courteous to first just ask if TF is willing to resolve the issue rather going straight to a takedown?
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  11.  @andrewfranklin4429  "they are still optimising it. It will get faster" There's no guarantee of that. Other tunnel borer makers have also been developing their machines for a long time. If there was an easy way to make them faster without significant downsides it would likely have been done already. It's not implausible that The Boring Company could come up with some improvements but earth-shattering ones (pun intended) are not super likely.
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  12. It's not obviously fair use. "if he wants to sell stock footage specifically YouTube is probably not the place to post your stuff.. for free?" Why so? He doesn't lose the copyright just by posting it to his own channel.
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  13.  @spaceduck413  "Mahlmann said he charges $750 for this - those are his damages." Damages can be higher than the normal licensing fee but they're still likely to be much smaller than the cost of a court battle.
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  14.  @spaceduck413  "Which is just silly." Mahlmann may believe (whether correct or not) that if he's not willing to take the hit others will not bother to pay him either when using his clips.
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  15. I'm only guessing but here's what I think. In a freeze dryer the temperature is very low which means the saturated vapor pressure of water is also very low. For the sublimation of the water to happen at a reasonable rate the actual partial pressure of the water vapor needs to be below that. The surrounding air will probably have much higher partial pressure of water vapor because it's much warmer and therefore won't be good for drying in subzero temperatures. Raising the saturated vapor pressure by heating is out of the question for obvious reasons. Therefore sucking out the water vapor by a vacuum pump might be the only option. Also sucking out the air in addition to water vapor isn't necessary as such but vacuum pumps cannot selectively only suck out the water vapor.
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  16. Kowloon Walled City
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  17.  @theultimatereductionist7592  "Dr Mason never hacked any of Trevor's computers." That's not a requirement for it to be copyright infringement.
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  18. But unlike Theranos, Musk hasn't raised outside capital to spend on realizing Hyperloop, has he?
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  19. Obviously, Thunderf00t is going to mainly make videos about ones that can't work as promised rather than those that plausibly could.
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  20.  @nohbudinose  ". I can't imagine a good way to synchronize the generators/motors to the grid. So you would need to buffer all of that into some intermediate storage, and then have some monumental infrastructure to chop it all up and ship it out through some big transformers." There's no need for intermediate storage. You can just convert the AC from the motors into DC and then invert it back to AC in a way that's synchronized with the grid. There would be some losses but this is what wind turbines do so it clearly works. Of course, Energy Vault will still not be viable but this issue is not among the reasons why it won't.
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  21.  @THEREALZENFORCE  "Tf00t claim : "you can't make it work with water, you have zero chance" Reality : Vianden Pumped Storage Plant (since the 1970s in my country)" Thunderf00t knows about pumped storage. He has mentioned it in his earlier Energy Vault video. That "can't make it work with water" was obviously referring water tower / tower crane sized systems, not actual pumped storage.
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  22. ​ @awdrifter3394  "So it seems like if regulation is not an issue, building a bigger nuclear power plant is most cost effective per kwh." I suspect that depends on the situation. That doesn't apply to SMRs in any case, at least not necessarily, because they're still in development and thus not yet an option. They might become more economical than bigger reactors due economics of scale in factory production once developed, though it's not certain. Btw, China is developing its own SMRs (ACP100) so clearly they see promise in them and not just in large reactors. "gravity energy storage like this is mainly to sidestep any environmental impact regulation" But they're still tiny compared to pumped hydro. I don't think avoiding regulation is so valuable that getting a much smaller capacity is worth it.
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  23. Too bad there isn't a way to short sell Indiegogo campaigns.
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  24.  @ActionHeinz  I suspect he has licensed many of his videos, not sure about this particular one, and charged that same amount.
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  25.  @TruthNerds : That's certainly true. Nile Red did mention that as well.
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  26.  @genli5603 : Short exposure (on the skin) isn't a problem. A longer one is. Btw, pure lye is a solid so it's even less of a threat.
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  27.  @cybernitemusic  "He comments on the laughing." But that's not the creative content of the video. If TF were commenting on e.g. camera angles or exposure that might more likely count as fair use.
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  28. Not yet watched most of the video, but $1 million per life saved sounds pretty reasonable.
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  29. Better than a two-bit company...well, maybe not.
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  30. I thought the word "polar" meant that the molecule actually has a non-zero dipole moment (and not just quadrupole or some higher moment).
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  31.  @MichelleHell  My point was that he called CO₂ "polar" even though it doesn't have a dipole moment. I didn't the word could be used like that.
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  32. Even if his videos aren't behind a paywall that still doesn't mean you can just use them in your own video without permission.
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  33.  @Nirakolov  Thunderf00t isn't giving a critique of Mahlmann's work, which is what would matter for fair use, but rather that of Musk's work (featured in Mahlmann's video).
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  34.  @Nirakolov  I'm not a lawyer either but Leonard French (an actual copyright lawyer; see the pinned comment) has made a video on this. His estimate was that the fair use factors at least slightly favor Mahlmann. Of course, the outcome is still not certain but based on Leonard's video I would guess that Mahlmann would be the one to prevail in court.
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  35. Doesn't Waymo have autonomous cars in some places?
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  36.  @Rhannmah  "to be fair, most of the CO2 emissions in concrete manufacture comes from using fossil fuels to excavate, transport and manufacture concrete" No, that's not the case. Concrete is made from limestone (among other things) i.e. calcium carbonate. When it's heated in a cement kiln carbon dioxide is expelled. That's where the majority of the emissions come from. It's also a fairly difficult problem as that reaction is necessary to make concrete unless you use a completely different chemistry.
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  37. I'm only guessing here but here's what I think. In the subzero temperature of the freeze dryer, the equilibrium partial pressure of the water vapor is going to be very low and you need to get the actual partial pressure to be clearly below that for the sublimation to happen at a reasonable rate. The surrounding air likely to have a higher partial pressure of water vapor because it's much warmer so it's not much help. The normal dryer mechanism of using heat is out of the question for obvious reasons. Therefore sucking the water vapor out with a vacuum pump might be the only practical choice. Also sucking out the air as well might not be necessary as such but in practice, the vacuum pump is going to do that as well as a side effect.
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  38. "Surely that is commentary" But it's not commentary on Mahlmann's video. It's commentary on SpaceX and SpaceX fans that merely uses Mahlmann's video.
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  39. It's not clear at all that it's fair use.
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  40.  @mirozen_  It's fair to not give my opinion more weight but Leonard French (who's an actual copyright lawyer) made a video on this and estimated that the fair use factors somewhat favor Mahlmann. Below this video, he made a comment, pinned by Thunderf00t, that if Thunderf00t was specifically criticizing Mahlmann himself (rather than e.g. SpaceX using Mahlmann's video) then in his estimate that would tilt the balance towards fair use. Either way, this doesn't seem like a clear-cut case and both Mahlmann and Thunderf00t would have a non-insignificant risk of losing in court.
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  41.  @mirozen_  I had personally assumed the person/people cheering wasn't the same as the person filming (i.e. Mahlmann). Maybe Leonard did too. If that were the case, then it would seem that Thunderf00t wasn't criticizing Mahlmann but I can't be sure if Mahlmann himself was cheering or not. I'm not sure how it would affect a potential court case if Thundef00t sincerely thought it was Mahlmann cheering but if it also turned out that it wasn't.
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  42.  @mirozen_  I don't really know. He is a professional photographer and these videos are his work so they're not "mere" fan videos. He seems to have filmed a lot of SpaceX stuff but he also has other stuff like NASA and airplanes. He does have a Tesla referral code for discounts on his webpage. That might indicate he's a Musk fan though not necessarily as he's presumably getting some compensation for that.
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  43. He's right in the sense that the Earth having an atmosphere is not a thermodynamic equilibrium and the atmosphere is escaping into space. The process is just so slow that it takes virtually forever.
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  44.  @seabreezecoffeeroasters7994 : "Espresso is the Italian spelling of it." But "expresso" is the French spelling of it.
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  45.  @seabreezecoffeeroasters7994 : "the original term is Italian" But it's quite common for loanwords to change from the language they're borrowed from. In general, words tend to change in both spelling and pronunciation over time and to a nitpicker, any change would be an error until it becomes so common that it's the norm. (Though it's probably fair to point out that "espresso" is still the dominant spelling in English.)
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  46. Impact Factor technology.
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  47. The plan for fusion reactors is that they could produce their own tritium from lithium.
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  48. It's not that easy. Maybe you could expect him to have worded his email in a friendlier manner but it's another thing entirely to expect him to not ask to be paid for his work. Would you be satisfied if your employer just sent you thanks instead of a paycheck?
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  49. Multiplying licensing fees when the work was initially used without licensing it first is entirely common.
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  50. It's not extortion.
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