I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.

Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!

There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.

I think it’s pretty cool that, in theory, I could say “Alexa, turn on the oven to 450” and it would (a) turn the correct device to the correct setting and (b) remind me when it was ready (or if it’s being super duper smart, tell me that it was 2 mins or so away from being ready) so that I could stagger over to the kitchen, pull a pizza out of the fridge or freezer, unwrap it, and stick it in the oven. All I need to do is have a bunch of speakers bugging my home, a new oven, ideally probably not two new ovens or not a new oven and a new toaster oven because god knows what will happen, and all this stuff networked.

Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.

I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven. I’m not inviting Amazon to parse all my conversations. I don’t need to learn a new magic phrase.

Oh and imagine the hilarity when you try to sell or rent your house and the internet gets turned off. We had a smart sprinkler system which, when we sold the house, we essentially had to rip out because it was easier to install a conventional replacement than figure out how to talk to it without an active WiFi.

So, we are very energy efficient. But no so awesome in terms of energy storage density.

My impression is that founders or early investors often have a lot of ability to dilute the value of stock prior to making a deal (there’s description of similar shenanigans early in “Chaos Monkeys”)

You do understand that the whole point of hydrides is addressing hydrogen’s storage issues (energy density and need to store under pressure). Using hydrides with fuel cells was what everyone expected electric cars to use before lithium ion batteries took off.

It seems to me what we really want is a cloud file system with local cache (like Dropbox or iCloud conceptually) so that if our local device is vaporized we have a pretty much up to date logical store alive and well (and we can work on any number of machines). The word “swapping” seems to me to be based on the virtual memory model which means that if anything goes wrong you have two disconnected piles of crap.

At a file level you could theoretically have a giant file that is never wholly local, but how useful is this as a feature in real terms?

There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan and Byzantine super-soldiers) of a tiny band with no resources executing ludicrously successful military campaigns, so I guess it's not completely impossible.

Still, it seems low.