Hah, yeah, I figured the muscl (sp?) variant would still be… basically impossibly broken, haha!

Neat! I did not know that!

Maybe I’ll give it another spin sometime =D

Well hey, ok, that’s what I asked for, its a detailed outline of the process!

What that whole process ultimately is, is pumping a bunch or energy into a machine, a process, that outputs hydrocarbons, which are basically energy in another form.

(Or maybe more accurately, precursors to being able to form more typical HC energy, or useful inputs to some other chemical sysnthesis process)

So, for this to even conceptually make sense, overall, you’d need to have your … fusion reactor be able produce an over unity surplus of energy, at a constant rate, that is equal in $$$ value to… basically, the sellable price of the hydrocarbon fuel you are producing, at that same rate.

And that’s simplifying out, assuming that you don’t need to further refine or otherwise transform the hydrocarbons produced by this process, which you probably would.

They do outline output volumes and concentrations, as well as… enough info that you could work backward and figure out how much energy they’re actually pumping in to this process, to achieve said yields.

So, from that, you could figure out what the required… ratio of over unity-ness of the fusion generator would have to be.

But, also, note that prices of various forms of energy, input energy, output hydrocarbon, they’re a major factor in whether or not this whole idea is viable or not, and prices can and will fluctuate.

It seems to me that this particular process … the authors seem to be describing it as not producing very high amounts of the most useful kinds of precursors for general fuel production, but is producing potentially useful amounts of precursors for other kinds of processes:

The low DME concentration and high H2: DME molar ratio in the CO2-to-HC reactions in this study may facilitate hydrogen transfer for the chain growth termination step and therefore limit the C chain length of the products, leading to formation of isobutane and isopentane as dominant products instead of isobutane and triptane, as observed at greater DME concentration. These light branched paraffins (isobutane and isopentane), which are not ideal blendstocks for high-octane gasoline, are in fact versatile precursors for SAF synthesis via commercially available alkane dehydrogenation and alkene oligomerization processes.[29], [34], [35].

They also seem to reference other attempts at modifying something like an FT process, that are more productive at producing precurors for, general fuel:

Other research groups have investigated CO2 hydrogenation over similar composite catalyst systems…

Hydrophobic modification of HBEA to improve water tolerance substantially increased C4+ HC yield and selectivity to 6.1% and 22.3%, respectively. [19] Using a 2-stage reactor system provided flexibility to control temperature of the reactors independently to achieve high CO yield in the first reactor which facilitated MeOH and MTH synthesis at the second reactor at 300 °C. The inter-stage water removal improved the activity of HBEA for MTH, resulting in C4+ HC yield and selectivity of 6.8% and 14.9%, respectively. [16]

This is genuinely novel and interesting, so I do thank you for actually informing me of this, and rescind my earlier claim of ‘bullshit’, modifying it to ‘needs further research’, specifically in the realms of how you’d scale this up, and what surrounding infrastrucure and economic parameters you’d need for this to be economically viable.

It is neat to learn that this is a thing that we can actually do… but you’d still have to work out the math of the conditions under which it would make sense to do, and be overall productive and useful… figure out how much over-unity-ness you’d need from a theoretical fusion generator for doing this to make sense.

Also:

We have termed this approach the high-octane-gasoline (HOG) pathway.

I just want to take a moment and laugh at that, lol.

Hi every one, my name is Tim, and I like video games.

I like it when kids can fully enjoy playing video games.

Kids are great, they’re the future, and they should be able to enjoy video games!

. … …

You know what else I like?

Well, its called ERP, and it stands for…

wretching, vomit splashing noises

Yep, ding ding ding, buy a burner phone, with cash, from a store that doesn’t have many or very good cameras.

Bringing your real main phone is you thinking you know more about cybersecurity and surveillance than Palantir, than all the cybersec and intel firms the US Mil and Police departments have been partnering with with over a decade now.

99.99999999% chance you don’t.

I haven’t attempted to run Void Linux in years, so, a question for you:

Can you run Steam on it?

Fuck, didn’t see your comment, but I made the same comment.

Some kind of cave/canyon area for non system d linux variants.

Can we maybe have Void Linux as like, an entrance to a foreboding cave of some kind?

I’m… trying to figure out if you could make the ‘topology’ here work with non system d variants of linux, but I can’t figure out how.

My god, the outspoken billionaire pedophile club just keeps growing.

Just can’t fucking help themselves.

… though… that… does makes sense, that you would lack self-inhibition… if you were a pedophile.

Hooray clown world!

… Some time back I put forward the idea of just making a game that is like, half splinter cell/mgs stealth combat, and half dating sim.

Basically, you have to guide the neediest, clumsiest, insecure, easily distracted, most frustrating npc through what is ostensibly a combat game… but the game just actually is an escort quest, with extra steps.

I put it forward as a joke, and a surprising number of people said they’d play it.

Apparently, fun, … is just a kind of frustration, that I guess… seems solvable.

While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.

More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…

The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.

(Not In My BackYard)

Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.

We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.

… The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.

I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.

I mean, I would generally call myself part of the anti AI crowd.

But that means I hate how its being used and inplemented in society, by people, how much money is getting thrown at it, how many people are acting like it is or is going to be something it currently isn’t and can’t be.

I hate how many companies are rushing headlong into it and fucking up workflows, security standards and workforces, how many corpos are just lying and saying they’re doing AI related restructuring, to mask that they’re actually just collapsing as a company… etc.

But, theres many more approaches to AI than just LLMs.

Theres many more ways LLMs can be designed or implemented or trained than the way we’re currently doing it.

… I run a lightweight local LLM on my damn Steam Deck.

What I don’t do is go around making claims and accusations wildly, with no basis, no ability to defend what I am saying.

I agree with you that running around screaming basically ‘everything I don’t like is AI’ is incredibly immature and annoying.

But its very possible to have a more credible and consistent view of and behavior regarding AI than that.

Like, my instance has a ton of comms devoted to AI art. I don’t care for them, by and large.

So I just block them, so I don’t see them, as opposed to constantly telling them that AI art is shit, in every post.

Everybody wins.

So, to combine both:

Make The Sims, but they are taught to be industrial engineers, who build factories instead of homes.

You can only partially direct their social and personal actions, you can’t do the builder aspect of The Sims now, you have to teach them how to do it.

And your Sims have to both hit production quotas, and also not all kill each other.

Or, make Factorio, but what you’re building is personality templates, who you then put into some kind of dollhouse type environment, and keep testing, untill you manufacture androids that produce the… sitcoms?.. that you desire.

… so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?

… Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?

I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…

…for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…

Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.

Just getting any fusion generator than is any miniscule amount of truly over unity, thats not enough.

Thats infinite energy… if you have an infinite amount of time to wait, and an infinite amount of some kind of battery system to contain that energy in.

Synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.

And for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.

If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.

It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.

Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…

Yeah I’m calling bullshit.

I would argue that that still constitutes a … kind of optimizing social obligations.

You’re just doing it backwards, maximizing antisociality.

Oh I mean… it has, because the UX and UI are fucking awful and confusing and changing all the time.

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.

Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.

Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.

Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.

With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.

But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.

Motorcycles… have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.

Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.

Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.

The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.

And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?

I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.

Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.

And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.

They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.

Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.

Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious…, than I would on a bicycle, where…

… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk… if there even is a sidewalk.

Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.

Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.

Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.

Motorcycles can do that.

So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.

I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.

We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.

We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.

I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.

Sorry I don’t read sci fi with garbage worldbuilding.

Confusing and bad UI/UX is… confusing and bad.

We’re all glad you’re a poweruser, anyway, can we maybe have an operating system that doesn’t actively hate and fight the user?

Ah, yes, of course, just pay MSFT more money, that’ll solve the problem.

… and you’re calling other people cattle?