149 points by simonebrunozzi27 days ago | 34 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
For those unfamiliar with Bucky, I highly recommend his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Its a short, light read. He has a really interesting take on technology’s role in pirates and he was a firm believer that there is enough resources for everyone. He even talks about the US’s vulnerability to an attack on its water system.
Towards the end of his life, Bucky had achieved rock star status and his lectures filled stadiums in all corners of the world. At age 88, he twice circumnavigated the globe to give nonstop addresses. And they weren't short - his talks routinely lasted between three and four hours without breaks. Truly a remarkable character.
It's funny, I had a similar experience taking a nap in the office. I listen to the home of the spinny hard drives all around me, and suddenly my mind zoomed out, and I became aware of how many computers there were around me, and try to imagine how many there were in a 10-mile radius.
That radius kept expanding and I became painfully aware that most of them were just sitting there, not doing anything useful at all.
Not a very original idea — I was familiar with SETI@Home — but it was weird to me how little it had caught on.
Most computers are just spinning their wheels most of the time. That's a lot of power just sitting there.
Ran similar numbers years back for a talk on energy consumption, comparing household kWh use to manual labor equivalents. Once you hit four digits of "slaves" per person, the abstraction stops feeling useful and just feels absurd, which is kind of the point.
The comic doesn't answer the question "how many energy slaves is 100 horsepower?" but based on the assumptions therein, the answer is 4,706 energy slaves.
4,706 is fake precision. Comic's own numbers swing between "1 slave = 1/20 hp" and "1 slave = 1/10 hp" depending on which source you use, so the real answer is anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000. Picking one exact figure misrepresents how sloppy the underlying assumption is.
Transcripts help but Fuller's syntax is famously recursive, half the meaning lives in cadence and self-interruption. Reading it flattens the "everything is a verb" quality that made the lectures work as spoken performance rather than argument.
archive.org media servers rot like this constantly. no monitoring, no SLA, nobody's getting paged when a decade-old upload goes dark. audio quality's the least of it, be glad it loads at all.
At max, two full work weeks for a lightly trained amateur to transcribe 42 hours of decent but not great quality audio. A professional could do it in near realtime.
For me, it is notable that this is notable for you. This used to be as ubiquitous of a profession in modern organizations as typists were. Many people's entire job was going to meetings and/or listening to calls, transcribing the conversation, not just taking notes.
Professional stenographers transcribe in realtime with phonetic markers and everything. Even lightly trained transcriptionists can transcribe 1 hour of audio in 1.25-1.5 hours of wall clock time. For an amateur, you could probably get to a 1:2 ratio within a few hours. It's at max two full weeks of work.
I'm transcribing more than 42 hours of meetings and designs into software code; work is work. It's tedious and repetitive maybe but there's always people really into that kind of thing.
I quite like the traingular-tiled graphic of buckminster fuller in the hero section, and that hover highlights the tiles. All very buckminster fuller-y!
I really enjoyed reading about his inventions when I was growing up, it was inspiring to me.
It’s also true though there’s a lot to be skeptical of, and it was also an education of sorts to go down the rabbit hole and read his Synergetics textbooks and discover he makes endless assertions that are not supported and also hard to parse.
https://archive.org/details/operatingmanualforspaceshipearth...