mastodon 4.7.3Artist/Composer/Programmer · They · Scotland
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I'm tired boss
okay if I see one more thing credulously discussing plans to terraform Mars or colonise it, I'm going to explode
MARS HAS NO MAGNETOSPHERE
IT CAN NEVER BE TERRAFORMED
the energy and resources required to produce an oxygenated atmosphere on a planet the size of Mars would cause the destruction of Earth, because you have to bump-start the the planet-wide process with trivial ingredients like 'a layer of nutritious top soil covering the entire crust' and 'massive amounts of water not already found on that planet' and 'the largest fleet of machinery ever seen in the known universe to shuttle these materials around the solar system and lay them down on the planet's surface at scale, all of which require steel, aluminium and fuel to make before they even do any work'
but even if you got enough trees planted down, or built big enough synthetic air-exchangers to convert billions of tonnes of water to oxygen to produce an atmosphere at the right density and pressure...
THERE'S NO MAGNETOSPHERE
the atmosphere would wick off into space, pointlessly, and even in an absolutely optimal balance with artificial overproduction to compensate for it...
THERE'S NO MAGNETOSPHERE
you wouldn't be able to stand unprotected on the surface without dying of radiation poisoning from the Sun and neither would any of the other life you introduced
YOU CAN'T MAKE MARS A THING
also been practicing my colour selection for illustration; I still don't feel confident with colour and building palettes, but I think I'm getting somewhere
I don't think of myself as being a particularly good programmer because I'm self-taught and I frequently have duh moments where I waste a bunch of time trying to reinvent something that I should know is trivially solvable using a comp-sci 101 data structure or algorithm
however
I do not understand how people paid significantly more money than me and with significantly more expertise than me build software that's *slow*
I can't build slow software; I don't know how, other than deliberately doing things badly, because even my inefficient, sketchy code that can obviously be optimised is tens or hundreds of times faster than commercial software I've paid for to do that task
computers are so fast that it's difficult to build things that are slow, and more impressively *it takes significantly more work to build more layers between you, the metal and the problem you're solving*, which is also the only real way you can make software slower
we're doing *so much work* to make software worse it's incredible
made it to the (second) highest point above my town on Friday evening
speaking of romance languages, I'm reminded that event in Marseille I was at last year
our neighbouring stall was Italian; he spoke Italian and English fluently and I'm English but speak French fluently, so we were comparing language notes to pass the time, and then one of the event organisers walked over and addressed him in accent-perfect Italian, switched to flawless French for me and then settled on English after realising she could talk to us both that way
she turned out to be Spanish
the two of us were mad as hell how is that even allowed
more theremin-type beats + tape delays from late night sound design
no frameworks, no build systems, no IDEs and not an electron wrapper in sight