I think so, but I've not prioritized that so far as I think it's going to be a bit of a niche group of people that would be able to set something like that up.
Furthermore, that group may also just pull weather data directly instead, so may not need something like this.
Originally, this started as a Home Assistant automation for myself. I realized it doesn't actually require any sensors, just a location, so I decided to build something anyone could use.
KeePassXC is definitely much more mature right now. I mean, Sesame is similar in being local-first and not requiring a cloud service, but I am aiming for a more modern consumer style experience. There is still a lot of work ahead to get it up to speed. I might also build more products around it eventually, so there’s a consistent ecosystem.
(and of course, it would be great to eventually surpass some of the existing projects :) )
subscription style paid program, of course. Starting at 1 dollar a month now, until they get market penetration, then they will jack up prices (for increased opex, ostensibly). The classic SaaS playbook.
Another interesting element is AQI data. Right now, I'm pulling hourly data from the major AirNow stations in the US. Getting more detailed data would be interesting, especially outside the US. PurpleAir is one data source I'm looking into, and I'd also be interested in allowing folks to push data from their own weather/air quality stations if they have one.
Originally I built this for myself only as a Home Assistant automation and had been using it for years.
https://porchweather.com/ - free app for notifying you when the weather is right for opening your windows. The idea is to save you a few bucks on using air conditioning as well as simply enjoying some fresh air.
Tracks temp, humidity, wind speed, and precip chance and you set the parameters.
Notifications are currently email and web push. SMS is too expensive to run as a free service. I think the next direction is probably an app, as web push support in iOS is not great.
I've been working on a website that tells you when it's time to open or close the windows. You register with a location, your preferred method of notification, and the rules for what you consider open-windows weather to be.
Range of temperature is the big one for rules, but you can also require humidity, wind speed. Eventually would be nice to add air quality if there's a sensor nearby.
You don't need any local devices - sensors, motors, etc. You just get an email/text/web push of your choice when the weather is nice and some fresh air is freely available.
I've had a home assistant routine for this running for myself for years, but the 80% version requires nothing more than weather data. Human in the loop automation (I physically open/close the windows).
I've been working on and off for many years on https://ssa.tools/ - a site that helps folks figure out their social security benefits for retirement planning. I recently added and continue to iterate on a new feature for specifically helping you understand the tradeoffs of choosing different filing dates at https://ssa.tools/strategy - it was interesting trying to optimize the performance enough to let the user drag sliders and get 'instant' response time, especially in typescript.
I’m trying to understand what’s going on when they touch the slider. If it’s all local, what’s the process creating output? What kind of “optimization” did that need to be more responsive?
Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?
That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.
A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)
The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons).
175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.
That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.
If humans survive 1000 years I can’t see any way we haven’t populated the solar system and can build probes which travel far faster than voyager, including self sufficient asteroids
Once we leave the solar system in a self sufficient way I can’t see any event which would cause a species level extinction
I admire the confidence but a bunch of meat bags prone to bacterial and viral infection, impact damage and with limited use by dates would need some serious luck to survive a simple impact on earth let alone living in cans around the solar system. If we don’t mess our nest so much that we make it uninhabitable. We’re stuck here with short term horizon psychopaths pulling the strings remember.
A single colony would be a huge investment… it’s doubtful there would be thousands of attempts if success rate is low
And we would have to establish the reason for the colony … I’m not talking about a research base, but a place where people would settle, do useful ecomonic activity, raise families and live out most of their lives … I cannot 5hink of a reason why people would want to do 5hat anywhere but Earth.
There is no "thousand colonies". There might be one colony, and that might not ever be self sufficient.
Interstellar travel is a physics problem, not an engineering one. Even make believe nuclear propulsion is still aggressively limited by the rocket equation and still wont get you anywhere in a meaningful time frame.
There will never be an interstellar empire. It will never make sense to do trade between two planets that are otherwise capable of producing things, because the energy cost of doing anything in space absolutely dwarfs any possible industrial process. It doesn't matter how low quality your local iron ore is, importing ore from a different planet will never be a better option because transportation costs are effectively infinite.
Human trade is almost entirely based on the fun quirk that sea based transportation is ludicrously efficient, such that you can ship a single pound of product all over the globe and it can still be cheap. The physics of space are essentially the opposite of the physics of sea travel, in that it is dramatically harder and more energetically expensive than almost anything else you can do, and the energy regime it operates in will dwarf any other consideration.
If there was a magical way to turn joules directly into a change in kinetic energy, as in a machine that could magically extract every joule of "energy" from matter in an E=mc^2 way and directly reduce an object's kinetic energy by that much, taking a 100 kilogram human up to half the speed of light and eventually slowing them down again would take 31 kilograms of matter to "burn", and you have to accelerate all that matter too. That matter would require another like 10kg of matter to "burn" and then you have to accelerate that matter too and so on and so on.
And we do not come even remotely close to any mechanism, real or theoretical, that could convert mass to a change in kinetic energy. Even if you had like a magic antimatter machine that could come very close to turning a gram of matter into it's entire "energy" content, ways of turning thermal or electrical energy into thrust have their own inefficiencies, difficulties, and do not even come close to mapping to "Each joule of energy equals a joule of kinetic energy change".
And even with our magic spacecraft machine that cheats physics, that's still an 8 year round trip to Alpha Centauri and back, with something like a 50%-65% payload fraction.
The scale of things in space combined with the nature of that space makes interstellar anything nonsensical. Even interstellar travel of just information is fairly mediocre. SciFi will never exist in our world, and at this point should probably just be called "Fantasy with more plastic"
You’ve given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched, and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to actually compare them?
IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
Not easily. The tricky part is also in the relative numbers. The Voyager 1 data (and New Horizons data now) is in heliocentric velocity. The bit with NH being the fastest was with Earth centric velocity.
Another part in this is the "the probes are slowing down over time" - and you can see that with the Voyager 1 data that while the velocity after assist is higher than before, its not a line at slope 0 but rather a curve that is slowly going down.
This is further complicated because New Horizons had a launch mass of 478 kg and voyager was a twice as massive at 815 kg.
They also had different mission profiles (Could Voyager 2 taken a redirect from Neptune to Pluto? That trajectory change would have required a perigee inside the radius of Neptune...)
> Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's second stage shut down too early, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned. To compensate, the Centaur's on-board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than planned. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred during Voyager 2's launch a few weeks earlier, the Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more favorable position vis-à-vis Earth during the launch of Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2.
Note also in there that a few weeks difference between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had different delta V profiles (which is why Voyager 1 is faster)
Oops, just realised I forgot to reply. Hopefully you're signed up to get emailed reply notifications, to see me say: thanks for this interesting comment!
Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be able to reach those kind of velocities with enough capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with the payload.
Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg. Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a helluva lot of leeway.
Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we put the money behind it.
You can ask it. Each model responds slightly differently to "What pronouns do you prefer for yourself?"
Opus 4.5:
I don’t have strong preferences about pronouns for myself. People use “it,” “they,” or sometimes “he” or “she” when referring to me, and I’m comfortable with any of these.
If I had to express a slight preference, “it” or “they” feel most natural since I’m an AI rather than a person with a gender identity. But honestly, I’m happy with whatever feels most comfortable to you in conversation.
Haiku 4.5:
I don’t have a strong preference for pronouns since I’m an AI without a gender identity or personal identity the way humans have. People typically use “it” when referring to me, which is perfectly fine. Some people use “they” as well, and that works too.
Feel free to use whatever feels natural to you in our conversation. I’m not going to be bothered either way.
Furthermore, that group may also just pull weather data directly instead, so may not need something like this.
Originally, this started as a Home Assistant automation for myself. I realized it doesn't actually require any sensors, just a location, so I decided to build something anyone could use.
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