Doesn’t the existence of this modded truck prove that statement wrong? Because I’m pretty sure you made the only statement explicitly refuted by the existence of this truck.

Congratulations?

Indeed, NASA stopped launching rockets with the space shuttle. But that was the single best decision that NASA ever made. The space shuttle was an extremely expensive death trap. (It was damn cool, but a terrible way to get to space)

It sounds concerning to put all the egg into the basket of private enterprises.

You can blame the trump administration for that, with their commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. But the truth is, NASA has always heavily relied upon private companies, it’s just that in the past they were all defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, lockheed, rocketdyne, ULA). The other annoying truth, these commercial programs have actually been wildly successful (except in the case of Boeing’s participation).

But it’s been wildly successful in a few respects, one of which is that nasa has been able to focus on exploration again. Without having to support the huge costs of the shuttle program, they’ve been able to put a lot of their money into landers, interplanetary probes and space telescopes. I think we have more ongoing exploration missions than ever before. The Europa clipper mission launched just yesterday (on a SpaceX Rocket coincidentally). https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/

All good.

And yeah for the record, I do think Bitcoin is pretty brilliant and that Etherium has some real unique utility. I think there are definitely some others that are genuine attempts to do something useful, but few that have really achieved much so far.

I make the point that what cannot happen?

I’m sorry, I just didn’t quite understand what you mean.

Haha, I’ll give you 100 CocoCoins if you can define what makes a cryptocurrency “fake” rather than real.

This headline should probably say “FBI create a cryptocurrency to expose…”

That said there are only a few cryptocurrencies I would call worthy of note or respect.

We can’t afford to use SLS. If you want to use SLS for all of the missions we have slated for starship, you’ll need to multiply NASA’s budget by 2 or 3.

Honestly, I’m not worried about starship reaching its goals, it’s moving along. They’re attempting their next major launch tomorrow morning, the first launch to include returning the booster and catching it with the tower.

take the Artemis contract away from this idiot and SpaceX

What? And give it to who? Besos? Boeing? China?

I guess the only workable option would be to have the ESA do every Artemis launch. That could work, but it’ll likely cost 10 times more and take another 20 years.

Also, the primary ways they save money is through reusable rockets and building everything in house. As far as I know, SpaceX isn’t skirting regulation more than any other launch provider. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a higher number of regulatory breaches than other providers, after all, they have a much higher number of launches than other providers.

Don’t get me wrong Elon is a complete asshole, an addict, and at this point a detriment to society. But SpaceX is probably doing the most important work on the planet right now. Fully reusable rockets could usher in a whole new era of humanity. This could easily be just as transformative as the automobile.

I mean, the speaker part makes sense. The vacuum has a speaker so it can make an alert sound of something’s wrong. The most common ones I hear are “please charge Roomba” and “error, please move Roomba” (that’ll happen if it rolls over a grate or something and the wheel gets stuck).

But a cheap speaker is a pretty sensible feature.

and using WP to improve WP is… not a good idea.

That is not inherently true. For example, there was an instance when I read a Wikipedia article, and a chart was simply incomplete, there were entries in the chart left blank, when I knew that data existed. All I had to do was look up those exact items in Wikipedia and the correct numbers were there, readily available.

I think that was when I first created a Wikipedia account for editing. There was an article clearly missing information and I knew it would be both non controversial and quite easy to fill in that information.

My point is, that first article could definitely be meaningfully improved, using only information already available on Wikipedia.

Yeah, I agree with that. And their solution instead of actually fixing the problem is throwing money and computing power at it in the hope that brute force will make it “better.”

Haha, well to be fair, that usually works… Most big problems could be solved by throwing effort and money at them. Hell, when I think about a lot of national issues, education, infrastructure, energy, crime, poverty, most of these could be solved by throwing money at them. And it would take less money than you might guess.

Call it a conspiracy, but I think with nobody ever telling the truth on the internet, LLM’s have only taught themselves to bullshit everyone into believing them.

And yeah, you’re definitely not imagining that. I’d say there’s something to that theory.

Honestly the problem is that it simultaneously works too well and not well enough.

The truth is, it’s proven time and time again to be hot garbage about 85% of the time. But that 15% of the time that it works great, that’s why it’s being shoved down our throats. That’s what’s ruining this for everyone, that fact that on rare occasions, it does actually work…

You know kids today, they yearn for the mines…

I can’t get mine to stop mining.

You should read Ministry for the Future. It’s about how people cope with the world after the effects of climate change get out of hand. It’s sobering.

The idea of just blowing up the offending petrol infrastructure made me think of it.

Audio is inherently analogue, but you can record it into digital formats just fine.

It’s tempting to say “well, that’s different though” but it really isn’t.

Just like with audio, you’ll need high enough fidelity encoding to make it all work, otherwise you end up with garbage.

Well there is no “data” per se, there’s voltages and a wiring map. And this article is talking about having the complete wiring map.

The neurons deliver electrical pulses across synapses. The thickness and length of the synapse can affect the voltage or amplitude transmitted across to the next neuron. And again, if we have this fairly complete map of synapses, we may have enough information to calculate the electrical outputs of each neuron when it fires.

My understanding is that neurons work something like transistors, they receive signals and when triggered by a strong enough signal, or by enough simultaneous signals, that neuron will also fire and transmit down its synapses. With this alone you absolutely have enough structure for very complex decision making, much like a microprocessor.

I guess the question is really how accurate is this map? If we have a clear enough picture of every synaptic connection, we could simply simulate behavior in software…

So can we model this now?

Can we use this data to essentially emulate a fruit fly’s behavioral patterns?

Like can we just wire this up in a software neural network, feed it some inputs, and see what happens?

So, as far as I can tell, the primary difference with this version of the game is that it uses question registers?

What does that mean, functionally?

Like how does that affect the software? How would the software run on an actual quantum computer?

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The podcast “build for tomorrow”

That’s basically the entire premise of the podcast, which they relate via hilarious stories from the past.

I recommend the episode on Teddy bears, or bicycles. (Both of which by the way threaten to unravel the very fabric of American society)

Back before smart phones I always preferred flip phones over “candy bars”, the flip phone helps to protect the delicate screen and buttons while the phone is in your pocket/purse. You don’t really need a case for a flip phone.

Modern smart phones tend to be more delicate than they should be across the board, but in theory, a flip phone puts the more delicate parts in a safer place.