ballooney

250 _meters_, this is science not javascript.

I'm from the dark ages and am interested in this for non-AI things like CFD. What is the state of SDK support for these chips? Is there a nice rust or C++ library that abstracts the hardware and lets you just do very big Matrix multiplications?

Spectacular still by modern standards.

Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.

Not in any intrinsic way, it’s just a mildly better way of representing attitude if your state vector includes attitude.

They’re both quite basic building blocks in state estimation and as SV’s focus shifts from web apps to drone warfare it will only increase in frequency.

This website is 99% the sort of not especially socialised young men who for various psychological insecurities are prone to the sort of hero-worship that she refers to in the video.

I did wonder the other day when the Jurvetson PR/rehab effort might begin.

+3 to -3. I will continue to shout at the tide. In the age of trump we must consistently and patiently push back against all the wrongness.

You want to play within your abilities, not right at the very edge of them. This technique nudges the edges out.

_biased_ is the adjective, bias is a noun.

As I said here a few years ago, I support this sort of company. VCs are basically stupid, especially for companies that are more complicated than gluing javascript together, and so it’s only just and right that some actual engineers have some fun in the desert for a few years at their expense, and get some experience putting ambitious, if ultimately silly, machines and prototypes together quickly and scrappily for a few years. Then when spinlaunch goes bust, which of course it will as its idea makes zero sense from an engineering pov, there will be a bunch of hardened and experienced engineers who can go and work for people with more of a clue and do something useful. It’s like a well funded extra-curricular student project.

'Partake in' - you mean drink? What's the issue?

No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.

The GP isn’t, a major part of Boom’s initial PR was that they’d enable domestic supersonic by solving the sonic boom issue through technology. Over the years aviation watchers have suggested they might have failed at that and are looking to solve it through spending VC money on lobbyists to allow noisy supersonic overflights.

"Maybe there's still value in writing for its own sake?"

I hope this doesn't need an answer!

You still shouldn’t post that kind of thing. Especially not that fraudulent bullshitter host.

Rather frustrating to read - as if intentionally written for nine year-olds. I was surprised to see it was Eric Berger, I don’t recall this affected style from him before, though I’ve not paid close attention.

I don’t think you’re using the word tribulate correctly here.

I can, it doesn’t.

Absolutely and completely fascinating and highly worth a watch. Reminds you how glorious engineering can be.

Yes, for the same reason that I can look into a 5mW LED but 5mW of laser can blind me. Your neighbour's WiFi routewr might be entirely DoS'd by the Maser of RF coming through the wall at it from your phased array, even thoughh it's only 100mW.

Right, so your citation is specifically density-impulse which is rather different to specific impulse, the conventional metric when discussing 'efficiency' of an engine, but of course you can define efficiency to be many things depend on the context, like thrust to weight ratio or whatever. But density impulse is quite a specific and generally not useful metric for rocket engines out side of e.g. a missile that has to fit its propulsion unit into very constrained packaging. For a conventional rocket, e.g. to launch a satellite, it is absolutely the case that adding mercuty would make the performance much worse. If you read the page before the one you cited, Clarke says as much:

I calculated the performance of Cavea A with various proportions of mercury —up to six times the mass of the primary propellant. (It was easy to fit mercury into the NQD calculation method.) As expected, the specific impulse dropped outrageously as mercury was added to the system, but the density impulse (specific impulse X propellant density) rose spectacularly, to peak at 50 percent above that of the neat mono-propellant with a mercury/propellant ratio of about 4.8.

Specific impulse is overwhelmingly the metric that matters for rocket performance in all but a small number of applications, so I feel justified in saying that your original claim that:

A traditional rocket becomes more efficient if you mix some mercury into the fuel. The loss of energy is made up for by the extra mass.

is simply not correct!

I’m not sure that’s quite right (I work in this field and we also give all new employees a copy of Clarke) - unless you really squint about your metric for ‘efficiency’, adding Mercury would be a disaster - the specific impulse (how much velocity change you can get for a given mass of propellant) would fall off a cliff completely. You’d actually want to do the opposite- add extra free hydrogen - to improve efficiency.

For the same reason they’d probably be against baking a steak.

He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.

Always in awe of these people lugging plate cameras up unexplored mountains

You’ve put the schitzophrenia thing into GP’s mouth. They didn’t say that.

> When I built out an A/V and networking rack for my house

Asside: where has this american-english prediction for adding random prepositions come from? Everyone now builds ‘out’ things instead of just building them, hates ‘on’ things instead of just disliking them from the comfort of their chair, and I was today told to switch ‘up’ a config file for a tiling window manager. I don’t remember this from the 2000s.

Ludicrous, deeply confused, and wrong bro science.