inamberclad

I think there's a sense that our personal experiences are being hijacked by algorithms. This has been going on for at least a decade or two but they've been getting more and more devious and extractive as the Internet, and our attention has been heavily capitalized upon. Nothing is private. Everything is for sale. Your worth is algorithmic, and AI is the biggest and most devious algorithm there is.

Why would you use an aerospace for this when conventional turbojets use an articulating nozzle? In fact, they'd be better off trying to develop and sell an articulating nozzle for a conventional rocket than a whole engine such as this

I asked this of the Stratolaunch people several years ago. They said there's an advantage to simply lifting the vehicle that high, it's already starting with more potential energy than it would at sea level. However, it hasn't seem to have made them competitive...

I programmed the flight software interface to those laser rangefinders. While they are beasts, they were very touchy in testing. I've sinced moved on to other jobs, but I was still quite nervous that they would fail on descent. I was texting members of the team asking them to check that the lasers were working in orbit. I was horrified to hear that they weren't responding. I thought my software had failed or worse, damaged the lasers. Hearing that NDL was going to be used instead was an immense relief to me. What's more, we've now qualified NASA's planned landing instrument to TRL 9!

I should also add that from my very first phone call with members of the software team, we clicked. It's an absolutely gobsmacking group of hard working, brilliant, experienced, and yet still inquisitive and passionate people! I've never met a finer team and it was an honor to be able to play a very small part in all this.

Seconded. People burned alive until we learned. Surely there is a middle ground that will let us speed up while staying fairly safe, but it's important to remember that outside of software, many rules are written in blood.

One of my favorite series from back in the day!

I'd love to see an algorithm try and segment this: https://dresdencodak.com/2009/07/12/fabulous-prizes/

Check out NASA cFS

Nah. I lived in Houston for several years and I missed everything in California. Austin might be better, but it is the exception to Texas and not the rule.

I've decided to stop patronizing Trader Joe's after they argued that the NLRB is unconstitutional.

Compared to a lot of startups, it's not sarcasm

The thing that struck me about Google is that it's a really well running machine. The documentation is all there, the build system is easy, and just about every issue is fixed with a single form submitted or email sent. You quickly develop a very high standard for how an organization should function.

When I was part of a mass layoffs, it was an incredible feeling of camaraderie because I was there in person with my coworkers.

It's linked to a whole lot of deaths, it seems. How on earth can a company betray trust like this and continue to function? There needs to be a corporate equivalent of a life sentence, or a permanent ban from a certain industry for leadership involved in a business unit that conducts such malfeasance.

And the statistical requirements for failure causing injury or fatality to the passengers are on the order of 1 in 10 million to 1 in 1 billion. Forgetting to turn off a small switch within five minutes of exiting icing conditions will almost certainly happen more often than that.

I assume that, despite their lack of design pedigree, JPL still thoroughly tested all these components and discarded many that didn't make the cut.

I'd wager yes since Mars has less extreme thermal cycles than the moon

It sounds like this isn't the cost of service, but the residual cost of buying defaulted debts. The hospitals and insurers have already written off the service as a loss and are trying to recoup anything they can by selling the debts for pennies on the dollar.

Unfortunately, that means that your payments are shouldering the burden of someone else's inability to pay the ludicrous cost of healthcare.

We can fix this by

1. Refusing care without payment at the time of service, which isn't possible, or even moral, in many cases.

2. Nationalizing healthcare and directly supporting healthcare with taxes so that payment is guaranteed to the service providers.

In my opinion, the fact that this airplane isn't legally an airplane yet, just a collection of parts, is part of the problem. Boeing and Spirit should be criminally liable for mismanaged production, or at the very least have their production certificate for the type revoked.

I think one of the comments on your article put it best, but I'll try and reiterate it here.

Things are almost always the way they are (civil rights, policy, etc) because someone benefits from the current situation. Even if your campaign is objectively beneficial to the vast majority, someone is going to resist. There is simply nothing worth working for that will not have some kind of resistance. That means that incremental change only goes so far. Sometimes we really do need large shifts, just like needing to overcome the activation energy of a chemical reaction.

Remember, Martin Luther King Jr was not liked by the majority of Americans in his day. I do not think the publisher of this post would have liked him either.

They're USB cameras. I don't know the vendor, but I worked with 4 cameras wired back to a small Linux computer.

Fun fact - the cameras that captures Perseverance's landing are also Linux based and vim is installed - at least on the later model that I worked with.

After trying to pack my status and health report uplink from my application into a quarter of a bit per second, I'm pretty excited about improving the bandwidth from space systems.

It's the first step on the path. Each incremental step is easy, and feels harmless. At first your drone only scouts. Then it gets used for actionable reconnaissance so a live feed is added. Then it's used for targeting so a laser designator is added. Then it's already there so it might as well launch the missiles.

Each step in isolation is logical and helpful and the end result makes a useful tool into an implement for killing people.

These things should never happen. They only do happen in a horrendously corrupt system.

Wonder how that will work out for Southwest after this.

As someone who's about to buy a new car, I thought about this. I can bike to work. I can walk to the grocery store. I did this all through college. Then I thought, "what happens when I move?" How do I buy furniture on Craigslist? How do I pick up my girlfriend from the airport? How do I visit my friends across the Bay Area? It's a real tragedy of the commons. I'd like to save the money but I would have to sacrifice too much else unless many, many other people were willing to put up the same gamble.

I think we can start by just building it. Make it fast, reliable, and safe. Make it go places people want to go. Make it go to the grocery store, airport, and random blocks across the entire area. Look to what we did 100 years ago when a train station was a palace of transport, not a dingy slab of concrete. People want alternatives, they just want better ones than what we have now.

Would be very interesting so see how it compares against RTEMS.

After my last XPSs unresolvable touchpad firmware bug and suspend issues, it's hard to justify ever buying another.

The point of this case was that an expert can testify without licensure, not that they can misrepresent themselves to the public.