maccam94

The hardware is reporting the errors to the kernel but not crashing the system. It's "difficult to detect" because unless you are specifically monitoring for those stats, the only issue you'll see is degraded performance on an occasional machine (assuming you are watching carefully enough to even discern the performance delta). Some of the error counters are even predictive of an issue rather than something that is actively impacting performance. The FB software is basically scraping those messages and bus stats into JSON that can be consumed by their monitoring infrastructure.

Yes, that works fine for a space station, but not so much for a rocket that needs to accelerate and decelerate it on a trip to Mars (and back).

FB doesn't want hardware to run at lower than rated speeds. Their tool allows them to detect when it happens and remediate the issue.

Prior to Starship, just getting large enough structures and mass into space has been the limiting factor. There is a minimum diameter for spin gravity to avoid disorienting vestibular side-effects. Spinning two spacecraft attached by a tether might work for short-term use cases, but I don't know how feasible it is to keep that stable for months or years. Transporting adequate volumes of water shielding is probably infeasible for SpaceX's planned Mars mission profile:

- you need 1 meter of water shielding to reduce radiation to safe levels[0]

- each cubic meter of water is 1 metric ton

- Starship's circumference is ~28 meters

Assuming you only shield 4 meters of the length of the ship, not counting the top and bottom cross sections of the cylinder, you've already blown past the 100T payload capacity of Starship.

[0]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/1826

I was considering buying a new dev machine a few months ago. I'd been hearing great things about the new Ryzen chips with 16+ cores, but then I saw the price tag and thought about what percentage of the time I'd even be fully utilizing that many cores: probably less than an hour or two a day, on average, if that. And then there's the cost of powering it. It would be much less expensive up front to just spin up a VM in GCP and suspend it when I'm not coding. The trick would just be making the experience as seamless as possible (maybe build an LSP proxy that automatically suspends/resumes the VM?). Nelson seems to be solving the build performance issue with llama, but I'm curious about running LSP servers in the cloud.

Sorry, my first thought was that it requires more delta-v to enter a lunar capture orbit since the gravity is weak, but I just double checked the delta-v roadmap and it's actually not that high.

However, it is a bit problematic that landing a rocket on the lunar surface can kick rocks around the planet (thanks to the low gravity), possibly into orbit or beyond (which could pelt other equipment). So you need to switch to an entirely different propulsion system for descent, which carries a payload penalty.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...

Water yes, but I haven't seen anything about CO2 so I think you're stuck with hydrogen-oxygen engines (which have different tradeoffs than methane-oxygen engines).

https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/ (scroll down to the text immediately above the RP1/Methane/Hydrogen chart)

There are no expendable engines in the first stage. Engine swaps do happen if anomalies are found in testing or during the refurb process, but I don't have stats on how frequent that is. r/spacex might track engine history.

The main issue was cost. A lot of basic research had to be done, developed, and put into production on an accelerated timescale. Control systems and processing capabilities were much more primitive which hampered reusability. Materials and fabrication technology were less efficient so we had to build big to get useful payload mass fractions. CAD modeling and computational fluid dynamics were just entering use, so designing rocket engines was as much an art as a science. You could work around most of this by just throwing money at the problems, but Nixon felt it wasn't worth the cost.

The moon has some additional practical hurdles compared to Mars:

1. No atmosphere means no weathering, so all of the moon dust is incredibly sharp and easily coats equipment when it gets kicked up. This dust quickly wears out joints and contact surfaces.

2. The Moon's low gravity and lack of atmosphere mean that you have to carry extra propellant to land.

3. Lack of easily extractable resources. It is comparatively easier to extract water and CO2 on Mars to generate methane for a return trip. A trip to the moon requires carrying all of the fuel for a return trip as well.

Nuclear-powered ships built in orbit would drop transit times significantly but I wonder if they'd significantly reduce Mars <-> Earth costs (you'd still need Starships to shuttle payloads through the atmosphere). They are probably required for mining the asteroid belt though...

I'd say 2x probably isn't worth causing major ecosystem pain. Maybe if it opened up potential for 10-100x speedup for some fairly common workloads or improved developer velocity.

The ISS is in a relatively low orbit at ~400km altitude, geostationary satellites are up at 35,000km and have basically zero drag.

If you haven't heard of it yet, you might find the rust language interesting. It is the most likely candidate for replacing C in applications like this today. It is kind of like C with built-in static analysis to enforce memory safety, plus a modern type system and tooling. It also has robust C ABI support.

Sorry, the "it" I was referring to was mining hardware, not solar generation. Crypto-mining, if it continues to grow unabated, at some point will start to increase the price of energy and encourage more energy production. Some of that might be somewhat neutral solar, but using basically any other energy source would increase thermal energy being generated.

It still generates heat, which warms the planet.

I'm afk so I can't check the current numbers, but as of a year ago Linux was up to 27.8M loc: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_sys...

Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox, it's Webkit with a Firefox skin (because Apple won't allow any other web engines on iOS).

Perseverance was ~1 ton of mass at launch, and cost ~$2.2B (plus $243M for the Atlas V rocket). SpaceX's Starship aims to deliver up to 100 tons of payload to Mars for ~tens of millions of dollars. Imagine how much science equipment that could be.

It only needs one or two of its three engines to land.

What's a firmware scan? I believe that most router OS images and driver blobs are encrypted these days.

The bandwidth available via undersea fiber optic cables is orders of magnitude higher than via satellite. I'm sure governments have backup satellite links but their use would be restricted to top priority traffic if something catastrophic happened to the undersea cables.

Starship will be an incredible game changer for space economics. Look at this progression:

- $50,000/kilogram for 27,500kg of payload (Space Shuttle, 1981-2011)

- $2,500/kg for 22,800kg of payload (SpaceX Falcon 9, 2010-present)

- $20/kg* for 100,000kg of payload (SpaceX Starship, 2022??)

*: This is the estimated operational cost, not the price of a launch

For a ballpark launch cost estimate, assuming that the mirror segments would be mass constrained rather than volume, it would cost $8M (plus however far off the cost estimates are, plus profit) just to get the mass into space. Maybe say $20M just to pad it a bit? There would almost certainly need to be more money spent on designing the whole thing to work in space, of course. But these projects have long planning horizons, there's no way anyone would have considered building something large in space before Starship was announced (other than nation-state level prestige projects).

I suspect we'll see a flood of small to medium sized projects announced once Starship completes its first commercial LEO launch, then larger projects tentatively announced in the following couple of years.

Sources on costs:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

> to not nauseate the human body, they need to be fairly large

I completely agree with your reasons why it hasn't been explored further (sadly budget issues killed even a small experimental module for the ISS[1]). Just how large is somewhat disputed though[2, pages 20-22]. By these estimates, ~10 Starship launches (ballpark $100M-500M launch price tag) could loft a dumbbell-shaped rotating station into LEO.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Modu...

2: https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Space-Settlement-Po...

Did you convert it by hand and translate the code into idiomatic rust? Or just run some C code through c2rust? Because the latter will not produce anything like a typical rust program, it will be C types and logic with minimal changes to make it compile in rust (and those changes will make it look very verbose).

The satellite imagery is from Google's Keyhole satellites. But the bird's eye view zoom levels are from aircraft.

The earliest versions of the rust compiler were written in Ocaml, which is also unlikely to have been built in a trusted way by these organizations. mrustc exists to be a way to bootstrap trusted builds of rustc.

Some distros ship programs compiled with rust, and they do so using the version of rustc in the repo.

> HTTP client in Rust using curl

Which could possibly use Hyper under the hood :-P

https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/Hyper

The placement of the address bar is configurable, but maybe the tab view should flip along with it...

As of today, some ads pay per click (CPC), but most ad spots pay per 1000 views (CPM). Ads can influence behavior after they are viewed, regardless of whether the user decides to interact with the ad. I'm sure Google has put tons of effort into trying to tie ad views to purchases, both online and offline (I bet GMail and Google Pay are leveraged for this).

I am not claiming this is good or bad, but clicks are not a good enough signal of efficacy for the vast majority of ads shown on the internet.