scrumper

The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here.

Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes.

But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.

There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.

Well chief designer was a Brit but yes that is a fair point. I went with Concorde, rationalizing that the flag is more an evolutionary agglomeration than a conscious piece of design. It's a weak argument I know.

Hers is quite a story. I think my favorite part of it was when she refused to marry her future husband until he had also won an award for lapping Brooklands at over 100mph on a motorbike, something she had already achieved. (Another lovely detail is that she used her racing motorbike to cross the country from airbase to airbase installing her orifices on Spitfires.)

Concorde vs. the Union Flag? In the round of 64? Bah. Impossible to continue.

EDIT Agh now Range Rover v Mini? What do you want from me!?

Yep.

"Goodbye, USA friend, I am emigrating to Tonga so I won't see you again."

"Hello my new Tongan neighbor! I am an immigrant to your beautiful country."

"Hey, buddies at my high school reunion, I'm doing great thanks! I am an expat living in Tonga these days."

"Emigrant" exists but almost unused (perhaps other than in specialist policy writing.) "Expat" is the common agent noun for "Emigrate."

This is truly horrible, no misery left unimplemented; you're not even in a window seat. Well done. (I think the young people say, "thanks, I hate it.")

That said your seatback map is better than anything on any airliner I've ever been on.

I think the point of this is simply to show off the author's data science and analysis skills as an advertisement for hiring them as a consultant. Certainty I hope it's not one of those intelligent outsider attempts at an obvious-but-very-wrong solution to an established problem in a complex domain (HN comment thread is the appropriate place for those.)

I wear silicone ring in the gym, in my workshop, and working on or sailing boats and a platinum band when I'm not doing manual stuff. I could wear no ring at all, but I don't particularly like the optics of an obviously married man with tan lines on ring finger not wearing his ring: I think it makes you look like there's something wrong with you - recently divorced at best, a sleazy creep at worst. Should I care? No, but I'm not that well adjusted. Silicone is basically as safe as no ring at all for almost any manual or physical activity. Metal rings offer an entire exciting catalog of spectacularly horrible accidents for the low price of one tiny slip.

So, yes, it's literally a social signal that I'm in a relationship :)

I don’t usually get parenting right but the stars lined up for this one: I got hold of the Lego Saturn V kit (1969 pieces!) and my two kids and I built it over a few days while listening to this in the background. Last piece on right about the time “the Eagle has landed.”

It is a fantastic site.

You are most welcome. Enjoy it!

Yes we really went there, quite a few times in the 1970s. We have been again, also several times, with rovers and landers. As for why not humans since then? There's bugger all there to justify the extreme cost (at this time). It's an unpleasant ball made from tiny abrasive dust particles that is more easily explored with robots. The prestige thing is done; until we set up some base there in support of some broader mission (scientific or exploratory) there isn't a reason to send people.

I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/

This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...

Both are worth a read!

Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/

The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.

I read this a bit fast and with half a brain (because I'm in a boring meeting), but I'm not sure what an "AI model" is over just a common or garden model.

I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?

It's not a sophisticated take but if you haven't really thought about inflation before and its relationship to monetary supply it's a pretty good illustration. I'd not really want to knock someone for having an insight.

This is a fun example of the cognitive switch you have to employ when first starting to program a computer. It's extremely easy for a human to pick at random one thing from a pile of things: you reach out your hand and grab it, maybe swirling them around on the table first to shuffle the order. For a computer, there's no direct analogy to that. They just can't do it. And the human process is nothing even slightly like the one the computer follows: we don't have to count the sets and iterate over them, or count the items and then generate a random number to pick the nth item, or risk picking a null item.

Author worked as a saturation diver in the '80s; this is a first-hand journal-style account of one particular job.

How do you keep the drinking water actually drinkable over any time period? Anything stored gets nasty.

It's probably significantly easier to machine it this way. The pipe is curved, so work holding isn't straightforward. Once the blank is installed in its place in the bearing chamber face then you can just move that larger part around to machine all the features in it, including the counterbore.

I guess I felt richer in 2020.

What does that mean? WEF is... world economic forum? What type of messaging is that?

I doubt it was just him, there'll have been a group. I am not surprised that some VIPs got given access. It's quite common for museums to do such things after hours.

This is strange language in the article, even for the Graun:

> and only limited viewings of the tapestry have been possible across a range of stakeholders

Weird, nonsensical corpospeak, copied from some PR drone's email perhaps.

I saw the tapestry on an exchange trip to France in the '90s. It's a deeply impressive thing, even for a teenager vastly more interested in flirting with the French girls hosting us than medieval art. Perhaps its grandeur will inspire a glimmer of humanity in the creature.

I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so.

Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.

> "not do significant work this at this late hour"

Is this Claude code? Or your local? I assume Claude? I'm more than a little staggered by this, like, it makes no sense! It doesn't even serve Anthropic's interests (surely better for them if it burns your token quota so you have to buy more the next morning.) The LLM just... decided? I'd be so mad.

WTF indeed. Can one even file bugs?

A measure of the market's perception of the threat to Meta from these lawsuits. The uncertainty is over now, so the price goes back up.

I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)

Doesn't work, HID error when adding a device (which is paired with and connected to my computer. Logi Options never installed on this Mac.)

Unfortunately the very obvious and quite grating LLM copy in the site and in descriptive text on the app does not make me feel well-disposed towards something that I really want to exist. Consequently, uninstalling. I'm surprised that I feel this way, but I actually trust Logitech more than this low effort thing.

That's fascinating.

I rather like your closing statement. What would we do if we made contact with an intelligent alien when we can't even have a conversation with a dolphin?

No I'm just saying that slaying the monster has secondary effects. Yes if the whole world one day ate some mushrooms and decided that war was completely over, there would be some upheaval. We would agree that it'd be worth it.

To make my position perfectly clear, I would rather Meta died a slow death than was assassinated by the judiciary. It is better for most - the 80,000 easy-sleeping order followers, my 401(k) - if they take a few big hits and then disintegrate.

Meh. Even assuming the flesh isn't toxic (which it totally is, and radioactive to boot) Godzilla weighs, what, 200,000,000lbs[1] which even at a ridiculous Wagyu price of $300/lb (and assuming every ounce of the bastard is meat) is only 60 billion dollars - the square root of fuck all in this context. And he died in the southern hemisphere summer; it's hot as balls in Cape Town in December so his corpse starts rotting pretty quickly. Certainly faster than you could butcher a hundred thousand ton monster with bombproof skin.

[1] https://x.com/TohoKingdom/status/1129168820944265216 screengrab from Monarch showing fatty's weight at 99,600 tons.

Weeeelllll... I was going to just go "fair point" and stop at that but I don't think I entirely agree. Most of those 80k, perhaps all but a few hundred, would do whatever they were told to do. They are the sort of banal evil that just wants a (large) paycheck and a decent annual review. You could pick them up and plop them into another, completely benign tech company doing something totally different and they'd make sure the site ran properly and the backlog was groomed just so.

They're like, er, Godzilla's limbs. For sure, very damaging, but not really directly responsible. His nasty reptile brain is in charge. That's the few hundred at the top that decide that Meta is going to fight these lawsuits or claim they're actually giving kids powerful tools for controlling their online experience or whatever other PR bullshit they barf up every time this happens. That's not some random SRE.

Eh, they are shitbags though; they knew what they were getting into. I'm not advocating for welfare for 'em. So, after that: fair point well made.

The secondary effects of nuking Meta would be pretty severe. The markets really would take a big hit and some (near-) retirees would suffer quite a lot.

Oh God, who's to say it wouldn't go all hydra on us: Meta goes pop, 80,000 well-off sociopaths scatter to hacker spaces around the world and produce a few thousand even worse companies.

Put 80,000 people out of work and take a chunk of of everyone's retirement account. Not to mention the second order effect on other tech stocks. It's right there in the comment you're replying to.

But that's boring. Let's pretend Gozilla is real. He's been around for a hundred years, pops up once in a while and wipes out a chunk of a coastal city before swimming back to the deep. Killing Godzilla once and for all would be a clear benefit, save thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of property damage. Governments and militaries and smart people work hard developing death rays and mega bombs and Kaiju-specific viruses and, oh I don't know, really big spears. Perhaps one will succeed.

But, he's been around for a hundred years. A whole industry has grown up around him to mitigate the effects and deal with the fallout. There's rapid-response evacuation blimps and self-erecting submerged delay walls and monster insurance. There are collateralized collateral damage obligations to securitize and spread the cost of compensating property owners for military weapons that miss their target. The financial system does what it does well: taking an existential risk, sticking a price on it, and turning it into profit. And it's not just white collars cashing in: there's entire companies that do nothing but quickly rebuild bridges that he chews up, or recycle building rubble into new skyscrapers. There's a whole smorgasbord of mom-and-pop operations that do things like scraping up and disposing of the gallons of his stinky saliva that clog the streets after a rampage (with a little refining, it proves to be a surprisingly effective self-adhesive sealant for leaking pressure vessels). Others specialize in filling in claw-shaped potholes in asphalt. Yet more insulate small buildings against fire damage. Satellites monitor him; subscription services forecast his movements; one company is developing a promising body armor based on studies of a scute found after an attack in Montevideo.

And then one particularly wild plan actully works. Trapped in a constricting net made of nano-scale monofilament and engineered spider silk, Godzilla dies in the shallows outside Cape Town, South Africa. The world celebrates. The next morning, hungover, everybody defaults on their Godzilla insurance. The value of those securitized policies goes to zero. The CCDOs blow up too: finance's innovation is exceeded only by its myopia. Investors take a beating. It's not 2008, but pretty damn close. The business was actually insanely profitable given that everyone in a coastal city anywhere in the world was at risk. The specialist construction and recycling giants lay off people by the thousand. All the independent niche remediation companies shut up shop. Tens of thousands are out of work.

Same thing, innit.