I wonder if this is their own web scraper, or if they're using Bing API?
As a very experienced SEO, this is pretty exciting nonetheless, a new front in the online war opening up.
If they're using their own scraper/search algorithms, it'll be interesting to see how they weigh the winners and losers compared to how Google does it.
If we can alter the chemical composition of peoples brains/guts to make them less hungry, how long until something similar exists to overcome anxiety? Public speaking fears? etc.
Generative AI, possibly combined with VR, could be great for people with social phobias. Or terrible, I've not decided which. It'll definitely have some effect!
Note that this launch has been ready to go for weeks and the FAA were stalling SpaceX. Elon joked that it's easier to build self landing rockets than push papers through the FAA. I really hope if Trump wins he guts that regulatory body.
> SpaceX provided information about the flight profile and its impact only in mid-August to FAA. [...]
> According to 50 CFR § 402.13, the other agencies have 60 days to give back their answers to the FAA.
> 15 August + 60 days = now.
You don't send a rocket without some sort of due diligence in terms of impact. Nobody likes bureaucracy, but I don't see how we're going to make the world a better place for everyone by letting billionaires basically do whatever they want with their toys without checks.
> t I don't see how we're going to make the world a better place for everyone by letting billionaires basically do whatever they want with their toys without checks
There is legal recourse to get people to pay for real damages — civil penalties. This is used all the time. Perhaps too often, but that's a different conversation.
SpaceX would be perfectly happy to pay penalties proportionate to the real damage the FWS is worrying about — literally, the rocket landing on a whale, which has approximately a 0% probability. But they aren't allowed to take that (nonexistent) risk and then pay for anything that went wrong.
> There is legal recourse to get people to pay for real damages — civil penalties.
Musk has the money to take any case to the Supreme Court, the court is controlled by Trump who is friends with Elon now. Any case against Elon will probably get thrown out or ruled in Elon's favour.
If Elon can buy the Supreme Court, why can't he buy a mid-level Fish and Wildlife employee to expedite the FAA review? That would be cheaper and less illegal, you'd think it'd be the first choice.
It's important to consider the broader implications of prolonged delays. They delay the potential benefits that these advancements could bring to society, for example in improved global communications, access to more natural resources in extraterrestrial sites, and the acquisition of more scientific knowledge through massively greater space exploration.
The cumulative effect of these delays will undoubtedlu outweigh the incremental safety benefits they provide. Each 30 days delayed sets back progress that will help address global challenges or catalyze economic growth through new industries and technologies.
And really, there is almost no downside to weigh faster approvals against. The checks you mention are already there, in the form of the deterrent effect of the threat of fines and lawsuits if they screw up. The checks should not come from centralized gatekeepers holding up progress by massively slowing the rate of iteration/experimentation.
Billionaires played a major part in the expansion of railroads, factories and the telegraph network in the 19th century. They played a major role in the expansion of private automobiles, the passenger plane fleet, and telecommunication networks, and the explosion of everyday consumer products, in the 20th century.
It is absolutely no surprise that they're now playing a leading role in pushing rocket technology forward, and the fact that they are shouldn't be used an excuse for obviously excessive restrictions on this enormously promising technology.
60 days per change is really pretty slow when you want to iterate quickly. It's probably worthwhile to figure out if we can speed that up. Perhaps by letting SpaceX pay a expedite fee (say, 2x the salary costs of the beurocracy employees who would look at it) to get it looked at faster?
It’s not like there’s a line around the corner for launch licenses. The fee should be $0 and it should take two weeks tops. Taxes fund the FAA not application fees.
Whether you like Elon Musk or his politics... or not I hope you can see that these actions demonstrate the danger of an overly powerful regulatory body. California Costal Commission members acting in their regulatory capacity while citing Musk's politics is out of line, abusive of their power, and not consistent with guarantees of freedom of expression or the democratic process. You don't win against MAGA or Trump by becoming them... and if you try to beat Trump at his own game... you aren't any damn better.
1. It's not clear the California Costal Commission actually have veto over federal land. Federal land ultimately is not within the power of the state to regulate. So they might be powerless.
2. The federal land is aimed at launches for national defense. It's not clear how commercial Starlink missions to mostly server commercial interests fits into this mandate
3. They actually okay'd 36 just not the full 50 - still an increase.
4. There's a fit a proper test to run a company - at some point Musk is gonna get called on this at the current rate.
> It's not clear the California Costal Commission actually have veto over federal land. Federal land ultimately is not within the power of the state to regulate. So they might be powerless.
> The federal land is aimed at launches for national defense. It's not clear how commercial Starlink missions to mostly server commercial interests fits into this mandate
"'I do believe that the Space Force has failed to establish that SpaceX is a part of the federal government, part of our defense,' said Commissioner Dayna Bochco."
OK, sure let's accept that assertion... but that's besides the point: should the commissioners be deciding these matters on the basis of their legally appointed areas of regulatory oversight or on their broader political sensitivities? If we're really saying its OK for regulatory bodies with a specific area of protection/oversight to express the agendas of constituencies outside of that concern, or allow commissioners to simply make enforcement actions based broadly on their own personal preferences rather than interpretation of laws and establish regulations, such as labor relations, "bad antics", and presidential elections... what have we really become and what is the point of the regulatory body?
In the end, I think the commissioner quoted above is simply making a shallow rationalization.
Moreover, why would a federal agency seek a state commission approval if it's not actually required? Doing so would just be asking for a political firestorm: there are incentives for the state to show they aren't beholden to the feds and the feds would simply be inviting controversy in cases where the state told them "no" and they went ahead anyway. You can see this in the article where the commission says Space Force disrespected them. Why opt into that kind of low-win scenario if you don't have to?
> There's a fit a proper test to run a company - at some point Musk is gonna get called on this at the current rate.
How is this in the purview of a commission that is ostensibly created to protect the coastal environment and things like public access to beaches?
This is why I am deeply suspicious of government: I'm given reason to be based on their actions and motivations. Who knows, maybe someday we'll normalize this deviance of regulatory purpose and our laws so much that maybe I'll be denied my next driver's license renewal for having said these things.
60 days is already sheer stupidity but the FAA was also quoting November before, well past the 60 day time.
It should be a short 5 business day window where other agencies can quickly check to see if they might care and file to expand to 60 if they think it needs a review. Default hold open of 60 days just in case is purely anti progress reactionary conservatism.
Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.
One of the first sites I downrank in kagi is all the fandom sites. I don't outright ban them, sometimes they're all there is, but I try and make it so any other result shows up ahead of them
If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher. Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating.
I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
> We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher
This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".
> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.
Ok sure I might have misunderstood you. I agree that Fandom is most likely not writing checks or paying directly in other means to Google for increased search rank.
They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
Interesting to see these companies before they became "infinite money generators". I'm sure Zuck today could call upon 500 engineers if he had something that urgent he wanted done.
That's because only one women can build a baby at a time. Whereas multiple people cann work on an app at the same time and ship it faster than one person.
I have, many many times, seen a large organization "crash" a project, that is to say put a bunch of new developers into it. It almost never works. The first thing that happens is that everything stops, while the existing devs tell the new ones what is going on and what needs to be done.
The second reason it doesn't work is that splitting the app into separate parts that can be worked on in parallel, is essentially determining the software architecture. If you haven't sorted that out then the different parts will get built, not work together, and then there will be a sh*%storm of blaming each other for why they don't work together.
There are cases where new devs can help, but if you don't have the overall architecture sorted out yet, then they will not, and if you do then there is a finite pace at which new devs can be integrated and brought up to speed.
The old analogy to pregnancy is, in fact, spot on.
The point you seem to be missing is that some work is quite simply not parallelizable, which is what people try to convey when talking about multiple women not being able to give birth to a single baby in less than 9 months.
You can staff up bigger teams to accomplish bigger goals, but this is far from linearly scalable, with different categories of problems showing up in larger organisations.
Piling devs onto a project is counterproductive for fundamental communications reasons.
The three chief alternatives are:
- Highly modularise the project and treat those modules as independent projects.
- Launch multiple projects which compete against one another for ultimate launch. Again, treat those as independent projects.
- Buy competing projects. This is a variant of the second option. The competing projects are inherently independent.
Both approaches reduce communications overhead. The result isn't faster production, but rather risk mitigation and diversification over a larger set of investments. Both approaches also work best for an organisation which already has a large engineering capacity.
BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.
“instead of giving users a real-time live view of distant celestial objects through an eyepiece they use pre-determined image settings (for ISO and exposure) and then live image-stack for clarity, pushing ever-improving images to connected smartphones and tablets”
What’s the point of even getting this? Just go look at Hubble images at that point.
It forces the question: What is the point of amateur astrophotography?
If you just want to admire the results, go to https://welcome.astrobin.com/ for photos that are better than most people will ever have time or budget to accomplish in a lifetime.
So if you want to do it yourself, the end result is not the point of doing it.
The process of doing it yourself is really the only point, to enjoy doing it. The journey is the destination in astrophotography.
Since these automatic telescope cameras bypass the human process they fail at delivering that enjoyment and they also fail at delivering the end result quality.
Why take pictures of trees? The ocean? flowers? Why catch a fish in a seeded pond? Why go to the zoo?
I don't think it's about getting the absolute perfect shot of the moon, but capturing an absolutely perfect shot of the moon in this moment, at this place; that kinda vibe. This holds even more true for distant celestial objects that you can clearly see in your telescope but look like a blur with your otherwise untuned camera.
if you go a step down on the automation ladder it’s quite a fun (if expensive) tech hobby, I use a raspberry pi to control my mount, an automated focus system, guiding system, and then get to learn about stacking and processing the images I capture. Plus it’s hobby I can do at night, at home (which helps with 3 young kids!).
“However, the core of that argument is that if you’re going to sit passively inside looking at a smartphone then you might as well be looking at images on the Internet.”
As a very experienced SEO, this is pretty exciting nonetheless, a new front in the online war opening up.
If they're using their own scraper/search algorithms, it'll be interesting to see how they weigh the winners and losers compared to how Google does it.
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