It is an amazing feat and can put the US on excellent footing.
But I’m not sure it is a fair comparison because the Space Shuttle also returned a crew with each launch. Starlink can afford to pay the cost of lost cargo, or diminished fuel reserves for sub-optimal launch altitude, on launch failure.
Still, I hope it continues on this excellent path and doesn’t fall into the complacency trap that skydivers have to watch for. It would be great if the Falcon 9 launches can fund the eventual completion of Starship, and that Starship goes on to become the first fully and rapidly reusable - and hopefully safest - ship.
The space shuttle was the worst possible launch vehicle because the majority of the expense was directed toward safe guarding the obligatory crew.
Science fiction fans always point to the fact that only the space shuttle could have saved Hubble. Yes --- but at a cost that was far greater than simply replacing it with a better, more modern telescope.
Nothing about the Space Shuttle made any sense from a cost perspective.
It was designed so that it could be launched from the US into a polar orbit, capture a soviet spy satellite, and land back to the US on the next orbit. This is why it has those enormous and heavy wings.
The shuttle-derived vehicles made a lot more sense. The shuttle could be used to ferry crew and modules for building space stations, but those two goals would be better served by two different types of spacecraft. It could return large objects from space and that was the one role where its unique abilities would shine, but that was never done.
NASA could have made continuous improvements to the heat shields, engines and other expendables to make flights cheaper, but never had the budget for it.
I think the tone of the article was really strong and, to me, it seemed biased because they repeated multiple times that “the buyers only care about looks.”
A more in-depth article might point to the CyberLandr, and until I went 4x4 camping, camped out of a truck, I didn’t realize how awesome a CyberLandr might be, or how nice it is that “Mother Nature’s pin striping” is a solved problem for a stainless steel skin. Or how nice it would be to do all that without all the engine noise (I get accused of “not being a car person” simply because I like peace and quiet - but EVs are cars so why can’t we love those too?).
I think the article intentionally mischaracterizes the reasons for wanting a CyberTruck, and prescribes that “you must be a shallow person who doesn’t care about practicality or reliability.”
Well thank you for telling me who I am!
Oh and why would anyone slander Tesla? It’s not like they are a publicly traded company where slander and praise affect the share or option prices. Surely they couldn’t have ulterior motives.
We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.
We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)
What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode.
We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.
Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.
> Don’t forget - they solder in the flash too even though there is no technical reason to do so.
There is, Apple uses flash memory as swap to get away with low RAM specs, and the latency and speed required for that purpose all but necessitates putting the flash memory directly next to the SoC.
Yeah but some people need to justify their $1,800 USD purchase of laptop that comes with only 8 GB of RAM. Even though most laptops manufactured today would also come with NVMe (PCIe directly connected to the CPU, usually) flash storage, which is used by all operating systems as swap.
It's harder to confirm for laptops but you can refer to motherboard manuals to see if any of your PCIe-related slots go through a switch or not. For example, my current PC has a PCIe x16 slot, x1 slot, and two M.2 NVMe slots. It says everything is integrated into the CPU except the x1 slot which goes through the motherboard chipset. I don't see why any laptop would make NVMe go through a PCIe switch unless the CPU doesn't provide enough lanes to support everything supported by the motherboard. Even the at the lowest end, a dual core Intel Core i3-10110U
(laptop processor from 2019) has 16 lanes from the CPU which could support at least one NVMe without going through a switch.
They will maliciously comply. They might even have 4 sockets for the 512-bit wide systems. But then they’ll keep the SSD devices soldered - just like they’ve done for a long time. Or cover them with epoxy, or rig it with explosives. That’ll show you for trying to upgrade! How dare you ruin the beautiful fat profit margin that our MBAs worked so hard to design in?!?
Apple lines perimeter of the nand chips on modern mac minis with an array of tiny capacitors, so even the crazy people with heater boards can’t unsolder the nand and replace them with higher density NAND.
This is normal. They are called decoupling capacitors and are there to provide energy if the SSD requires short bursts of it. If you put them any further away the bit of wire between them and the gate turns into an inductor and has some somewhat undesirable characteristics.
Also replacing them is not rocket science. I reckon I could do one fine (used to do rework). The software side is the bugbear.
I tested Llama-3-70b-8192 on Groq against ChatGPT 4, and while Groq ran it super fast, it hallucinated one answer, and didn’t get the logic correct on another question.
So, ChatGPT 4 is still more reliable for my use case. But if I were to want an LLM to process data, summarize, and so forth, Llama-3 on Groq is very fast.
Questions:
Do you know anything about Intel Hala Point?
Groq: bullshit, but admitted it when I called it out.
ChatGPT: did a Bing search (it knew what it didn’t know).
Question 2a (separate chat):
If you’re in Canada, what’s the best way to use a TFSA?
2b: Okay, if your portfolio has some tech stocks, some cash cows, and some government bonds, which should be allocated to the TFSA?
The reason I chose Question 2 is that most banks are happy to recommend bad products if it benefits them. Llama-3’s answer reflects the bank bullshit. ChatGPT 4 gives the advice your trustworthy and financially savvy friend would give you.
Follow-on questions for Llama-3:
2c: You have it backwards.
2d: Why did you get it backwards? Were you influenced by the glut of “advice” proffered by banks?
I think you are moving the goalposts. The batteries I linked to are consumer standard lithium chemistry batteries that people can buy off-the-shelf in drug stores and be used in smoke detectors and kitchen scales.
In order for them to function: They've each got charge circuitry, buck converter circuitry (to get down from 5v to ~3.7v lithium voltage for charging, and from ~3.7v lithium voltage down to 1.5v to be compatible with end-user devices), and each one includes its own USB C port.
No we’re talking about rechargeable batteries here… disposable lithium are too expensive and wasteful for frequently used high drain devices. I love them for emergency equipment like spot trackers and emergency strobe lights
The time value of money is always more than inflation. The classic simple example is that if you need food today, the money for food is worth much more today than it is worth a year from now.
Therefore to ask someone to surrender money today, they have to give you more money to return it to you next year.
This isn’t the same as growth (ie you’re doing a job, but next year they expect you to make 25% more sales, or else…)
In theory they could use the capital to inflict a loss on all the other places an investor could park their money. Zero growth but still an incentive to invest!
But I’m not sure it is a fair comparison because the Space Shuttle also returned a crew with each launch. Starlink can afford to pay the cost of lost cargo, or diminished fuel reserves for sub-optimal launch altitude, on launch failure.
Still, I hope it continues on this excellent path and doesn’t fall into the complacency trap that skydivers have to watch for. It would be great if the Falcon 9 launches can fund the eventual completion of Starship, and that Starship goes on to become the first fully and rapidly reusable - and hopefully safest - ship.