Diederich

Yeah this morning I was thinking about what the astronauts must be thinking.

I would ride the Atlas/Centaur stack, it's been exceedingly reliable. Starliner itself? Not quite yet, given its checkered history.

Boeing brings up nothing but sadness in me these days. I really, really, really want that company to succeed and be awesome. Hopefully going forward Starliner will bring forward the excellence that has been Boeing in the past.

This is obvious but I don't see it discussed or mentioned that often, so far.

Massively decreasing the per mass cost of delivering any kind of cargo has huge and complex implications.

Massively decreasing the per mass cost of delivering cargo across oceans was a big deal.

Massively decreasing the per mass cost of delivering cargo across continents by rail/road was a big deal.

Massively decreasing the per mass cost of delivering cargo by air was a big deal.

"Big deal" here means all kinds of things, but let's talk about war.

Every one of the above mentioned steps caused radical changes in how wars were fought.

What have we seen over the past few years, even prior to 2022, in terms of drones? Massively decreasing the cost of precisely delivering small explosives over short ranges, with drones in this case, has been a game changer.

Even without a fully functional and reusable Starship system, SpaceX has greatly decreased the cost, cadence and reliability of delivering cargo into space. I understand the price they charge for individual launches is only 'somewhat' below the competition. That incremental but rather sudden decrease has already opened up a lot of doors.

A fully reusable Starship system drops that cost by at least another order of magnitude.

We are on the cusp of another revolution in warfare, and it's happening far, far more quickly than any of the other previous revolutions.

Imagine hundreds of thousands of smart kinetic munitions in many LEO orbital inclinations. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment a 20kg tungsten kinetic munition in LEO would deliver about 11 tons of TNT to the ground. Each SpaceX fully reusable launch to LEO could deliver about 2,000 of these. I didn't look it up, but I believe SpaceX has done about 150 Starlink launches so far. If each of these had delivered 2,000 kinetic munitions, there would already be 300,000 up there.

As far as I know, there's absolutely no defense against this kind of munition. In LEO they're moving at about 8km/s, and just before sea level impact they're moving around 3.5km/s. At best there could be a few minutes of warning.

Any entity that controls such a constellation would have what is effectively absolute and permanent air supremacy while risking no 'friendly' human life.

As far as command/control/tracking/sensing? Very low $/kg to LEO fixes that too. See Starlink and Star Shield, right now.

Nobody can predict how this will go, except that it will definitely 'go' in unexpected directions.

From what was said at the scrub conference, with additional context, it was scrubbed only because of more strict rules regarding it being a manned mission. Normally they would have just recycled a valve and moved ahead with the launch. Apparently the rick here is extremely minimal.

Being involved in a vacuum decay event would not be bothersome in the slightest.

I've been running this for about 15 years now:

  ddiederi@ddiederi-mac notes % while [ 1 ]
  do
  git add -A .
  git commit -am wip;git push;git pull
  sleep 6
  done

Can you expand on that? Thank you.

It's going to be super interesting when millions of my fellow tech-savvy gen-Xers get really old.

Can you expand on the high points from your perspective? Thanks.

Well fair enough, I remember that with great excitement back in the day. Is it possible that MSFT has moved on from this perspective?

Here's an example of what it looked like 21 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20030204090614/http://freshmeat....

Back then, for years before and after, I looked at it almost every day. It was my go-to 'take a quick break from work while at work' site.

> glaring conflict of interest

Can you expand on that?

I've never had COVID. In fact, the last respiratory infection I had was in 2019. I sing, masked, in a 90 member choir where few people do mask, and we've had a couple COVID outbreaks. In one case, the people who sat to my right and left both caught the bug.

I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.

> And, it lost power at almost exactly the worst moment. What are the odds?

I don't know, but I suspect we don't hear much about all the times power is lost at moments that are less than the worst.

I still play https://mume.org/ from time to time. It's been running (almost) continuously since 1991. I started it in 1992.

In this context, what's the physical scale of a 'central office', as far as regional dimensions? Thanks!

Back in the early 90s when I was writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon 's, and for a while had quite a few players, I was always keen to move as much functionality as possible into unloadable/loadable libraries, since restarting the game was quite invasive.

To my surprise, this was seen as a pretty amazing feature at the time. I never understood why many/most of the other MUDs at the time didn't utilize this.

Hah, beautiful, well done.

But yours isn't nearly so...catchy looking...as the New Yorker version.

Right, I believe they will be a few tens of meters per second short of orbital velocity.

> They will be finding problems in this thing until the day it's taken out of service.

Is this similar to how they developed the Falcon 9 platform?

What is the actual downside to hosting it personally and hosting it on github or something like it?

I'd love to read more about this!

> parents don't parent

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

Is minimal parental involvement a new thing?

Well I got one of my domains almost 28 years ago and I still haven't done much useful with it. (:

    dana@eighteendotfour:~$ whois realms.org|grep ^Cre
    Creation Date: 1995-10-17T04:00:00Z
    dana@eighteendotfour:~$

So they registered the domain close to a year before incorporation:

    dana@thalos:~$ whois google.com|grep ^Creat
    Creation Date: 1997-09-15T07:00:00+0000
    dana@thalos:~$

That seems fast to me.

> But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped.

That's interesting. If you have a moment could you expand on that? Thanks.

> this is one of the reasons for SpaceX's newer Raptor engines also using kerosene

Typo there :)

I'm not going to necessarily disagree with you. Perl was my professional go-to language for about 20 years, and I moved on to Python for the past eight or so.

Back 15+ years ago, you'd see perhaps 2-3x more updates on CPAN recents per day than what's there today.

I'll always love Perl, but it's definitely on a long slow popular decline.

> Yeah, because the ecosystem is dead.

Is it?

https://metacpan.org/recent