foobarbecue

It's good to see an old NASA page that hasn't been destroyed by the "web modernization" pushes. I was looking for information on human landing site selection recently and the bitrot due to "modernization" there is extreme. I also saw a lot of this from the inside while working at JPL. Insufficient care is taken to preserve old pages and URLs are rarely preserved in upgrades. (And this story is a fun one -- I think I learned about it in a Radiolab podcast which is worth a listen)

Edit: Oh shoot just realized this page is by Dave Williams. I worked with him on MoonDiff. He's great. He also maintains pages about lunar impact flashes.

What is this?

Because it will absolutely have hidden errors.

Woah when I said "headline" I meant "explanation"!

Wow, thanks so much for the detailed headline! There really is no substitute for having things explained by an expert.

I don't get how they know they have exactly one in there. I mean they're measuring the magnetic field but how on earth do you make sufficiently precise measurements to detect a single particle!?!

Edit: this is explained pretty extensively in the paper (https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/2026OnePositr...). I'm gonna need to do some background reading though...

Ok, I hadn't seen the jump video when I wrote the above. That's more impressive than the ramp video.

No, it doesn't fly. It fell a bit slower than it would have without the compressed gas.

Curiosity, on the other hand, is a car that actually hovered, and that was on Mars, in 2012. https://youtu.be/Ki_Af_o9Q9s?is=uepnp2XLG81tHacn

Exactly. No O, just CR.

There was a brief moment where programs had decent built-in help you could search to easily find where stuff was in menus. Didn't need a billion parameters or a giant faraway data center...

Or, better, the global menu search. Intellij's shift+shift shortcut is great.

Like I said, I'm privileged and happy. It's my teacher friends, service industry friends, and factory workers I feel bad for. I just wish the USA was still a country where workers were well compensated, like they were from 1950 through about 1990.

https://youtu.be/Wxdo4UpHBn4?is=DfljtOwP5kLP1eCm shows some evidence of the structural changes I'm talking about.

> If the company goes bankrupt you lose your money but so do those groups.

No, generally speaking, the CEO gets a golden parachute. E.g. Adam Neumann got 1.7 billion severance for being a douchebag cult leader and bankrupting wework.

I'm not complaining about my situation-- I'm doing really well. Making $207k / yr and living at the beach in LA. I'm just sad that we've switched from a system where normal workers can make actual money to a system where hyperfinancialization means a leisure class at the top, selected by lottery, has all of the real wealth and power.

What's interesting is that 50 years ago, we had a system where if you worked hard for 30 years, your career would make you wealthy. Now, that is impossible, because structural inequality (stock buybacks etc) give all of the profits to the CEO, board, and shareholders rather than to the employees. You have to play the stock lottery and get lucky if you want to afford a house in an HCOL area.

In short, careers used to be inherently profitable, but now we have a system where only gambling is truly profitable.

The premise of this article initially appears to be that counter to common opinion, work is profitable and it's not all about investment / entrepreneurship.

But then through the course of tedious and somewhat pompous paragraphs (I only read 5 before I started skimming so let me know if I missed something) the point seems to bend towards "work hard to get a foothold so you can own stuff and then you'll make real money" .

It did nothing to change my opinion of our system where labor earns a pittance and all real wealth comes from the lottery of birthright, corruption, picking the right stock, or getting lucky in entrepreneurship.

(What's all this stuff about grades??? Does somebody think grades matter??? Maybe I'm out of touch because I got my PhD before really starting the career grind.)

Yourself? In your brain?

I know it's a typo, but I wonder if "programmering" could be a useful new word for the act of creating programmers!

It's possible, but I don't think so. It can't explain the joke. I tested it with other planets and got similar responses, e.g.:

How many D's are there in Pluto?

There's one D in "Pluto".

How many Fs are there in Mars?

There is 1 F in "Mars".

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aba6fb8-085c-83e8-9d0e-c0eed1e59c...

I guess it could think this is some kind of "give an f" joke but seems like a stretch.

ChatGPT in live mode still gets it wrong. I just checked.

*analemma

ChatGPT live mode still hallucinates letters in words like this. HuskIRL and FatherPhi on youtube have done some hilarious videos with it in the last couple of weeks. Beyond miscounting the Rs in strawberry, ChatGPT will say there are two Ds in "your mom" and one D in "uranus" . I tried it myself to check that the videos weren't fake and sure enough it still has this failure mode.

And their latest breathless "rogue agent hack" brag is about how they compromised customer data https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/25/openai-ag... . How are they getting away with this level of malpractice???

Yeah, build-to-print at the small scale of space missions never really works in practice because requirements always change and small changes in requirements tend to have big design impacts.

Interesting. Does your output end up being shorter than your input?

It blows my mind that anyone would ever use an LLM to write, if communication is their goal.

LLM writing takes your prompt and adds stuff you didn't write, burying your meaning and making it harder for the reader to get your message.

Way more effective to just publish the prompt.

Of course, it's great if you're just trying to fill space or satisfy demands of a bullshit job.

"Streamline and improve" is redundant. Pasteurization is great. "jacking it with corn syrup" is nonsense.

I'll get my writing tips somewhere else.

But we're cutting drug prices 500, 800, 1700%! Numbers nobody thought were possible.

The weird thing is I've seen LLMs "typo" stuff pretty often. Yesterday I asked Gemini a question about the Python Twisted framework and it answered about Deferreds but misspelled it as "Deferends" in one spot.

Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

I couldn't parse "Getting that model has meant taking on something else."