gibolt

These aren't built in a city, where most people will be staring at them. They are in remote areas.

I'd also argue that they are awesome, quietly spinning giants in the distance. Although maybe that wears off if you constantly live near one.

Cell towers and oil wells are allowed to be built wherever by a landowner and are both eyesores, yet were built anyway.

I selected Mac + iOS devices when a job offered a choice, specifically to try out the option, while personally sticking with Windows and Android.

Now the performance of Mx Macs convinced me to switch, and I'll die on the hill of Android for life

This should be a temporary problem solved with time. The battery and performance gains are completely worth most workarounds required.

"Why would anyone use" -> "when" usage generally means lots of use cases are being ignored / swept under the rug.

>1 billion people exist. Each has a unique opinion / viewpoint.

Plenty of people would gladly not have to learn another language (especially C).

You could also benefit from testing blocks of code with safety enabled to have more confidence when safety is removed.

Spaced repetition is a good way to remember anything, including methods. Just review the method (maybe with a small practice problem) on an SRS-based schedule, to hone your skill. When you encounter an issue in the wild, having committed to memory ways to solve it will speed up the actual execution.

There'd be less drag on rockets too. That could be a plus for when we need to escape the death spiral we create

The one I follow is slightly different:

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we want to

And later we can find 100 good excuses explaining why it was worth it

Cha is tea in Chinese. I assume this is Indian naming is mentioned as a carryover from Chinese.

Same. I've been using a tiny pair of wireless headphones for ~5 years. If anything were to break, it is fairly easy to order replacements on Ebay which causes nothing new to be manufactured.

A set of small wireless headphones uses far less material than a large pair of wired headphones. Not saying it is a direct replacement, just that everything has some environmental impact, and fretting over one tiny device misses the forest for the trees.

China is physically the same size as the U.S. They absolutely want energy independence, and will probably achieve it for the majority of use within 10 years.

ICE car sales requirements are going up drastically this year, meaning most new sales could be EV within 5 years, and they could sell EVs at such scale after that that a ban on gas cars in cities would convert the rest of the fleet in another 5-10 years.

Once you have cheap, abundant energy all the industrial segments are highly motivated to switch.

Renewable production is still rapidly increasing, and prices falling. At some point, you saturate the most profitable markets relative to production, and get a race to the bottom.

Worse off nations should benefit from the glut of cheaper panels from companies fighting to stay afloat, that are far cheaper than continuing to buy oil.

Even better, since larger payloads can fit, the design can be far less complex due to weight and folding limitations.

Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform

The focus on making lots of prototypes reduces cost. They streamline the largest and most expensive manufacturing bottlenecks.

Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made

They are aiming for 6 launches this year. That is a lot of chances to make it work.

Even if there is a catastrophic failure that destroys the launch tower, they are building another and will still likely get 2-3 attempts.

Starship is expected to be 3x as powerful as the Saturn 5, once 'complete'.

The size+weight+frequency of payloads this enables will drastically alter the industry and how we interact with space.

Edit: Image for scale of other rockets: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-size-of-the-w...

Watched up until #30, but it gets old watching the exact same thing that many times.

Exactly what you want for a reliable space vehicle.

Agreed. For super specialized advanced materials or processes, some Western-aligned country will usually be able to provide it, even if no one in the U.S. can.

As a bonus, Starship should be fully reusable, meaning long-term costs drop drastically to continue the program.

Each flight could cost single-digit millions, mainly in fuel and employees.

Once Starship is able to reliably get to orbit and refuel, the payloads we'll be able to get the moon will increase significantly, and hopefully with high frequency.

Developing custom probes where most of the development+weight is to navigate space and land, May quickly become obsolete.

Here is Scott Manley's great discussion of it: https://youtu.be/7bFiJvbKyPs?si=EPXhBYba3XnQN1YB

If several of these could be looped together, could you get a structure stronger (or at least more resilient to tension) than carbon nanotubes?

I said approach, not vanity. Having 200,000+ safety drivers across the U.S. and classifying it as level 2 is Tesla's approach.

Waymo's approach is a Level 4 system from the start, but in a very limited operating environments, and slowly expanding.

The company decides the level. Tesla's approach is to get more real-world training data to reach a general solution, while Waymo goes slow with pre-mapping as a requirement.

Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does).

Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.

Tesla is legally Level 2, but has done 500 million miles of driving, with the 'driver' acting as supervisor.

The race is on, and if Tesla can fix a large number of small issue, they'll be able to do a massive global rollout fairly rapidly.

Waymo and Tesla are the only real competition left in the U.S. The deciding factor is how fast Waymo can roll out to more locales before Tesla gets closer to level 5 over the next 3-5 years.

After that, vehicle production and operations cost will be the main factor in the race to $0

Sensors can already handle rain. Heating elements are not hard to add (if not present now).

Phantom braking has been almost entirely eliminated in the past year. Plenty of others have noted the same experience.

Used to happen to me once every ~100 miles. This year, it only happened once the whole year, and the drop was maybe ~10mph.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving)

Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.