mathsmath

The US didn’t “invent” the internet.

It did play a pivotal role in its development, but CERN also was there at the beginning!

The US arguably just deployed it widely first.

I added “most of the time” to match my experience. If the entire building is a SCIF, I’ve usually left my phone in the car. If it’s just a room in a building, they usually have lockers outside and use the honor system.

That’s still wild IMO for a 152. Economical trainers they are, but summer mountain flying plane they are not.

Maybe if you ride some thermals…

Oh yikes. Every 152 I’ve flown makes 172s look like Superman. They are anaemic even at sea level in the summer!

In that class of plane, 182s are my personal minimum up here in the summer. I have heard of very experienced pilots having close calls with unexpected downdrafts on otherwise calm days.

Even in the US, nothing is technically stopping you from walking into a SCIF with a phone most of the time. We used the honor system.

I would almost automatically assume that any SCIF in a foreign country was compromised to some degree.

Lots of comments here about a 172 at these altitudes. Our field is at 7,500’ and has the continental divide with peaks over 14,000’ on one end of the runway.

A 172 can fly up here, but you have to be smart and very picky about the days you fly. We don’t fly with full fuel and take the back seats out in the summer.

If there’s enough wind over the passes, or density altitude is high, we stay in the valley. Mountain flying is an entirely different beast.

> What used to take a dedicated research team and millions of dollars of compute (to play professional go), can now be done with a sub $1 gpt4 call (to do something like make strategy slides).

Is that an accurate statement, though? AFAIK, the Go-AI was hyper-specific to Go. I don’t think any LLM would approach the level of skill exhibited by those specialized AIs (much less provide valid moves for an entire game in my experience).

It’s really not that bad unless you really don’t want to be found. Most DMCA/copyright firms just do a basic investigation which stops at the IP AFAIK.

Mullvad and I’m sure other modern VPN clients have “kill switches” built-in that shuts down traffic if the tunnel isn’t on. You can also do a leak check before starting anything up.

GPT-4 is also really bad right now about comprehending “new” software libraries (even when I ask it to scrape the web).

I find their error model to be off for my location. I'm in a mountain valley in Colorado, and forecasting the weather is like throwing darts at the wall (especially with precipitation).

We have no radar coverage, and the only "official" sensor I know of is at our local airport. It was recently upgraded to be somewhat accurate, but isn't operational about half the time. The most accurate forecast we have is the text synopsis from a forecaster in Pueblo talking about how it "might be stormy in the afternoons this week."

Our nearest city is a 2.5 hr drive, so we're in a pretty big gap of weather coverage!

Anyway - hope someone finds this interesting. I envy those of you with accurate weather! It has been interesting moving out here.

I think for SEALs in particular the issue would be cumulative large shockwaves, and how to better protect against them.

I think it depends on the shockwave. Maybe someone can math it out, but it’s like the sound leaf blower makes vs standing right next to a jet engine. I have never seen a shockwave on the ground behind a “normal” firearm, but it seems commonplace with artillery.

Never underestimate the ability of humans to throw something really hard ;)

I actually think if the object was on the right trajectory and we had enough time, that you could pretty much park an impactor in its path. You could probably do a lot of science based on the spectra of the resulting cloud.

I agree that gently landing and return a sample with that much delta V is out of our reach at this point. Maybe with enough shielding, you could park a second sample return vehicle in the path of debris.

I wonder if a one-way trip with an impactor would be useful. It would at least be easier than a roundtrip journey to and from solar escape velocity.

Also, it seems like the space base weapons treaty is being ignored now (https://spacenews.com/russia-vetoes-u-n-resolution-on-nuclea..., https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/nx-s1-4975741/what-to-know-ru...). I wonder if there is an opportunity to do some science with space-based lasers and spectroscopy. The energy would be small, but then again we can learn a lot just from the off-gassing created by the sun’s photons as well.

I had a similar experience recently. Massive turbulence on a commercial flight low over the continental divide flying into Denver.

I personally witnessed 3 people vomiting, but I was all smiles the whole time. I am in small planes a lot, so kind of enjoy the bumps when it’s someone else’s job to fly now.

Yes. Worst case, they will have to take a Dragon or Soyuz home.

What happens in peacetime is low funding and stagnant military leadership.

If things ramp up, you’ll see something akin to what happened around WW2 or Ukraine more recently. “Peacetime” officers will rapidly be replaced, and the funding faucet will turn on. I’m not saying this is ideally things should operate, but it tends to be what happens. I am hoping it doesn’t.

I don’t know much about LLMs, but is it possible to throttle their training?

Solar has gotten pretty cheap, and I’m just wondering if you can throttle up and down based on how much output the panels are producing.

Sure it does! I’m rural and our phones/ISP went out last week.

I activated our Starlink roam (you can access the captive portal while service is disabled) & all the remote working neighbors came over and shared the connection. It worked great!

I had to check, but you're not wrong - only 47% of total are controlled re-entries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_cemetery#cite_note-...)

I thought I recently read about a law requiring a de-orbit plan for anything launched. I would assume if most of the mass doesn't burn up (Starlinks mostly burn up), it would require them to hit the South Pacific patch or similar.

Not only this, but they fall in a randomly-distributed fashion. Most satellites are still under control and steered to a predetermined area for reentry over the South Pacific.

It's kind of like the industrial revolution. I don't think anyone knows what will happen (it's the classic human behavior of kicking the problem down the road), but the collective human mind has decided we want global connectivity now that it's cheap.

I can't see the cat going back into the bag (or reengineered) unless there have been proven negative results like the ozone hole directly linked to CFCs.

The satellites are typically much smaller than historic satellites. I think ~50-60 are launched in a fairing that would house 1 or two older-style satellite.

Does the mass make a difference?

Yes whoops. I should have made that distinction. The parent comment was talking about electricity, and that’s what I meant.

I would argue that the USA as a whole generally has more climate variability than the UK in addition to larger housing to account for the overall energy usage as well.

Keep in mind that the UK is much smaller and has a colder climate in general. If you look at a state like Colorado, the energy usage is vastly different than Florida or Texas with lots of heat and humidity.

I would bet that the southern states skew the results quite a bit for the entire USA.

Long term yes, but people still go to the ISS in 0g.

I was just pointing out that some things that are bad for humans actually make the rocketry problem for returning easier for this bullet point.

It doesn’t really make sense, but some childhood part of me likes to imagine us as a species of explorers.

There are tons of things humans do that don’t make sense. IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense. We did end up benefitting in unforeseen ways from the technology developed by doing so.

If people want to sign up to fly to Mars or send hardware there to terraform, why should we stop them? I take lots of unnecessary risks mountaineering, because it’s what fills my cup.

You make great points about orbitals, and I do agree from a logical standpoint. Maybe Mars proves too impractical, but the technology developed leads us in that direction instead. I’m excited for the future either way.

Lower gravity isn’t necessarily a con. It’s great for rockets!

Yeah! I have had this as far back as I can remember, and recently found out that (I think) it's tinnitus.

Interestingly enough, it doesn't really bother me unless I'm seeking it out, so I wonder if my young brain just adapted to it.

Another weird fact about me is that I can hear things (I'm 35) that lots of people can't. I can definitely hear switching power supplies in everything (well, almost everything - really high quality electronics mostly seem to be exempt). I also know when bats are around, because I can hear a "clicking" noise from whatever their echolocation-producing organ is. I don't think I can hear the echolocation itself, but there is a very distinctive clicking that they make in the process.

It's also worth noting part of the craft flew (intentionally) without heat tiles, and another part with thinner tiles.

They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rated.