rtkwe

It was a new piece of test/validation equipment used on Hubble first. Reread it, they used the new equipment to test Hubble that had an error during assembly, they also crosschecked against the old machine which showed the mirror was flawed, and incorrectly decided that the newer machine was correct when it passed the Hubble mirror.

The test equipment is a much smaller part of the cost than developing, building and testing the machines required to actually grind the mirrors to spec in the first place.

I'm not saying all of LLMs writing quirks are naturally derived just this one. It's a bit like it's overuse of em-dashes, they're not common in general writing which is why it stood out, but they do show up a fair bit in other types like scientific writing. My wife, who's a chemistry PhD, has bemoaned the association to me that she liked using them in her writing for papers and now it looks like she's using an LLM.

You can see it too a lot in "debunking" of videos and images. 4 years ago anything unbelievable was CGI now it's all just getting called AI instead.

AI definitely over uses it but it's important to not just see one indicator and assume.

It's common in AI writing because it's common in human writing. Juxtaposition is a useful rhetorical flourish.

It's definitely disappointing and feels like a lazy site to not have much more than "look at these neat origami representations of these shapes.

Building from a single sheet is pretty limiting and beyond a cube build like the classic inflatable lantern you'd likely need glue to hold the folds down I think.

Most of them don't have origami instructions if they have instructions at all. I didn't find any beyond a few of the platonic solids.

Less than a half dozen of the things on that page have a set of actual origami instructions available. I can completely see missing the few out of all the others because they're the less interesting items on the page.

> You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste

I think a lot of this has been driven by businesses completely dropping their part of the deal in a pursuit of ever increasing profits. Formerly there was the long term promise that staying with one company would be rewarded and instead now for 99% of companies you're deeply punished if you don't hop jobs every couple years for a pay bump. Then they've also lobbied to completely gut funding for education to lower taxes or shift into subsidies. And a lot believe college is a waste because there's been a huge reduction in the value of just holding a college degree while the costs have ballooned.

The whole system that created it has been dismantled for profit long before the culture of it started to fall apart.

Some of the platonics have folding instructions not just the papercraft net but yeah I wish some of the more interesting ones had actual instructions for the thing being shown too.

> "Israel is allowed to unilaterally declare their home is no longer allowed to exist and I don't see a problem with that"

Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.

Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.

That's the level of tech the colony will need to replicate if it's going to be truly self sufficient for anything other than short periods which it would be to fulfill it's purpose as an actual "backup" in the situation it's trying to restore a broken earth it's going to need chips to put in all sorts of things. For a tiny example look at how long the shockwaves of minor delays in chip availability from various floods in Taiwan or the Suez blockage have caused issues and imaging them just not being available.

Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.

> wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own

My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.

The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...

> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world

That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient

> Guarding against another global pandemic is another

This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.

> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.

This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.

Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).

The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.

Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).

The reason I say history proves that to be bluster is because they capitulated after 2 atomic bombs and far fewer deaths than the 100 million number, so it's more a question of what other events could have caused that same change in posture inside the war council/the emperor's will to override them.

It's still quite hard to sneakily fly into the US in a GA or charter plane and land unexpectedly at an international airport which is why they seem to not count. I say that because places like the SBCC don't include 100 mile bubbles around international airports on their maps of the issue.

https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...

I don't see many maps that include them in the visuals of border so I'm not sure of the status of that and if the feds are arguing it would count and I think they would if there was an indication they were. I do remember that that was part of the discussion when the policy/rule first got a lot of attention a few years ago but it's not showing up in the visuals now. Maybe there was a clarification or restriction added either by courts or by the executive?

See the map here: https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...

There's still a net flow of USD across those countries unless KSA buys the Yen from France...

Hmm ok that's new info to me thanks. I don't think it's fatal to the anti argument but I'll try to jettison that from my understanding of the decision to drop the bombs.

Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)

> Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place.

My problem with quotes like that from the Japanese side is I don't believe they could have actually fielded anywhere near that number or at least not for any sustained amount of time. The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes and Japan was having massive trouble building any more planes and training new pilots.

Then ultimately the question is how much of that would have been required before the same shift that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped happened in the run up to blockade/invasion? How much of the remaining airforce could have been destroyed before it was really a threat to this alt-history force? etc.

> "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."

Like if we take this quote and others about the defense of the home islands at face value and suppose that they wouldn't have broken soon any ways in the run up to an invasion or in the early days of that effort why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit? History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.

A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen. Living as it does in the land of the counterfactual it's tough to really say when they might have broken in this alt-history scenario.

Taking numbers from here which pulls from a post war report: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e5fvss/comme...

Two main cases and the interpretation there-of [0]. The most expansive interpretation of the 100 mile zone that includes all coastal areas hasn't really been tested and AFAIK CBP mostly uses it in a more justifiable area around land borders so far relying on other justifications for more inland operations.

[0] ^f Supreme Court: https://forumtogether.org/article/explainer-u-s-border-patro...

That's a separate issue I don't support outside of situations where they can reasonably prove/show you crossed without alrady going through the search. Luckily, at least so far afaik, it hasn't really been deployed in the maximalist way that turns the whole country into that zone. It's a lot easier to justify near physical land borders like Canada and Mexico than it is if it's being used within 100 miles of very controlled impermiable borders like international airports. Has it been used outside of the land borders?

As a citizen they cannot block you from returning to the country. What they can do however is seize your devices (and briefly your person) and other property.

So the main argument is that in the time that was written and immediately afterwards we can look to see what they mean by that by how it was implemented. At the time it was understood that the government could and would search goods as they enter the country without warrants to enforce things like tariffs. I think that's a fairly reasonable interpretation of the meaning. Where I think this goes wrong (and maybe deviates from history?) is the conflation of papers and other digital records now with physical goods, historically were people's papers searched as they entered the country (beyond say looking through them to find hidden goods, I mean reading and examining letters and records)?

3-days is a pretty short time for such a major shift in politics for starters. Would a 3rd or 4th have been justified in the 6 day gap before their August 15th surrender announcement if the US had had them available?

Also the justification for the second bomb, that it was required to demonstrate it wasn't a one off doesn't require the that bomb be dropped on a second city either. The main thrust isn't that the bombs weren't effective it's that the extreme nature of the act requires extreme justification bordering on it being the only option but for a bloody home island invasion. See my other long posts about the anti-moral-bomb argument in this thread, I don't want to duplicate them here to avoid spamming the thread.