scrumper

Sad she wasn't savable but this is a better finale than being broken up. Lovely lines.

Here's another good-looking piece of US maritime history, in better shape but still at risk: NS Savannah[1]

[1]ns-savannah.com

I don't get it. It keeps moving and I can't navigate around (WASD, arrows, anything). Why isn't the central monument spire thing the well-known ur-article (Philosophy). What is the information architecture?

I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.

But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.

Andor really was an outlier, wasn't it? It's up there with the Sopranos and the Wire as one of the best TV shows in my lifetime, and everything else they make is lukewarm garbage soup.

If I read this right, it's only banning stuff without an FCC ID stamped on it. If you want to list, you have to provide the FCC ID.

I believe the FCC ban doesn't apply to used gear but seems like eBay is taking a harder stance.

Super frustrating. It's the best thing about LLMs, that you can be so imprecise and human with your discussion, with context maintained from input to input. Siri doesn't have the predictability of an old-school fixed syntax voice agent (like Wildfire from the '90s - remember that? It worked!) and doesn't have the flexibility of a proper natural language interaction with an LLM. It lacks any sort of working memory - "Create an appointment on Tuesday at 3pm." "OK." "Name it 'Mechanic visit'" "Now playing songs by Mike and the Mechanics."

At least then it would be trying to make me happy.

Huh interesting idea and quite easy to test by putting the phone in a blanket in the trunk. It's definitely using the car speakers, and when I do eventually get a call through I am heard clearly, but perhaps that initial interaction is using the phone mic.

The whole thing is buggered. My latest, in car, on 26.6.2 with phone connected via bluetooth. I hold the voice button on my steering wheel down to activate Siri:

"Call Fred."

"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."

"Call Fred."

"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."

"Call Fred."

"OK, calling Fred."

Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.

And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:

"Call George."

"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."

WTAF.

Refurbished are now gone too. Best Buy or similar I guess is only choice.

I need a new ATV to replace the ancient HD one that's dying in our living room. I've been putting it off because of laziness and now I can't get one directly from Apple if I don't want this too expensive, Siri-infested thing with all its microphones that I'll never use. Dammit!

I did not know that. But almost everybody in the working classes suffered from awful work-related health problems in Victorian Britain. Some vitamin D deficiency for a scullery maid compares to a miner's black lung or that ghastly phossy jaw that afflicted match girls.

> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.

Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.

None of that should be affected when the switch is flipped, that's the bit I'm struggling with. Sure, connecting a wire somewhere could act as an antenna but attaching a switch to the unconnected end of the antenna can't do anything. It's very weird.

> The switch could be connecting ground trace to the casing

This seems most likely - that there's actually a conductive path on one side of the switch from the switch body to the metal frame it's bolted to, so flipping it does take the frame in and out of circuit (doing something like changing capacitance or introducing RF noise on the ground plane which something in the PDP is sensitive to.)

Yes it's quite bad what that muppet is up to but it's not Stalin level yet.

Decades ago I wrote a paper, lost to time now, on the effect of his military purges on the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army during the back half of WW2. He purged not just senior commanders but mid ranks and up, think like down as far as their equivalent of majors. A vast amount of battle-relevant experience was swept away, much more damaging in the day-to-day grind than simply disappearing a few field marshals.

My point is, hope is not lost for the US military. Yes lots of irreplaceable senior experience is being tossed aside for unforgivably stupid and pointless reasons, but there's a lot of recent, hard-won, actual shooting war experience in the officer corps which, if they don't all bugger off in disgust, will serve us well in future. Today's captains and majors are well aware of how drones in Ukraine have changed battle[1], to give one example, and the career-minded among them will be in doctrine-influencing and development positions before too long.

I'm aware this is to some degree wishful thinking.

[1]I chose this example because it's going to be one of that drunken fool's more consequential errors: re-tasking the Army unit charged with developing drone capabilities for the US.

> Some things we don't need to maintain just to maintain them.

The point of my note was less about SR-71 and more about developing the capability to resurrect old technology in general, a skill we do not often practice at institutional scale. The SR-71 is a visible and cool way for NASA and contractors to teach themselves how to do something we'll probably have to do again in future. Making a documentary series out of it would be a smart move too, if we are attempting to inspire the future of American engineering by fetishizing the past as seems to be this administration's intent.

Then:

> We simply don't need that capability anymore. Recon of this sort is now done by satellites (at much higher resolution) and it's unclear if designated enemy states don't have or couldn't have an effective defensive system.

Isn't really true. The A12/SR-71's predecessor, the U2, is still flown operationally today because satellites are only a 90% solution. They can't be tasked to overfly a particular site on demand or on an arbitrary schedule, can't have their sensors switched out on demand, and can't loiter. The air defense evasion aspects of the Blackbird aren't as important now which is why the U2, being much cheaper to operate, is still flown and the SR-71 isn't. Of course that is not an argument to spend billions returning Blackbird to flight, since we already have the U2. But high altitude reconnaissance aircraft are still useful.

The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here.

Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes.

But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.

There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.

Well chief designer was a Brit but yes that is a fair point. I went with Concorde, rationalizing that the flag is more an evolutionary agglomeration than a conscious piece of design. It's a weak argument I know.

Hers is quite a story. I think my favorite part of it was when she refused to marry her future husband until he had also won an award for lapping Brooklands at over 100mph on a motorbike, something she had already achieved. (Another lovely detail is that she used her racing motorbike to cross the country from airbase to airbase installing her orifices on Spitfires.)

Concorde vs. the Union Flag? In the round of 64? Bah. Impossible to continue.

EDIT Agh now Range Rover v Mini? What do you want from me!?

Yep.

"Goodbye, USA friend, I am emigrating to Tonga so I won't see you again."

"Hello my new Tongan neighbor! I am an immigrant to your beautiful country."

"Hey, buddies at my high school reunion, I'm doing great thanks! I am an expat living in Tonga these days."

"Emigrant" exists but almost unused (perhaps other than in specialist policy writing.) "Expat" is the common agent noun for "Emigrate."

This is truly horrible, no misery left unimplemented; you're not even in a window seat. Well done. (I think the young people say, "thanks, I hate it.")

That said your seatback map is better than anything on any airliner I've ever been on.

I think the point of this is simply to show off the author's data science and analysis skills as an advertisement for hiring them as a consultant. Certainty I hope it's not one of those intelligent outsider attempts at an obvious-but-very-wrong solution to an established problem in a complex domain (HN comment thread is the appropriate place for those.)

I wear silicone ring in the gym, in my workshop, and working on or sailing boats and a platinum band when I'm not doing manual stuff. I could wear no ring at all, but I don't particularly like the optics of an obviously married man with tan lines on ring finger not wearing his ring: I think it makes you look like there's something wrong with you - recently divorced at best, a sleazy creep at worst. Should I care? No, but I'm not that well adjusted. Silicone is basically as safe as no ring at all for almost any manual or physical activity. Metal rings offer an entire exciting catalog of spectacularly horrible accidents for the low price of one tiny slip.

So, yes, it's literally a social signal that I'm in a relationship :)

I don’t usually get parenting right but the stars lined up for this one: I got hold of the Lego Saturn V kit (1969 pieces!) and my two kids and I built it over a few days while listening to this in the background. Last piece on right about the time “the Eagle has landed.”

It is a fantastic site.

You are most welcome. Enjoy it!

Yes we really went there, quite a few times in the 1970s. We have been again, also several times, with rovers and landers. As for why not humans since then? There's bugger all there to justify the extreme cost (at this time). It's an unpleasant ball made from tiny abrasive dust particles that is more easily explored with robots. The prestige thing is done; until we set up some base there in support of some broader mission (scientific or exploratory) there isn't a reason to send people.

I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/

This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...

Both are worth a read!

Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/

The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.

I read this a bit fast and with half a brain (because I'm in a boring meeting), but I'm not sure what an "AI model" is over just a common or garden model.

I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?

It's not a sophisticated take but if you haven't really thought about inflation before and its relationship to monetary supply it's a pretty good illustration. I'd not really want to knock someone for having an insight.