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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Interesting, thanks for explaining. I agree with the aspiration but maybe not the practicality?

    In a perfect world elections would be about hard policy discussions, but in 2024 policy barely matters. Campaigns don’t even release real platforms any more. The first party to take the emotion out of politics would lose horribly, because so many voters respond to it.

    Personally, I also like when people acknowledge that policy discussions impact real people. I think there’s an important role for displayed genuine emotion in rational discussion.

    I also don’t think that what we’re discussing is relevant to Gus Walz. We have every reason to believe that was a genuine and beautiful apolitical moment.



  • I won’t be using these features, but I’m not sure there’s cause for concern. The implementation seems very sensible and legitimately privacy-centric. The LLM runs locally and is meant as an very basic email proofreader. The crypto wallet is a likely an extension of the password management tech they’ve already developed, with transaction features that some people care about.

    I can see why some people want these features, and I’m glad there are new alternatives.





  • Yeah, the concrete storm wasn’t great last time. They did have some engineering reasons to believe it would work for a single launch, but it seems like there was more subsurface damage to the concrete than they realized. As far as I know the only property that was significantly damaged was related to the company, but I’m sure there were some smaller residential insurance claims for the dust.

    Part of the reason Saturday’s launch was delayed was so that more environmental assessments could be performed. A few weeks ago there some government scientists taking samples at the launch site for a baseline measurement to compare against in the future, and the entire project was reviewed by environmental regulators. So, those agencies were very involved in approving the launch license and SpaceX can’t just do whatever the owner wants them to. I guess my point is that it’s not strictly PR-speak, there really are qualified people making these decisions. But I agree that it’s not great to have the facility in the middle of a sensitive wetland, and no doubt there was backdoor politicking. I wish SpaceX would do more to offset the harm they cause, but I still think the StarShip project does more good than harm.




  • They’ve been pretty transparent about their expectations for these early test flights, and today’s achievements match those expectations. For example, they didn’t bother securing all the thermal tiles because they didn’t really expect to survive re-entry.

    The rocket didn’t go to LEO. This was intentional, because they knew that this flight was unlikely to survive and they’re as concerned about space debris as you are. All the debris either burned up or fell into the ocean.