Robotbeat

So long as you don’t live in India, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea… or maybe even the countries Russia their ally is antagonistic with, like Ukraine, Turkey, all of Europe.

FWIW you can get a kit Core One+ for $999 USD in the US. I actually prefer to get the machine as a kit as assembly helps with understanding the workings of the machine for maintenance.

I don't even think it's corrupt self-interest. Just idiotic bravado and wanting to settle long held grudges.

America does that for aerospace & some defense stuff. But the reason not to is that the industrial policy needed to do it like China does has the effect of reduced wages, longer work hours, and lower quality of life.

In general, I do think the East Asian nations have over-prioritized work for export and industrial policy at the expense of the well-being of their citizens.

Not as much as their East Asian neighbors, who had increasing democracy and fewer deaths to starvation…

GoPro is a US company designed in U.S. with manufacturing in Thailand, China, and Mexico.

Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too.

People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.

A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds).

Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.)

The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.

I’ve physically touched the materials being used for solar sails and the lightweight mirrors.

I agree with all that. Many times I see someone Vagueposting about stuff, and I wish I could see their feed.

X posts have a permanent url.

I know for a fact because I’ve dug deep into the field, colleagues work on it every day, and I’ve met and talked to the founders of Reflect, saw material samples of their mirror tech.

I know for a fact it is gossamer thin. It does need structure, but there’s a fundamental limit to how small your spot size is anyway due to Conservation of Etendue, so small deformations aren’t a huge problem.

Landauer’s Principle (a direct consequence of the Second Law of thermodynamics) shows there’s a very clear physical manifestation of information and information theory, it is not just human perception and preference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

Nope. Technological possibility of landing on a droneship was claimed to be impossible. And yes, of course it was never actually impossible. The technical expert was obviously wrong even at the time, kind of shockingly so, but you see similar kinds of claims of impossibility today by so-called experts.

Launching a gossamer thin mirror in space is not very expensive. Broad strokes claiming anything launched to space is going to be a more expensive solution has to level with the fact that GPS and quite a lot of telecommunications and Earth observation seem to have incredible leverage if launched to space instead of just using ground based solutions.

Nah. Should have been named after the Two Trees of Valinor, Telperion and Laurelin.

orbital mirrors make very poor weapons because Conservation of Etendue means you fundamentally cannot concentrate very high unless your fill factor is very high (which would require millions of tons in orbit). Lasers are far more effective as weapons as a single aperture launched on a single rocket is sufficient to get high concentration. Microwaves also.

The military application would just be illumination.

Yes. Unable to edit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

I’m aware of the von Neumann joke.

There is, however, a direct equivalence between them derived from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics are pretty d*mn fundamental.

This is a misconception. It’s more fundamental than that. There’s a fundamental connection between (Shannon) information theory and thermodynamics. The Landau Limit, whether blackholes can destroy information or not, quantum mechanics, etc.

Information is actually tangible. It’s not just an analogy or a coincidence that the word “entropy” is a word used in both physics and computer science (information theory). Thermodynamics, mind you, is perhaps THE most fundamental elements of physics and how the universe works.

Engineers became really jaded by Shuttle and the failure o X-33. Many of them, inappropriately, started claiming it was impossible. You still hear people claiming things are impossible today that are “merely” very hard, like full reuse, getting launch costs same order of magnitude as transpacific air freight, orbital datacenters, terraforming Mars, space settlement in general, travel to other star systems, etc.

Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”

That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war. If there was political will, then the area around the Hormuz strait would’ve been seized, as well as the nuclear sites secured. Carpet bombing, too, not just surgical strikes.

Having followed SpaceX since the beginning, this is not true at all. People doubted every single step. Industry experts did.

Or composite rebar. Basalt fiber is sometimes used. Way cheaper than stainless and just as rust proof

Ok

Wikipedia doesn’t make much money but is still helpful. LLMs don’t need to make a whole bunch of money to be helpful.

I actually strongly prefer to read such forums WITHOUT "responsive design," even on my phone. Strongly.

In January 2025. It’s also not a court decision, effectively an executive branch directive.