h3half

Anyone who’s worked inside the sortation centers has also seen sorters crash and rip packages to shreds.

Obviously that’s not “normal” damage to packages, because those things certainly aren’t getting delivered, but it’s not like these things get handled gently by the automation. Packages slide into collection belts where they land hard on top of other packages, they zip down chutes to be loaded into semis, etc.

There’s a reason they want breakables properly packed, and it’s not because the last-mile delivery guy is going to shoot a three with your box.

They might be getting mixed up with the “close door” button, which is something always included because it makes people feel better but when you order the elevator you can choose whether it actually does anything or not

Pot, kettle

The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit

Subjectivity is implied. You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made. Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.

And as has been pointed out, you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact (i.e. that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)

There’s also the fact that nearly 1/4 US states require no emissions or safety checks whatsoever [1]. So everything is valid by default and realistically the only thing stopping you from driving a literal rust bucket, with tailpipe dragging, poor combustion, or modified emissions filtering (like modifying your truck so you can roll coal down Main Street) is it a cop feels like pulling you over for it

[1] https://goodcar.com/car-ownership/vehicle-inspections-by-sta...

My understanding was that each satellite broadcasts a coarse ephemeris for the whole network, and that that “almanac” isn’t accurate for very long (on the order of weeks). Without uploads to the satellites, those almanacs will go stale.

I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.

(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)

This is a great plot for a B movie or a trashy military action book. “The bad guys are jamming GPS uplink and we only have two weeks until the almanacs are out of date and the whole system breaks down. Millions of innocent Americans will drive into rivers by accident.”

The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.

The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).

So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.

Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions

Even then... the reason we use the aero toolbox is because everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate. I don't need to prove that the ECEF<->Keplerian conversions are correct, I can just show that I'm using the toolbox function and people assume it's correct. The aero toolbox is trusted.

When I've had to write similar code in Python, it's a massive pain to "prove" that my conversation code is correct. Often I've resorted to using MATLAB's trusted functions to generate "truth" data and then feeding that to Python to verify it gets the same results.

Obviously this is more work than just using the premade stuff that comes with the toolbox.

Any MATLAB alternative faces the same trust issue. Until it reaches enough mindshare that people assume that it's too popular to have incorrect math (which might not be a good assumption but it is one that people make about MATLAB) then it doesn't actually mimic the main benefit of MATLAB which is that I don't need to check its work.

I can attest to that. I was using Gemini to help with some spherical geometry that I just couldn't figure out myself. This was for an engineering system to define and avoid attitude deadzones for a system that can rotate arbitrarily.

About 75% of the time the code snippets it provided did what it said they did. But the other 25% was killer. Luckily I made a visualization system and was able to see when it made mistakes, but I think if I had tried to vibe code this months ago I'd still be trying.

(These were things like "how can I detect if an arbitrary small circle arc on a unit sphere intersects a circle of arbitrary size projected onto the surface of the unit sphere". With the right MATLAB setup this was easy to visualize and check; but I'm quite convinced it would have taken me a lot longer to understand the geometry and come up with the equations myself than it actually took me to complete the tool)

Do you have links where I can read about that? Sounds interesting

As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?

Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.

They are either thinking of Vladimir Komarov (who died during Soyuz 1, in 1967 - six years after Gagarin's orbit, for whom Gagarin was the backup crew) or referencing the conspiracy theory that the Soviets tried a couple times to orbit a human, covered up initial failures, and only made Gagarin's success public because it worked.

Afaik there's not any evidence of this. The Soviets did have a bent towards secrecy so it's plausible, I guess, but it's definitely more the realm of creepypasta ("there could be dozens of old Soviet capsules in orbit with corpses inside!") than historical fact.

Just anecdotal, but I've met a few hundred NASA contractors (and am one, and work on the field) and I'm not aware of anyone ever using MacOS as their primary OS. The laptops are all issued by the government (or a prime contractor but that's not so different in the end) and I've never heard of them issuing MacBooks

My employer (a small space services company) also had issues with our .space TLD. For a while every email from everyone at the company to anyone external was getting caught in their spam filters. We eventually just had to get a .com domain specifically for the email addresses which is a damn shame because the .space domain is a lot better (think "companyname.space" vs "companynamellc.com")

I think your final sentence would be a more specific/more correct to say "five acres away", but in reality I don't think I've ever heard anyone use a furlong as a serious unit in conversation.

I have heard sentences like "the property line is two acres into the woods" and it was understood that he was using acre like you might use "block" in a city - "the property line is two acre widths into the woods". As you say, that's just a furlong, but I doubt either of us knew that at the time.

A similar interesting situation is how in some cases murdering a pregnant woman counts as a double homicide because the law includes the unborn child

I must be misunderstanding because that seems like the most common morality basis in the world. People who equate running over a squirrel in the road to vehicular manslaughter (as if you had hit a human child) are seen as extremists, and someone who was OK with hunting deer as well as humans would be seen as having some sort of mental condition. The majority view is that species matters

Why so snarky? It's pretty clear cko understands that and is trying to convey your exact point to the person they responded to (who made the opposite assumption)

My read of the thread is that this discussion is specifically about Microsoft Copilot, not GitHub Copilot.

Which I guess just goes to show how confusing Microsoft insists on making its making scheme

Do you expect coffee from fast food restaurants to be hot enough to send you into shock? That whole incident is a great example of a story confirming peoples' assumptions (frivolous lawsuits are everywhere) despite not being an example of that assumption

Sorry

Apology accepted. If you wrote anything after the apology you'll have to have your AI talk to my AI because I didn

This is very true; I've experienced both extremes.

In one neighborhood there was a yearly block party where we closed the street and cooked out, kids played together in the street consistently and visited each others' houses, neighbors babysat, etc. Everyone on the street knew everyone else's name. Whether this was a suburb is maybe up for debate, I don't know, but it was at least all single family homes.

I moved directly from that to a more rural suburb. Homes were still pretty close to each other - nobody had much land - but there were no sidewalks and the neighborhood was a network of cul de sacs. I knew the last names of my two next door neighbors but only talked to them maybe three times in about ten years. I knew of some people ("a fire chief for a nearby town lives in that house, that one has a family") but that's really it.

My assumption is that this is getting worse over time as entertainment gets more and more individually catered. Basically _Bowling Alone_ but moreso and as the most civically-minded people die off. Not sure if there's anything individuals can really do about it other than be friendlier with your neighbors

This is also extremely extremely common in engineering services contracts, both for government and private sector contracting. RFPs (or their equivalent) will specifically lay out what level of effort is expected and will often denote effort in terms of FTE

Why are you commenting to disagree with something the parent comment didn't say?

Not really, yes (though possibly not for the actual landing, depending on accuracy), and it's actively being worked on: https://www.intuitivemachines.com/post/nasa-awards-intuitive...

IM didn't win the contact because of their landers per se, but obviously as a company they have a vested interest in this kind of lunar infrastructure. Being able to build it with a bunch of public money is a huge win for them

They'll be using sidelobes. This is what's done at geo altitude which is also above the GPS orbits.

At geo the commercial satellite I worked with had position accuracy within about ten meters, and we always had access to 6-8 GPS satellites at a time. Obviously at the moon the signal is much fainter but my understanding is that it's essentially the same just harder to detect

Seconding GMAT. It's a distant third in the space in terms of adoption (behind FreeFlyer which is itself (anecdotally) far behind STK) but as a GN&C contractor I've used GMAT over FF and STK for a few jobs.

Particularly when it comes to code generation it has, IMO, a big advantage over FF and especially over STK. It's relatively lightweight, at least in my experience it's much faster to spawn and destroy instances than FreeFlyer, and it's pretty simple to write code to leverage GMAT to do interesting things.

Two things I've used GMAT for that would have taken longer in FF or STK are generating thousands of randomized ephemerides with keplerian parameters distributed in a set range, and automating a Monte Carlo-esque analysis focusing on error magnitude permutations by generating GMAT code from templates and collating into a single script file.

Not to mention it's free; STK and FF are very much not.

I'm on a first name basis with a chunk of the GMAT development team, though it's been a minute and I don't know how they're faring given recent political changes - they were out of Goddard which was having issues even before this January.

I don't know how often they accept code from the public, but I know they appreciate bug reports.

Anyways I guess I just wanted to go on about GMAT a little. It's a really cool tool and it's awesome that it's free. I wish it had more industry adoption.