stoneman24

I think the main idea for starship is fully reusable ( which falcon 9 isn’t) and much larger capacity (both volume and mass). Driving down the cost of getting mass to orbit.

I googled and got the following costs per kg to orbit Falcon approx $3000 / kg Starship (early) $600 / kg Starship (target) $ 100 / kg

If they can achieve the target, it’s transformative. The Chinese will follow the lead and be available for some commercial customers but the majority of the market will be SpaceX.

There’s also “the ruum” by Arthur Porges[0]. We got as part of English class in high school, a long time ago.

Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum

Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society.

Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society.

If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out

An interesting science fiction book is Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross. A major structural core of the book is how different colonies trade and the finance models across interstellar distances.

How does a colony finance the initial voyage and investment. It raises the concept of slow money ( 1 slow dollar is the economic output of a professional people for 40 years irc) and fast money for day to day use.

I still have my iPhone mini 12, in the desperate hope that it can last until Apple have another outbreak of common sense and decide that a mini iPhone has a place in the market.

Battery is starting to fade during the day, despite minimal use.

I think replaceable batteries should be mandatory and 10 years of security updates. In these times, phones are really expensive (however you pay for them) and we shouldn’t stand for planned obsolescence in any form.

I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of “git”. To quote Wikipedia [0]

“modern British English slang, a git (/ɡɪt/) is a term of insult used to describe someone—usually a man—who is considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or silly.“.

And “ Git is a popular open-source software for version control created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

The author Terry Pratchett had some of best error messages in his Discworld novels. The Hex computer could produce the following

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++

And that’s before we look at whether the participants form a quorate group (sufficient people are present to make a valid choice).

Then we could consider whether all participants have the same voting power. My son has a strong vote on what to paint his room but much less on where to go on holiday.

Need to consider whether the votes could be hidden and revealed at the end to avoid intimidation.

For me, not so much a decrease in quality but more of an evolution as the landscape of sentient beings expands. The paired covids in the last book, were a great addition.

Don’t normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the paperback) but I may do that for book 4 “Children of Strife”

If the wells have been throttled back or stopped. There can be issues when production is reduced (or even worse stopped), restarting & resuming the previous production rates can be very difficult and time consuming. There’s a lot of complex multi-phase physics that can prevent the restart. Sometimes wells, just don’t restart.

I hope that you are right and we are just filling the storage tanks and waiting for the straits to re-open, so the hit to the market is minimised.

Iran do seem to be losing but that doesn’t mean the US is winning. The US needs to get the oil/gas moving through the straits and on the market, otherwise there will be big hit at the gas pumps and other economic factors.

We did the poem in secondary school as well. While we didn’t have the acting skills of your teacher, we deconstructed and reviewed each line and it really had a powerful impact on the class. The tortured helplessness of the dying soldier was a lasting memory.

Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.

Just reacting to the headline (not a telegraph reader). While initially the idea of energy security and base load power is attractive, having worked (as a contractor, long ago) on a nuclear power station simulator for a uk energy company, I came away with the idea that keeping the station running effectively (with maintenance and upgrades) was very difficult and expensive.

it also feels like a big security target when the uk is worried about both traditional enemies, the dependencies on other countries and companies. (See the worry about Chinese tech in our telecoms infrastructure.

Perhaps investing in multiple distributed facilities capable of grid level storage (of renewable energy, wind, solar) would be a much better investment for the country.

Maybe I am being unfair in comparison of old systems with the huge drop in costs of wind and solar. And while developments are happening in large scale storage are happening, it’s not quite a settled solution yet.

If you can get a cheap electric overnight home charging tariff in the UK, then the electric cost is lower. Mid week, I charged 43kWh for the cost of £3.04 (7p per kWh). My home charger does 7kwh in a hour. Usual mileage is about 4 miles per kWh (typical rush hour drive into Edinburgh). That should give me about 170 miles of range.

Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).

I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.

I suppose butterflies would do for volatile storage but you really need long term memory, such as twig and clay tablet.

What was good enough for the Sumerian’s is good enough for me.

Thanks for reminding me, I last saw some of those when visiting Harris in the Outer Hebrides. “The Hearach” malt is pretty good.

While an interesting history, the actual truth is that the haggis is a small mammal which lives in the highlands. While they can be hunted (from St Andrews Day to Burns night), most commercially available haggis is farmed.

There is no truth to the rumour that they have 2 legs longer on the left side to easily run around the steep hills. Or that the males and females have different long legs so that they run around the hills in different directions and therefore meet.

I wonder if the executives have realised this

If I remember correctly, the visa free travel (esta) asks about arrests as part of the information. Even if you were never charged, never trialled, declared innocent at trial. I would imagine that this would include a uk police caution as well. For all matters, even if under uk law, these are minor and spent (no longer needed to be declared within the uk).

Just mention the UK, but I am sure that other countries have thier own procedures but the US wants all the details for thier own examination.

There was recently a crisis in older publicly constructed buildings in the UK that were built [0].The aerated concrete had a limited lifespan especially if it was damaged and had contact with water.

Lots of people looking for compensation and claiming mis-representation.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66669239

A Merry Christmas to everyone !

Do you if there has been any work how lasers affect other animals and insects?

Am I being catastrophically pessimistic to think that in addition to swatting insects as it moves forward, the cars lidar is blinding insects in a several hundred meter path ?

I’m very optimistic about automated cars being better than most humans but wonder about side effects.

My dilemma as a student in Glasgow (a long time) at the start of term when I had some money, Fish supper or deep fried Pizza & chips. With the mandatory bottle of Irn Bru.

Delicious but excessive consumption would certainly reduce your life expectancy.

I would really like to send this article out to all the developers in my small company (only 120+ people, about 40 dev & test) but the political path has been chosen and the new shiny tech has people entranced.

What we do (physics simulation software) doesn’t need all the complexity (in my option as a long time software developer & tester) and software engineering knowledge that splitting stuff into micro services require.

Only have as much complexity as you absolutely need, the old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” still has a lot of truth.

But the path is set, so I’ll just do my best as an individual contributor for the company and the clients who I work with.

Yep, I’m sitting on the same fence. We can all see the circular deals in the high tech sector which has been the recent engine of the stock market. It’s all uncertainty, everywhere you look.

The article details the story of a business that tried to change their address in NZ. Thier documents (while correct to NZ) didn’t match the criteria of Wise and then Wise effectively closed the account. The support and appeal process was basically nonexistent and even by the end article it is unclear that the business owner were even able to retrieve the funds in the Wise accounts. Also the author’s personal account with Wise was also closed.

I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies

I suppose it’s what you are used to. A company that I worked with had under 100 staff, very profitable but had a staff turnover of about 10% per year.

People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.

Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.

From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.

So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?

I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI

Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment

Wouldn’t say best but he is certainly world class for his short stories. While the film “Arrival” was excellent, it was based on his short story “Story of your life” which was even better.

“ how are you able to manage conflict between org builders and your technical vision?”

That for me, is the core of the issue. I have been in a few places where senior management (up to c level) still code and are critical parts of the project team.

The problem is who keeps them to schedules and co-ordination with the other people on the project. Hard to complain about team level issues if the failing person is also the boss of the technical staff.

Build a demo perhaps to illustrate the idea/vision but don’t code, focus on the high level management and direct the ICs to build out the production version.

Both roles (management and coding) are difficult, demanding positions to do well, deserving of respect and commitment.

Just my opinion after bad experiences.

In addition, Team Dynamics 301: A course in Blame Management Handling the traditional “innocent punished, guilty escape/promoted” issue. With explanation of the meme “Success has 100 fathers/mothers while failure is a orphan.