whaaaaat

"You can decline to consent, but you'll miss your flight because we'll detain you for an hour". It's so clear that no one can meaningfully "consent" in a situation where one person has the power to deeply fuck you over like that.

ACAB.

These cops, like literal generations of cops before them, work in a system that financially and socially rewards and reinforces this behavior.

We need to stop thinking about cops as the good guys by default, and really start examining the systems that we've built to give them power. Especially unchecked power like this where they can train a dog to mark on a bag, use that training to get probable cause, and then steal whatever they want within the bag.

It's not just a few bad apples, it's a systemic issue that needs systemic fixes. Because if you put most humans in a position where they can get tens of thousands of dollars a year, without consequence, and be told they are heroes for doing so... it's going to be difficult to resist. We need to sharply cut back on police power, sharply cut back on police presence (do we really need DEA agents "cold checking" airline passengers because they bought a ticket late?)

This is a ridiculous reduction. It's clear that the numbers matter here, and that one family's decisions are nothing compared to the harm this CEO can create or prevent.

I absolutely adore Becky Chambers (and Murderbot, incidentally), but I also love low stakes sci-fi.

I want more stories about people just... living unremarkable lives in remarkable places. Like, I don't need to read about Batman, but reading about the guy who runs the bodega in Gotham City? Yum yum yum, that's absolutely food for me.

I describe Chambers to others as "cozy" sci-fi.

That said, I think her different works hit differently. The Monk and Robot series is a really poignant pair of novellas about what it means to be human in a solarpunk world.

The Wayfarer series (Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) is slice of life stories of people caught in awkward situations around space. It's like, "What are people on the fringes doing in Star Trek -- not Picard types, but like, construction crews or black market dealers or space communists or people who get stuck at a motel because the highway shuts down. What if Firefly was a little less high energy.

I disagree with your assessments a little, but not enough to make a fuss. I think it's absolutely fair to say, "This wasn't to my taste".

That said, I'm also queer, poly, and use neopronouns, so I think I may be primed for science fiction that takes the transhumanism language and explores those topics in ways that doesn't treat those topics are scandalous or shocking.

All gaming is not consumeristic. That's like saying all art is consumeristic, or all music is.

Play this game: http://passage.toolness.org/

It's 5 minutes long.

Read the creator's discussion on it: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/statement.html

Hardly seems consumeristic. And there's a huge pile of games like this out there.

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume "better working conditions", given the near infinite stories of Amazon abusing workers in fulfillment centers.

A band, on a metric, indicates a minimum and maximum safe value. For instance, if you alarmed when your latency is below 50ms or above 150ms, that'd be your band. Being out of band is being out of that 'safe' window.

It's a totally valid and common jargon phrase from the web services world, apologies though, I assumed that it was wider jargon than it turns out it is...

Why? What about it spoke to you?

Was it the messed up human anatomy? The letters and numbers being misformed? The lack of faces? The weird choice of unnecessary detail and bizarre scale?

Do you have any advice on how to paint a figurine?

One or two "Army Painter" brushes will do you fine.

Thin paints a little as you work, the paints in the bottles are a little thick.

Paint a base coat layer, wash a darker color over that layer, drybrush a lighter highlight over that layer and you'll be 90% of the way there. From that point, it's just practice and adding skills.

The giant, terrible, AI generated header image isn't doing anything to support the page. IMO, either hire an artist for a sketch or remove the image.

Seeing people standing around a classroom... hospital?... as amputees and weird shaped people in a space that's too large for them is very disquieting and distracting from the piece later on.

The reverse is also true though -- hearing from folks that we need to measure nothing because "trust me". Both lead to poor outcomes, ime.

A good engineering team has measurements in place that are reasonable approximations, where it is reasonable to build them, but also treats them as prompts rather than absolutes. Asking "why is this metric out of band?" is infinitely more valuable than stating "this metric is out of band, we've failed".

"A bad thing" is a highly variable judgement based on local rules, mores, and culture. And not every bad thing results in arrest. If I swear loudly, once, some people might think that's bad, but it's not going to get me arrested.

Do you have any credible sources?

"Do your own research" is a pretty thin rebuttal to "here's a source by a well regarded NGO".

And if you are saying Amnesty International is feeding propaganda through the mainstream media, that's also going to need some credible sources. They are generally considered a fairly highly factual organization.

When I think about a country who just incarcerates everyone I think:

* Do I want to support authoritarianism?

* Will I be arrested if I do a bad thing?

Also, I was surprised to see the prison incarceration rates, but yeah, El Salvador is absolutely the highest, by a country mile.

The top 5 are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and the USA.

they’ve got pretty serious potential for letting tech companies get paid for a seasoned voice actor’s unique delivery, tone, inflection, etc rather than the voice actor themselves.

I think you mean "steal the labor of an actor"?

People are allowed to recognize the realistic negative outcomes of technology, especially on a forum that frequently discusses the tradeoffs of modern, cutting edge technologies.

Imagine creating a podcast where Mark Zuckerberg interviews Elon Musk – using their actual voices?

I'm imagining it. It sucks to imagine.

I'm imagining it being used to scam people. I'm imagining it to leech off of performers who have worked very hard to build a recognizable voice (and it is a lot of work to speak like a performer). I'm imagining how this will be used in revenge porn. I'm imagining how this will be used to circumvent access to voice controlled things.

This is bad. You should feel bad.

And I know you are thinking, "Wait, but I worked really hard on this!" Sorry, I appreciate that it might be technically impressive, but you've basically come out with "we've invented a device that mixes bleach and ammonia automatically in your bedroom! It's so efficient at mixing those two, we can fill a space with chlorine gas in under 10 seconds! Imagine a world where every bedroom could become a toxic site with only the push of a button.

That this is posted here, proudly, is quite frankly astoundingly embarrassing for you.

I haven't seen anywhere suggesting a $1-2m launch cost is a reasonable target. Sure, maybe $10m is achievable, but $1m is so far off it's not useful as a cost estimate.

One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes.

The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.

Then you'd need the infrastructure to actually operate the rockets. That includes refurbishment, grounds crews, basically a whole Kennedy Space Center operating to launch these things.

And on top of that, you'd need an urban area willing to deal with constant sonic booms. Even one launch/landing cycle from these rockets is multiple sonic booms. The noise would be unbelievable. No urban center is going to allow regular starship launches out of it, so you'd have to go a loooong ways out. Which then means either a long boat ride or a short flight back to the city center. Which entails baggage transfer and potentially significant delays.

On top of that, space flight is not easy on the body. You can't just put grandma on a rocket and trust that it'd be a comfortable experience. Both the exit, zero-g, and re-entry portions of spaceflight are significant w.r.t. the forces they exert on the body.

It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.

Let's take the pessimistic estimates of Falcon 9 Heavy, which are about $3000/kg to LEO. (The optimistic estimates put it closer to $1500.)

You are suggesting that pessimistically, Starship is aiming at $30-60/kg to LEO. (Or, using the optimistic estimates, $15-$30/kg to LEO).

I don't think in even Elon Musk's wildly optimistic press conferences he pushed a number below ~$100/kg to LEO. I don't know where you get the idea that launch costs are going to come down 50-100x.

Some asteroids are water rich, some asteroids are mineral rich. Many mineral rich asteroids appear to be 'hydrated', meaning that among the rocks they contain ice. Solar power will be more effective on an asteroid in NEO than on the surface of Mars, but gravity will be lower. I don't know that we, as a species, really know which will be harder. They'll require different technologies, but the raw materials exist in both places sufficient to manufacture fuel.

You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to get to meaningful asteroids, and in fact many fantastic candidate asteroids come much, much closer than Mars.

Thank you. I was timed out, but I was going to say there's 0% chance of Starship taking 100 people. Do you have any concept of how much water, oxygen, C02 scrubbing, food, shielding, medicine, and infrastructure you need to support 100 people?! Imagine the device they have on the ISS, multiply it by 20, and then pack all the water it uses in a year in advance onto the ship. Then pack 100 warm bodies in there too?

It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.

I think you are being taken for a ride, but hey, if SpaceX does this in the next 15 years come find me.

I think that's a reasonable attitude to a point, but like, it doesn't scale infinitely. Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity? And Mars is still a laughable pipedream. Doing 100s of launches will cost SpaceX so much more than they are making selling launches to the rest of the world, it simply makes no sense.

And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense.

What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.

I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand.

Today, there are about ~1,100 metric tons of satellites launched into orbit annually. Starship is aiming for $100/kilogram cost per kilo to orbit. Let's get absolutely wild and assume that Starship takes over the entire world's launches. It would earn what, 1,100 tons * 1000 kilos/ton * $100/kilo = $110,000,000. $110M is... not a tremendous amount of money. It's definitely not enough to be building a fleet of rockets up.

Only about 20% of satellite costs are due to launch (and that was found in a pre-SpaceX era), so it's not likely satellite builders are going to optimize solely on cost. It's not an order of magnitude cost savings for builders. So SpaceX will have to find other means to compete -- reliability, capability, etc.

The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference. And that's not even counting the differences in payload capacity. Add several whole integer multipliers to account for that. For starship to need an "hours-scale" relaunch time, you'd need something like 50x+ the number of launches we currently have AND every launch in the nation to be on the platform.

It's a cool engineering target, but it's total nonsense for now.

That was primarily said for the second stage. The primary stage I didn't hear them call out as often (if at all?)

I think it's fair to deny his brilliance, totally independence of his politics. Don't confuse money with brilliance, and don't confuse "I can pay for the best minds" with "I am among the best minds".

Tesla was just found to be the most dangerous car brand, at literally double the national average of fatalities per billion miles. (National average 2.8, Tesla 5.6 fatalities per billion miles.) The model Y has above 10 fatalities per billion miles. Insurance companies are refusing to insure the Cybertruck and some places are refusing to allow them to park. People have burned alive in Tesla vehicles because they couldn't figure out how to open the doors.

I don't know that engineering principles that lead to horrific deaths and uninsurable vehicles are sound engineering strategies.

And I know some folks are going to say, "but spaceX!" To which I'll say, "Gwynne Shotwell runs that show. That company does everything it can to avoid letting Musk touch things".

Twitter has been steadily declining. Their competitors are absolutely skyrocketing in popularity in no small part to engineering decisions at Twitter. (Though, admittedly, that one is probably less an engineering failure than a policy one.)

But what about the Boring Company, they've... made a few small tunnels I guess?

If these are the results of his engineering principles, I think maybe there's good reason to consider whether they might actually be more harmful than beneficial.

You post:

No-one in that conversation denied the existence of anyone.

Then go on to deny the existence of trans folks. I ain't going to reply to all your hateful nonsense. Yours is the opinion that crosses over from "I don't want to hang out with trans people" to "I deny trans people", and I don't have to tolerate hateful people.