avmich

55 ms·

811.
by avmich 3y ago
Starship can be comparable to CERN in space exploration. While CERN builds the tip-of-the-spear accelerator - the modern incarnation of a roughly 100 years old technology (i.e., engineering, even though there's plenty of science in CER
812.
by avmich 3y ago
Zander was saying "Forward to Mars!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Zander but he didn't have the technology yet.
813.
by avmich 3y ago
For long time we had the conservatives who question the new ways of doing things, who don't like the tradeoffs of new benefits vs. new drawbacks. It's a bit amusing to have them on this site :) but that's how people's op
814.
by avmich 3y ago
Starship has still not successfully flown once - if you disregard those testing flight to some 10 km height a few years ago - and yet the matter of the problem and the pace of the company still makes it quite comfortable to talk about multi
815.
by avmich 3y ago
I'm not sure that aggressive timeline Musk mentioned - about 4 years before sending an (unmanned) Mars mission (with Starships involved, as I understand), or about 10 years before that kind of a conference - a room for some ~100 people
816.
by avmich 3y ago
Recently talking remotely on a space conference in Baku Musk talked about launching Starship 10 times a day from an ocean platform, as it will probably be "too much" for Cape Canaveral. That's 3000+ launches per year, each wi
817.
by avmich 3y ago
Theoretically, hydrogen or ammonia burning don't produce CO2, among relatively popular rocket fuels. In practice, methane could make less CO2 than kerosene. Also, rockets are still relatively small part of aviation regarding exhaust, t
818.
by avmich 3y ago
Yes, I agree that "profit is the whole purpose of the business" is oversimplification. This point is well illustrated in "Other People's Money", 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?
819.
by avmich 3y ago
I think it deserves clarification that computer technology is the current technical enabler of complexity which is the obstacle to repairs. In other words, Big Tech is the root cause - the enabler - of multiple different problems in other i
820.
by avmich 3y ago
City-wide rule which forbids using noisy polluting ones?
821.
by avmich 3y ago
Judge it by its merits. If the object of hype adds useful novelty, the interest could be justified. If, as it's often the case, it is not quite known - it's a question to figure out. Granted, intuition is worth something, but it&#
822.
by avmich 3y ago
Generally speaking, we have two technological revolutions this decade bearing fruit - one in space and another with AI. To get significant benefits from space revolutions, some reasonable alternative to SpaceX would be useful. Launch servic
823.
by avmich 3y ago
Yeah, interesting, at least some cosmonauts on Salyut stations explicitly used legs to float around...
824.
by avmich 3y ago
No, just because historical :) . There's the system centimeter-gram-second, which is used e.g. for electromagnetic physics, it has its own quirks, at least with "centi"-meter unit name.
825.
by avmich 3y ago
"Kilometer" is another popular unit, which is never called "kilo", lately I heard it's informally called "click" in US. Logic is the same, kilometer means a thousand meters, and meter is the base unit of l
826.
by avmich 3y ago
The confusion comes from naming American units "imperial" - after British, and having international - metric - system created by the French revolution, with "liberte" an important goal. So it could be argued that it&#x27
827.
by avmich 3y ago
Freedom units?
828.
by avmich 3y ago
I agree, and disappointed, that we don't really know how different gravity levels affect human body. We could make experiments of that kind on a space station - free-flying if needed - but chose not to up to now. We'll have to wai
829.
by avmich 3y ago
Can we talk about actions as well, not only written agreements?
830.
by avmich 3y ago
Then the question is, why not smaller. Actually, why 0.5G is chosen as optimal.
831.
by avmich 3y ago
> the first lesson they drive home is to talk to users and ship product. Build tech isn’t on that list. That's the perennial mystery of Y :) - how is it even possible to ship product before building the tech?
832.
by avmich 3y ago
> ...you’re almost guaranteed to fail, but only because of your own _definition of failure_. It's not _mine_ definition of failure. It's the definition of _people around me_, those I'm spending my life with - try telling t
833.
by avmich 3y ago
Not sure if still above 140 millions. Pandemic, emigration associated with war, war losses, reduced immigration, reduced births numbers could have some significant effects.
834.
by avmich 3y ago
From your article: > Despite growing concern, Western officials said Russia's breakneck speed of actually using its military equipment is still outpacing its production levels: the country fired about 10 million rounds of artillery
835.
by avmich 3y ago
In places where I live it's considered polite to keep WiFi open for somebody who may occasionally be without access. You know, neighborly thing to do, like cleaning snow from a common driveway in winter time.
836.
by avmich 3y ago
On the International Space Station American and Russian crew agreed the French cuisine is the best of them both. Deliveries with European ATV carrying French food were seen as a particularly great opportunity for a better choice of food on
837.
by avmich 3y ago
> Code is code - either you pull it down as a dependency or you write it yourself, it all executes the same in the end. This looks like an oversimplification sometimes. You surely can solve the same problem in programming in different wa
838.
by avmich 3y ago
> What does ‘minimal’ even mean though? It doesn't include the batteries. The batteries - extra features - weight you down if you don't need them. So you'd better be able to avoid them. Large projects can be hard to audit
839.
by avmich 3y ago
Re: what is an operating system. A traditional definition is "kernel, drivers and shell". Here, "shell" should be understood somewhat creatively - as means to interact with the kernel - but the definition still stands.
840.
by avmich 3y ago
Dates like 2023-09-21 looks like a pretty good approach, except, apparently, when communicating with Kazakhstan-related peers.

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