roystgnr
1d ago
This guy needs to be banned.
Only took another hour, albeit for a short ban.
He states views that are basically unfalsifiable.
The failure at "making beliefs pay rent" is ironic when juxtaposed against moaning that "This place used to be LessWrong and SSC", but epistemology is hard and sometimes you can come up with an idea that's falsifiable in principle even if you have trouble figuring out how it might be falsified in practice. I think the point where he really went off the deep end was the thread where one of his claims actually got falsified and instead of taking the opportunity to literally become less wrong he started misinforming everyone about the response and insulting the respondent and calling correctness "pedantry". I've seen people speed-run the decay that LessWrong described as "pass from lying about specific facts ... to lying about the rules of reasoning" before, but I've never seen someone doing it while approvingly citing LessWrong!
who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?
But, to be fair, this is exactly the sort of distinction between causality and blame that autism-adjacent LessWrong-type folks have no trouble making correctly. There is no logical incompatibility between positive claims like [if you hand over your wallet a mugger is less likely to shoot you] or "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all" and normative claims like [the mugger is completely at fault and the victim not at all at fault for the negative consequences of the mugging] or "I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified", even if the positive claims feel like victim blaming.
roystgnr
2d ago
We have magically bloodless revolutions roughly every 4 years in the USA. People who don't even consider bloodless revolutions to be worthwhile aren't actually devoted to revolution at the price of blood, they're devoted to blood via the excuse of revolution.
roystgnr
4d ago
Also a complete normie, and this is why I make cold brew. Better than instant or any kind of preserved hot-brew coffee, you can still use fresh-ground beans and everything, but you can do all the work in the afternoon or evening and then the result is quicker and easier to put together in the morning than fresh hot-brew coffee.
Zero "pleasant aroma filling my home" is a downside, though.
If I was more of a coffee person I might switch to one of those coffee makers with a "set it up the night before to turn on right before you get up in the morning" electronic timer, but I'd assume that gets noticeably more expensive - not because of the electronics, but because it's got to have some way (pods? a perfectly sealed grounds compartment? a built-in grinder?) to prevent the grounds from going stale as they sit there overnight.
roystgnr
5d ago
Maximal precision in string literals is referring to a different type of precision. To a software engineer, this sentence is incorrect:
The phrase "my quotation" is the same as "my quotation."
because a period is either part or not part of a string and those two options aren't the same string.
But this sentence is fine:
The quotation "I'm making the point that [X] via a careful logical application of [point Y], and [point Z]" can be summarized as "Y and Z imply X".
because quotation marks are how you indicate that something is a single string variable (a noun phrase, essentially) whose internals have no syntactic impact externally. IMHO it's actually pretty annoying that there's no clean universal English-language way to do this. Often you can get away with punctuation to delimit a phrase if you reword the sentence a little, or you can use a hyphenated-compound-word if it's short enough and if it's needed as disambiguation (which it isn't in this sentence; the rule is so non-universal that I'm already breaking it here), but there's nothing as clean as the programming rule: wrap it in these delimiters and you're done. (Isn't that colon so much more annoying than quotation marks would have been there?)
To an American journalist (and to most non-journalist normies, honestly), the first sentence is fine (it's just using the "typesetters' quotation" rule, common in America, for how commas and periods interact with quotation marks) and the second is wrong (because quotation marks around text are "to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name"), not just a mere paraphrase, unless the paraphrase is also marked via brackets. It's not that journalism is supposed to be less precise, it's just that it's supposed to be following a different set of rules.
I've spent most of my life writing software for fun and for school and for a living, and I frequently have to fix it when I catch myself slipping up (or get caught by others while slipping up) in just this way when writing English, and although I probably fail to catch myself even more often I'm at least trying. I feel that someone who went into the humanities in school and writes English for a living and doesn't have a half dozen incompatible computer languages twisting their brain and does have an editor trying to catch their slip-ups can be fairly held to the same standard.
Moreover, in these cases we're not even talking about misquotations where the rules disagree! Omitting a phrase like "of Alberta" would be incorrect by both journalistic and programmers' rules - the use of quotation marks is fine by programmer's rules, but the semantic meaning of the sentence including it is false! That's even worse! Errors which fail to compile are much better than errors that compile but then give you the wrong results!
I'm still happy (by which I mean persuaded and unhappy) with my theory that technological/economic devastation of newsroom employment means we're now stuck getting our news from people who make bad life choices.
roystgnr
5d ago
American food is great.
It is if you look hard enough, it is, and you don't have to look too hard, but you have to admit that walking into a restaurant aimed at an American audience (so, including Asian and other ethnic cuisines) is a crapshoot in at least the "incorporating vegetables into their dishes" category. These days "bland, boiled mush" is rare, but "steamed, with butter and salt" might be the median and "your meat and starch comes with so few veggies they're practically just a garnish" is way more common than it should be.
H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world,
Have you been to Central Market? That upscale subsidiary is the H-E-B of H-E-Bs (except that ordinary H-E-B stores somehow accomplish high quality without high prices, while Central Market ... does not). When their grandmother last visited and wanted to spoil my kids, my son lobbied for (and got) a grocery shopping trip there, I guess on the theory that he had enough entertainment to last until Christmas but who knows when he'd next get let loose in an aisle with four or five hundred (not hyperbole) different kinds of gourmet cheese.
and their produce is fantastic.
You do still want to get there early and shop in person for the best selection. I usually order online for pickup, and that's still great for most fruits and veggies, but there are a few (fresh okra!) that are a crapshoot unless you pick your own.
H-E-B is also decent with charity and famous for disaster relief efforts. "Better than the government of Texas" isn't as high a bar as it should be in that case, admittedly, but it's still impressive that they clear it.
roystgnr
7d ago
I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch
ChatGPT just added a "branch in new chat" option last week.
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I haven't really tried Grok before, despite starting to use (paid) ChatGPT for work, and regularly testing new (free) ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini versions on my own personal benchmark math questions. I should rectify that. On my first try, the free version took nearly 5 minutes thinking, which I was hoping was a good sign - paid ChatGPT will take 3 minutes to answer something that free ChatGPT answers instantly, but the paid answer will be correct and well-sourced or at worst "I don't know" where the free answer will be nonsense that it proceeds to try to gaslight me about if I question it. But the Grok answer after 5 minutes made a sign error of the sort that the other free LLMs stopped falling for several months ago, and when notified it started in on the gaslighting.
roystgnr
7d ago
in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook
He's referred to as "Lord Vader", and recognized immediately by an imperial senator.
Later, he's on board the singular imperial superweapon in a top-level strategy meeting with less than a dozen participants. He does obey a command from one of the other participants, but the command is "stop choking that high-level general", everybody watches for a while first before anyone dares give the command, and Vader still faces no consequences for the incident; Tarkin even goes back to addressing him as "Lord Vader" immediately afterward. Out of context, the impression the movie gives is that Vader is basically the third in command of the Empire after Tarkin. With "it was only 30 years after WWII" context, Vader seems to be the head of the sort of personally-loyal private forces that fascist dictators develop alongside existing traditional armies, with perhaps less nominal power but with more real power.
and the republic collapsed in distant history
This was probably technically a retcon - there's some bit of dialogue in the novelization about multiple Emperors and their increasing corruption over time - but the bits needing to be retconned never made it into the movie.
In the movie, the Emperor dissolves the senate in the middle of the plot. Not long prior, Leia is invoking the Senate as a moral authority and the villains are taking it seriously enough as a practical authority that Vader decides it'll be easier to pretend Leia died than to admit she's imprisoned. This is perhaps compatible with the Senate being just an old Imperial-Rome-style facade that hasn't had real power in centuries, but from the film alone the retcon is the most parsimonious interpretation - they spell out right in dialogue that everyone still takes the senate seriously, and that the imperials get rid of it as soon as they think they've got the centralized military power to ignore any backlash.
Vice-President of the Empire
The phrase in the final draft of the script was "right hand of the Emperor". To be fair, this never made it into the movie, and could have ended up in the same wastebin as "Journal of the Whills" without too much hassle.
Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.
Star Wars, even if you only consider the first movie vs later films (and not the others or the shows or the entirely waste-binned Expanded Universe), has some seriously retconned ideas! These just aren't the best examples.
roystgnr
10d ago
I'll say Helen Keller International; if for some reason I win but neither they nor I are around then go ahead and take your pick of Free Software orgs.
roystgnr
10d ago
I feel confident that I would wreck any 12 year old girl in a fight, knife or no.
Surely this isn't in question. The question is whether, after you've wrecked her, you're going to find you've got an artery gushing out.
The old saw about how "the loser of a knife fight dies in the street, the winner dies in the hospital" probably wasn't taking scared little girls into account, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still enough of a risk to worry about. IIRC one comment here talked about taking away her hatchet and ignored the knife; slip up like that in reality and you're likely to end up with one hand holding a hatchet and the other hand holding the first hand's sliced up wrist.
The kid's probably too young to have heard the phrase down the road, not across the street, right? You'd probably be fine.
roystgnr
12d ago
Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.
To one Congressman, anyway, indirectly, probably. He said his staff gave Senator Wyden's staff the correct answer afterward. But, the next time I can find that he talked about it to anyone else in Congress was in an apology letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee a few months later, a couple weeks after Snowden's revelations.
This seems both still-damning (Yeah, I lied to Congress, but I did tell the truth to a staff member who said they told another staff member who should have told their boss who should have told everybody else purple monkey dishwasher!) and yet partially-exculpatory (why didn't Wyden just report the corrected answer himself, if he was confident that its classification was invalid, except that it only felt safe to get someone else to put their reputation on the line in that way?).
roystgnr
12d ago
Yeah, that's my preferred way of dealing with it as well, for privacy reasons.
We've got a deal, then! See you in 2029 (other geopolitical events, the existence of TheMotte, etc, willing). Want to let me know a "default" charity pick for if and when you win, in case I can't track you down then?
Isn't that underperforming relative to what was promised to investors? I think I heard the somewhere it should have been 20 million by now.
In an estimate from ten years ago, when they were trying to round up a bunch of investment at a $12B valuation? Yeah, they're behind that schedule, but it's hardly a promise. Investors who want a promise 10 years out are currently happy to buy T-bills at 4.25%. Probably some investors gave up during the latest ($400B valuation) buyback, and have had to dry their tears with wads of $50s instead of $100s.
That said, I'm not a SpaceX investor (except indirectly via Alphabet) and don't plan to be; I'm just refuting the idea that they're dependent on continuing investment for continuing R&D funding. Their investment over their whole history appears to be less than their revenue in 2024 alone.
roystgnr
13d ago
the superiority of Vibe Analysis over deliberate reasoning
Ah, but the catch is that most of the other sides of your bets (myself included) are probably likewise using motivated reasoning, not deliberate reasoning. "Elon Time" has been a thing since at least Falcon Heavy (announced Apr 2011, first launch planned by end 2013, first launch accomplished Feb 2018, 82/32 months = 156% schedule slip). BFR announcement was Sep 2017 with first unmanned Mars launch planned by Nov 2022, so that'd just make the 2031 launch window after the same magnitude slip, and it's a much harder challenge so expecting the same level of slip should probably be a best-case scenario not a median-case.
I'll be more than happy to give you 3:1 odds on this one.
Would you take $33 of mine to a charity of your choice vs $100 of yours to a charity of mine? (Probably just Givewell or a top pick of theirs) Official judgement based on whether there's a Starship-derived upper stage en route to Mars by July 2029 (if they're running late SpaceX might try some kind of Hail Mary pass after the best of the launch window has passed) but more likely February 2029 if they launch something on time, or I'll call it at the end of 2028 if they clearly have zero plans to launch anything. Yeah, I just figured out that "33%" was motivated reasoning on my part, but if we keep the bet small enough to just rub my face in a loss then I'd be in anyway.
No one asked him to go to Mars
IMHO part of why SpaceX has been a success and e.g. Blue Origin (with more investment and a head-start) hasn't yet is that Musk's employees implicitly asked him to go to Mars. At some point I guess people were willing to work crazy hours at SpaceX for barely-competitive wages because the stock options made up for it, but at least in the beginning the only thing SpaceX offered employees was the promise of being able to just get important things done, not to just eventually co-chair a committee to review the recommendation to change the color of the book of regulations against doing things. The list of "first privately-funded X" (liquid rocket to orbit, spacecraft recovery, ISS, GEO, humans to orbit) and then "first X" (booster landing, ocean booster landing, rocket with a 120-launch success streak) and "most powerful X" (operational rocket, rocket), while Constellation and SLS were turning into dead ends, keeps the dream alive. If SpaceX ever pulls a bait-and-switch on that, and just focus on e.g. Starlink as a cash cow while ignoring Mars, eventually their best people will go elsewhere and they'll rot Boeing-style from the inside out.
the investors could very well say they're done here
At this point SpaceX is the investor, buying back $500M of their own shares last year, and at the rate Starlink is growing (7 million subscribers now, up from 6 million in June and 5 million in Feb) they're not likely to change that soon. They're still letting employees sell their shares to outside investors too, but AFAIK the last time they issued new shares for investment was Jan 2023.
The existing investors could turn on Musk, and I'd expect a shareholder lawsuit if he gets Spruce Goose "the next Starship will be made out of wood!" crazy, but right now he's still reportedly got the majority of voting shares, and "we're mad because the company that's been talking about going to Mars for decades is going to Mars" probably wouldn't even make it past a Delaware court.
If the competition can provide a tolerable alternative for Starlink, at least for the Pentagon, and the Dems win the next election, they'll stop at nothing to fuck him over.
I'm hoping the competition can provide a tolerable alternative, but so far the best out there is Kuiper, 100 satellites launched (out of a planned 3236), half via the cancelled Atlas V rocket and the other half via Falcon 9. Even with Falcon launches, Kuiper has an upcoming July 2026 deadline to launch the first half of their constellation, and I don't think they're going to make it. Hopefully Trump is still pissy enough at Musk that his FCC will waive the "may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date" consequences.
Plus, the competition isn't even yet proposing an alternative for Starshield. SpaceX had put up several hundred commercial satellites and begun paid service before they even started putting up the military sats.
I guess there's still a lot of time between now and the next administration. New Glenn isn't even planning to launch its first KuiperSat load until "mid-2026", but by 2029 they could really be in business. There's not a lot of time between the next inauguration and the subsequent launch window, though. If SpaceX actually is prepping for a Mars launch in February 2029, I'd be astonished if the Dem's "First 100 Days" list in January 2029 was topped by "1. From Hell's Heart, We Stab At Him."
You mean the Estates General, right? That's the assembly that hadn't happened for a century and a half and squabbled about procedures and then split apart so the Third Estate could found the National Assembly. The Revolt of the Parliaments was a year or two earlier, and the problem there wasn't that the parliaments' judges couldn't agree with each other, it was that they could agree that even impending bankruptcy wasn't a reason to approve new taxes.
(This is confusing as hell because as far as I can tell neither the "parliaments" nor the "Estates General" assembly were actually what modern English would refer to as a "parliament", a legislative body; they were just there to give either a judicial or "popular" stamp of approval to laws that the King made?)
roystgnr
13d ago
Thanks for the detailed response!
You're welcome, but it's not entirely to my credit. I reserve the right to keep giving you shit about "three years AFTER" from now until the end of time, and I figure if I don't at least try to be as helpful as I am annoying then that's probably not good for my soul.
I actually forgot to mention what I think is a very important detail in the "worrying" category: the fact that they have a shot at reaching their target payload isn't actually because their initial estimates were good, it's because their underestimates of engine performance are making up for their overestimates of structural performance.
On the one hand, the Raptor looks like it'll end up with a thrust-to-weight ratio similar to what they eventually hit with Merlin, despite much higher specific impulse, and it's already better than the best non-SpaceX engines in history, more than twice the next best engine with equal or better specific impulse. The Raptor 3 is incredible, not just in the metaphorical "higher thrust than Blue Origin engines twice its size" sense, but in a literal "the United Launch Alliance CEO thought it must just be an unfinished model until Gwynne Shotwell posted video of it firing" sense.
On the other hand, the mass growth on both Superheavy and Starship has been heinously bad. They need the extra power, because they're something like 50% over their estimates on dry mass. On Superheavy that's not such a big deal so far (every extra 10 tons of dry mass on the booster only means losing around 1 ton of payload), and not likely to be a bigger deal in the future (they're already landing and reflying them), but on the ship that's a huge deal (every extra 10 tons of dry mass on a ship that's doing a powered landing is a tad over 10 tons less payload) and it's still in danger of further growth (soft-landing a ship is 80% of the way to reflying it again, but there's no telling how much extra bloat that last 20% will require).
Mars feels like a distant dream.
I'd put maybe 33% odds on them sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival. 66% in the 2031 window, with slightly-better-than-even odds of survival by that point. Just a baby step compared to a colony, but still, it's been super exciting when we landed a couple 1-ton robots on Mars and I can't wait to see what scientific "rideshares" in a 100-ton payload will look like.
What pushes us to "distant" is that those launch windows only come every couple years. On Earth, when SpaceX flubbed a test super-badly then it took them 7 months to launch the next, and when a test goes well it takes them 1 or 2 months to launch the next, and they're gradually speeding up the cadence overall. For Mars entry, no matter how well or how poorly a test launch is prepared, it's 6 or 7 months before they reach Mars and find out, and it's another 19 or 20 months after that before they can launch a redesign. If they want to test Earth return too, with a conjunction class mission to give refueling time, it's 29 months before the Earth reentry and then another 23 months after that before they can launch a redesign. That's a horrible rate at which to iterate, for a company that's always depended so heavily on iterative testing.
roystgnr
13d ago
Didn't Jeb recuse himself from being involved in the recount? And I don't actually understand how the Iraq War would benefit Jeb or the Supreme Court; the conspiracies there were all about Cheney and Halliburton.
The election conspiracy theories I remember all revolved around either "recounting punch cards sucks" (which makes a little sense: you have votes that can be changed by a fingernail, and you're going to get as many grubby hands on them as possible?) or "recounting electronic voting machine records is pointless, and also they suck" (which makes a lot of sense).
roystgnr
14d ago
What's your take on it's performance so far, in that regard?
Very disappointing out of context, then reasonable with a little context, then worrying with a lot of context.
With their current "v1 booster, v2 ship" stack, they claim max payload to Low Earth Orbit of ~35 tons, basically twice what they can get from a Falcon 9 with a drone ship landing. A new stack and test flight of Starship is something like 4 times the cost of a Falcon 9 flight, so we're looking at twice the price per kg, when they were shooting for 20 times less, so they're off by a factor of 40. Demonstrating booster reuse this early means that ongoing costs would be less than new stack costs, but until they can reuse the ship too or increase the payload they're still at maybe half of the price per kg of Falcon 9, roughly what Blue Origin is trying to hit with New Glenn. They'd be way ahead of Falcon in price per m^3, which for older Starlink designs might have been more important (they were limited by the size of the Falcon 9/H fairing much more than by the payload capacity), but these days they're launching "Starlink 2 mini" and "Starlink 2 mini optimized" satellites that squeeze down more densely and actually use the Falcon 9's mass capability. Regardless, billions of dollars of R&D to save a few hundred million a year on launch costs would be very disappointing in LEO.
Past LEO the current design would be a total failure. Their goal of using at most a dozen refueling launches at full-reuse prices to get a hundred tons out of Earth orbit would be awesome. They'd be able to put dozens of people on the moon more cheaply than they currently send four people to the ISS. But with their current performance, requiring three dozen launches at partial-reuse prices to get 35 tons out would mean they'd eat a loss just fulfilling the HLS contract.
So, TL;DR: very disappointing.
It seems to have taken quite a bit of time for it to pick up speed during launch
When I watched, it looked like it cleared the pad pretty quickly as soon as it started moving at all, but for some reason it wasn't released from the pad for like 5 seconds. Makes me wonder if some sensor reading almost triggered aborting the launch. They did shut down one booster engine about 2/3 of the way through its flight, and didn't relight it for the boostback burn, but just one problem engine wouldn't have been enough problem to possibly cancel a liftoff.
just with 16 tonnes of the dummy payload. It's hard to imagine it taking off with double that, let alone the 100 tonnes they're targeting.
That's because imagination is an inadequate substitute for math. ;-)
The v1+v2 stack is around 5200 tons. By far most of what any rocket does with its fuel is accelerating the rest of its fuel. If they were to add another 16 tons of payload to that stack, it would not have half as much acceleration at takeoff, it would have 99% as much acceleration at takeoff (about .36 instead of .365 g's). Another 68 tons after that gets you down to around 94%. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress, and one of the consequences of it is that, for any rocket with enough delta-V to get to Earth orbit, the payload mass at liftoff is practically a rounding error.
The extra 200 tons of propellant in the v2 ship does make a bit of a difference to their initial acceleration, though. What their current descriptions call a "v2" Starship would have been in between v1 and v2 in their earlier talks; it's basically "v1.5". It's got the stretched ship from what they previously called a "v2" stack, but not the stretched booster with higher-thrust Raptors. From a performance point of view they've upgraded half the ship so far, and in an imbalanced way. They still think they can get 100 tons to LEO out of what they're now calling "v3" (what was "v2" on their prior timelines) with both ship and booster upgraded. Flying newer ships on older boosters isn't a performance thing, it's a "need to test after major changes" thing, and in hindsight they really needed to test after major changes. The higher-thrust Raptors on the next booster version should give it around .41 g's at liftoff even with both stretches. That also means higher acceleration through most of the trajectory (rockets start accelerating faster and faster as each stage's fuel burns away and the same thrust is lifting less weight; it's common to start at around .25 or .3 g's but throttle down before the end to cap the acceleration at 6 g's to go easy on the payload), which means less nasty gravity losses (imagine a rocket "taking off" at 0 g's acceleration - it's still producing 1 g but only fighting gravity with that and getting no velocity) and more efficiency, which means much more payload makes it to orbit. The payload at liftoff is practically a rounding error compared to the weight of fuel and oxidizer, but when Starship hits orbit with only as much propellant left as is necessary to get back down, the payload should be more than a third of the total mass.
We saw this same sort of growth with Falcon 9. The first "v1.0" stack was around 320 tons at takeoff and could put 8 or 9 tons into orbit, but they kept making the engines more powerful and that let them stretch the fuel tanks and densify the fuel, and today the final "v1.2 Full Thrust Block 5 Why-Cant-SpaceX-Name-Versions-Sanely" stack is around 550 tons at takeoff and can put at least 22 tons into orbit. They typically spend some of that growth on things like earlier staging and landing legs and landing fuel, and now they can put 17 tons into orbit while landing the booster again afterwards. For booster landings, Starship doesn't have to spend anything more than it already has. Earlier staging and landing fuel are already in the current accounting, and they replaced "landing legs" with "giant robot arms on the launch tower" and somehow that's repeatedly worked because I guess we live in some kind of sci-fi anime now.
They could finish up their immediately planned upgrades, and if everything works on upper stage reuse too, hit their original goals. With an additional booster upgrade (and an extra 3 engines on the upper stage), they still think they can double their original (2017, after they scaled down from the 2016 trial balloon) payload goals, and that would be amazing but not a priori impossible.
So, TL;DR: reasonable with a little context.
The trouble, in the long term, is that "if everything works on upper stage reuse too". They could give up on upper stage reuse completely, get to spend a few tens of tons on more payload instead of on heat shielding and flaps and landing propellant, and even with the design they're testing next year they'd be good enough for HLS and for Starlink launches and for continuing to price under their competitors' next generation. But, unless they can do upper stage reuse, that still doesn't put a colony on Mars. Their existing "can reenter and then do a soft touchdown afterwards despite some damage" ships would actually be fine for getting to Mars, since that atmospheric entry isn't inherently as bad as Earth's (less free oxygen in the shock plasma, plus significantly lower speed entry) ... but then to bring people home they need the same upper stage to get back to Earth afterward, with no more refurbishment than they can accomplish in situ, with the reentry at Earth now at a significantly higher speed. With their dream architecture, getting to Mars is (relatively!) cheap and getting back afterward is practically free, but if they can't make upper stage reuse bulletproof then getting to Mars is too expensive to do regularly and getting back is impossible (without some other gimmick like carrying a separate reentry capsule). Part of why their flights 7 through 9 were so awful was that such major regressions on the v2 ship were really embarrassing, part of it was that the flight 7 and 8 failures were at the worst possible part of the trajectory, but part of it was just that they've been trying to do more heat shield robustness tests (removing tiles here, experimental tiles there) since January and they didn't actually get a v2 ship to reenter properly and run a test until August.
So, TLDR; worrying.
roystgnr
14d ago
Nah. If UB always fired explosives it wouldn't be nearly as bad. What's diabolical is that UB is allowed to be a squirt gun on your test system and then switch to rapid-fire explosives as soon as one of your users installs a minor OS patch.
roystgnr
17d ago
then 13 would probably be around December.
I just ran across an Eric Berger article from this morning which agrees that 13 would be "probably the first orbital flight" but predicts a much longer delay before the first v3, putting flight 12 "in early 2026", which would push 13 to something like March. He says to take this "very notional" "informed guesswork and reporting" "with a pinch of salt" but his guess is probably far more accurate than mine.
Oh, no, they're definitely trying to go to orbit. Basically every use case they have requires it. Starlink satellites use low-acceleration argon ion thrusters to change their orbit after a launch, but they have to start from a low parking orbit that won't decay for weeks or months. (One time a series of solar storms reduced that to "days" and actually brought down a batch of satellites.) Starting from an orbit that reenters within 45 minutes is out of the question. Artemis missions and Mars missions have to refuel in Low Earth Orbit, and that again requires weeks or months of orbital stability, at a minimum, for the propellant depot Starship. These barely-suborbital flights are the best way to test everything, but even barely-suborbital is not suitable for an operational launch.
Their problem is that they're trying to get to orbit with a ridiculously huge payload (which is requiring redesign after redesign to make things more powerful and/or lighter) and then get back from orbit in good enough shape to reuse (which will require redesigns to make things more robust and thus potentially heavier), and so even when they have successful tests (the last version-1 flights, 4 through 6, were awesome) that doesn't guarantee that a major redesign will still be successful (the first version-2 flights, 7 through 9, were awful, and they had one v2 that didn't even make it to flight).
[Edit, to sum up the problem in one sentence: They can't safely go to orbit until they can safely go to orbit, and it's hard to both achieve and verify "safely" with a design that's still a rapidly moving target.]
My guess is that they'll go for a full orbit in the same flight that they attempt their first ship catch, which Musk claims will be 13 if everything goes right with 12 (the first v3 launch). They've got one last v2 launch for flight 11, and if they had a NASA milestone for orbit then I think they'd try to check that box then, but they don't (the next milestone is for ship-to-ship docking and propellant transfer, requiring two launches to orbit) so 11 will probably be another "fix stuff that broke or wore too badly on the previous flight and pick new spots to weaken to see what else they can push to the breaking point" suborbital like 10 was.
If everything goes right with flights 11 and 12 then 13 would probably be around December. I wouldn't bet on that, since even Elon is suggesting that they might end up waiting until 14 or 15 for a catch. And if the first v3 flights are as much of a regression as the first v2 flights were then the catch+orbit attempt would be flight 16 and wouldn't be until next summer. Even that would still win you your bet with months to spare, but the implications for the already-implausible Artemis 3 timeline would be awful.
roystgnr
17d ago
Caffeine has evolved independently like 5 times. It may attract bees (and enhance their memory of where they found it!?!) and deter herbivores (including insects) and inhibit growth of nearby plants of other species.
There's a bunch of other examples where humans find chemicals evolved to be toxic or unpleasant and consume them for fun, too. Nicotine and menthol and sulphur+allinase (in onions and garlic) were supposed to defend against herbivores, capsacin against mammals, morphine against microbes and insects, cinnamaldehyde against fungi... And there's others (like persin in avocados, an antifungal that can sicken pets and kill birds) where we just don't even notice the toxin is there.
I want to see a "planet of hats" sci-fi show where the humans' hat is "the race that eats poison for fun". "My guacamole is extra spicy, but there's some mint chocolate chip ice cream for after." "That's five different toxins in one meal!?" "... how about a margarita?" "Is this just a mix of ethanol and acid???"
roystgnr
17d ago
I wonder if it's a closer-to-home example of the old "Saudi men holding hands" paradox. If you're in a culture where homosexuality is nearly unthinkable, you simply don't need to worry about innocuous behavior being misinterpreted as homosexual. If you're a heterosexual in mainstream modern culture, where bisexuality and homosexuality are officially approved of and celebrated but unofficially bisexuality would be brutal on your dating life, then you greatly want to avoid anything that might give misleading signals, and the fact that all the other hetero guys are doing the same just increases how misleading the signal would be if you slip up.
roystgnr
17d ago
To me Life is Strange felt like a very progressive game, but it was in a "we're all progressives here"/"fish don't know what water is" way: they didn't make a big deal about any artistic choices that stemmed from that, but so many artistic choices felt like they stemmed from that. It's hard to go into details without spoilers though.
Life is Strange 2 often went the "petulant and preachy towards various conservative residents" route by contrast, but didn't seem nearly as self-aware or unreliable-narrator about it as what you're describing. It felt almost like the converse of an Ayn Rand novel; instead of Rand's fascinating but disturbingly realistic villains mixed with corny one-dimensional heroes, LiS2 (or at least the majority of it; I quit about 2/3rds of the way in) mixed fascinating troubled heroes with cartoonish one-dimensional villains.
roystgnr
17d ago
Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.
It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."
roystgnr
17d ago
I'll second Andor and Arcane. For Andor I'd say season 2 is as good as 1, for Arcane season 2 is great but in different ways than 1 so YMMV.
For gaming I'd nominate Life Is Strange, and to a lesser extent its prequel, but Life Is Strange 2 fell into the "ideological and terrible" category and I never bothered with the others.
Caveats: Life Is Strange is a "choose-your-own-adventure"/"puzzle" style adventure game; not quite "walking simulator" but adjacent enough that it's not recommended for anyone who wants a higher percentage of game in their games. It's also not quite the best of its genre if you consider less-ideological games too; my pick for that would be the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead.
Yeah, but even at that point (and definitely since 2016) the win state has been just another toy to play with. The area with the end boss is literally called "The End", but after the final victory text the game doesn't actually end, or even restart from scratch in a "New Game +" sort of mode; all persistent world and character changes remain. As of 2016, "winning" spawns a portal that makes it easier to reach new areas that are practically inaccessible otherwise, with monsters and treasures that don't exist elsewhere in the game. To make it easier to reach more of those new areas it's recommended that you re-summon the end boss and defeat it again to spawn more portals; wiki says you can get up to 20 of them.
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