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> the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private space companies were still very new.

This is completely orthogonal. If it weren’t, the lander would be in a better shape, but it’s as much of a clusterfuck as the rest of the mission.

SpaceX has never been outside of LEO, and I’m very unconvinced Starship can do it’s part on Artemis, much less do all the mission by themselves.


> The Artemis program is nominally about going to the moon, but it really isn't. It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit, in orbit refueling, building habitats on the surface of another planetary body, and obviously in the future in situ resource extraction and surface refueling.

Side-goals, fake goals and scope creep are one of the biggest red flags for “projects to avoid”.


The amount of pro-net neutrality in here is a clear demonstration of the opinion forming power of John Oliver, by dressing the issue as affecting users instead of companies.

A lot of people seem very confused about what “neutrality” means, and it’s consequences. As an analogy, VAT is an equal tax (everyone pays the same VAT) but it’s a very non-progressive tax (it burdens poor people more than rich people.

Your ISP doesn’t really care about your speed, it could increase yours and all your neighbors speed by a big chunk and it won’t really notice it. The problem is that to handle a Netflix they need to do a massive investment.

Yes, non net neutrality is about creating differentiated “highways”, but you are not going on that “highway” no matter what.

The discussion is if internet is considered infrastructure (as roads are) and thus they should be built with everyones money, no matter how specific they are to a single company, or if we should leave it to the market.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me why a company that makes massive amounts of money from the internet shouldn’t be paying a higher proportion of the infrastructure costs than a user.


Net neutrality laws are not an US only thing. EU (The Net Neutrality Regulation 2015) and many other countries have net neutrality laws.

>I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me why a company that makes massive amounts of money from the internet shouldn’t be paying a higher proportion of the infrastructure costs than a user.

Because ISP is in business of selling internet access to consumer. ISP can sell different tiers of service to the consumer, but can't sell the product twice. Netflix pays huge sum in their end.

This is how money flows:

   customer--->[ISP]-->|backbone|<---Netflix
>The framework we adopt today does not prevent broadband providers from asking subscribers who use the network less to pay less, and subscribers who use the network more to pay more

You see.


> Because ISP is in business of selling internet access to consumer. ISP can sell different tiers of service to the consumer, but can't sell the product twice. Netflix pays huge sum in their end.

The network is not some amorphous blob.

If a new streaming company called Notflix enters the market (with dedicated hardware), ISPs will have to build dedicated infrastructure that connects that competitor to the network. One of the obvious ways of gaining a foothold in the market is to go where other services have poor connectivity and setup shop there. Of course the ISP that sets up that infrastructure will take big cut for their work, as they should.

With Net Neutrality in effect, the supply side of heavy use internet services becomes constrained, creating a barrier of entry for new competitors. It’s just plain old regulatory capture.


I became "pro-net neutrality" back in the 2010's when Verizon was trying to charge an extra $20/mo for hot spot functionality on my provider locked android phone.

After some rooting and side loading I was gleefully working around that until FCC came down on them for it [1]. Net Neutrality was passed after that and only seemed like a logical response as a means of consumer protection.

It has always been a user facing issue, it's just not one that many people seem to want to expend the energy to think about how it impacts them. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth, the users are. Without users, Netflix would use low/no bandwidth, just as it did when it was renting DVDs. The users are paying for their own access and speeds to be able to watch netflix over the internet instead. And in turn Netflix is paying their ISP to be able to provide that data. Punishing either the users or the web hosts for finding a more effective use case for the internet than just sending static pages is the ISPs either trying to find a way to blame someone else for having over provisioned their network. Or they are trying to strong arm web hosts into paying more because they have regional monopolies and can get away with it. As a consumer if I had a choice between two ISPs and one of them throttling Netflix to try and extort them for more money, even for self centered reasons I would pick the other just to have better service. But there are a lot of areas where that isn't the case and there is a single major broadband provider who has free reign.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/what-verizons-fcc-tethering...


ISPs don't want to charge they want to extort.


“Programming is mostly thinking” is one of these things we tell ourselves like it is some deep truth but it’s the most unproductive of observations.

Programming is thinking in the same exact way all knowledge work is thinking:

- Design in all it’s forms is mostly thinking

- Accounting is mostly thinking

- Management in general is mostly thinking

The meaningful difference is not the thinking, it’s what are you thinking about.

Your manager needs to “debug” people-problems, so they need lots of time with people (i.e. meetings).

You are debugging computer problems, so you need lots of time with your computer.

There’s an obvious tension there and none of the extremes work, you (and your manager) need to find a way to balance both of your workloads to minimize stepping on each others toes, just like with any other coworker.


The article isn't for programmers, it's for non-programmers (like management) who think it is mostly typing, and describing what's going on when we're not typing.


It's not nearly as unproductive as my old PhD college professor who went on and on about the amount of time you lose per day moving your hand off your keyboard when you could be memorizing shortcuts and macros instead of working


An important difference is that in programming, it is often better to do the same thing with less code (result).

I don't mean producing cryptic code-golf-style code, but the aspect that all the stuff you produce you have to maintain. This is certainly different from a novel author who doesn't care so much about maintenance and is probably more concerned about the emotions that his text is producing.


Fuel transfer with what? That would require things like docking


They performed an in-ship fuel transfer, from one chamber to another. My understanding is that this is a very important pre-requisite for an actual transfer from one ship to another, because of the need to keep the fuel at cryogenic temperatures during the transfer, which is apparently not easy. Last time it was done was decades ago, but in kilograms. SpaceX just demoed a transfer of tons of fuel.


Bigger problem than keeping it cryogenic is getting it to one side of the tank while in orbit, so the pumps don't run "dry". Harder than just doing an ullage burn first too, because moving that amount of mass around also moves the vehicle.


They used tanks inside the ship to transfer from 1 to another to prove the process, was discussed and called out as success, and talked about many times before the flight


They transferred something like 10 tonnes of fuel from one end of the ship to the other.


Transfer internally between tanks in the bottom and top of the ship. This was one of the planned tests, I have not heard whether it was accomplished though.


There was a callout saying that it was successful.

Edit: On the other hand tweets from Gwynne suggest that they still need to review the data to see if it was a success.


For me this has become one of the biggest frictions when trying to help in open source projects.

Most issues either look like someone has been working on them for quite some time (which seems rude to barge in and waste their time), or there’s no clear indication of what would be valuable to help with.


I very much doubt it, and it’s probably going to do the opposite.

CRA just brings the kind paperwork that physical products have always had to be licensed in the EU (CE marking) to software. Have you seen european companies investing in Open source hardware?

The path of least resistance will be to use homegrown alternatives and sell them to potential investors and shareholders as valuable intellectual property that puts them ahead of competitors.

Not only because that makes perfect business sense, but because this kind of IP is very hard to value fairly, so it will allow for a variety of accounting and tax avoidance shenanigans.


Really? Specific security requirements for iot devices “have always” been in existence? I’d really like to know the source for that. I sound snarky because I work in security and am unfamiliar with what you describe. I could also not be very good at my job.


I think they were speaking more generally: the requirements in the legislation are similar in structure to the kind of safety/serviceability requirements that already exist for hardware being sold in the EU (much of which is just self-certifying you have implemented the relevant standards). Having security requirements and applying them to pure software products is what's new.


No, but devices have strict regulations and paperwork intended to keep people safe.

Keeping people safe when it comes to software means first and foremost having good security.


For a useful comparison you need to show if open source hardware is more common / more invested in other parts of the world. E. G. Risc V has a growing momentum https://riscv.org/blog/2023/07/the-growing-momentum-of-risc-...


> Have you seen european companies investing in Open source hardware?

Arduino and RepRap are poster children of open source hardware, and originated in the EU, I think.


They are, but both were born out universities not companies, so I’m not sure how this goes against my statement.


One more of the reasons I don’t make hardware.


And the people who don't get electrocuted by your non-CE-compliant hardware are thankful for that. Good thing the equivalent is coming to software.


Most people over estimate how effective CE marking is.

For example, CE only prevents people from selling products. For example, I’ve done pilot tests (city wide installations of urban equipment) with devices that, while I knew they’d be compliant, we had done 0 tests.

It’s also fairly trivial and common to cheat at the tests. Most EMC testing is done in conditions that aren’t necessarily the normal operating conditions and with “accessories”.

If anything else fails, aside from medical or safety critical devices, you could always self certify and roll the dice, it’s way more common than what people think.


It’s a problem of how book publishing works.

Most of these self-help books are made because publishers can sell them, mostly on the name of the author.

At the same time, most authors could condense their “insights” into a 3-4 page article. The issue is publishing a 4 page article is not profitable, there’s too much fixed cost, and too little market price to absorb it.

The logical result is publishers that insist that a book must be extended to ~300 pages to be really profitable, and authors that pad their books with cherry-picked examples, anecdotes, “case studies”, and whatever else they can to get the book published.


I wonder if ebooks would help with length of books. There are short stories, to novellas, to novels on Amazon for fiction. Novels are definitely more popular partly people complain about the value of shorter fiction.

Self-help books could try having shorter ebooks. They would have to forgo printed copies since pamphlets don't work in the store.


>What else can be done? This isn't a meritocracy, it's just capitalism.

What an absurd take. Just because it involves money doesn't mean it's "capitalism"s fault, for starters because this has way more to do with regulatory capture than anything else.

The number one reason for all these fraudulent research is that it has become mandatory for phds, and that education in the west is subsidized to a point that you need a phd to qualify for jobs that would have only required a bachelor's 50 years ago. There's a law of diminishing returns to science, so vastly increasing the amount of people researching is going to disappoint lots of them. It's only reasonable that a number of them will take the easy way out and cheat.


> education in the west is subsidized to a point that you need a phd to qualify for jobs that would have only required a bachelor's 50 years ago

I've only ever encountered this in Germany. Are you sure it's a general phenomenon?


> recognize the political reality that almost no one is willing to suffer a substantial downgrade in standard of living.

“Downgrade” is an understatement, people always idealize living “in the field” until they need an emergency surgery, then all of the sudden the cheap availability of plastics is great.


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