* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4531 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Mass Matters

I think you may have to adjust your expectations a little. Think capsule hotel, but a bit smaller. You are travelling in a group of four but the hotel only has one capsule.

NASA renders always show Orion attached - to be fair, when there are people at the station there will be an Orion. To bulk up the size a bit more, they add a human landing system, but it is always the government reference concept system, not a giant Starship HLS.

The Gateway Logistics Services contract requires the cargo spacecraft to be able to leave and never come back. NASA asked about the possibility of it hanging around so there would be significantly more pressurised volume for the astronauts. I am not sure if that is still a plan. The pressurised volume of Starship HLS dwarfs the rest of Gateway.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

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"it might take longer than anticipated to get driverless cars on our roads."

I hoped driverless cars would not be allowed on the roads before they could routinely do something safe in unusual circumstances. I anticipated them being let loose early. Clearly AI is being aimed at the wrong jobs. How about an LLM to replace a CEO? Anyone anticipate that happening this century?

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

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Re: What did Bridenstine do

Bridenstine was surprisingly competent considering who appointed him. He successfully defended much of the commercial crew program budget and avoided down selection to a single supplier (Boeing). I am not sure how to split the credit for Artemis between Bridenstine and Pence. Both of them together formed a bipartisan coalition to fund a return to the Moon - instead of the previous flip/flop between the Moon and Mars that generated profitable cost plus change requests. That focus on a single goal created progress that survived a change in government.

Bridenstine had Shelby on the defensive, by proposing massively cheaper alternative providers for SLS missions. SLS was slated to be a re-run of Constellation: a pork project that did nothing but waste money until cancellation and replacement by pretty much the same thing made by the same people with a new name and a new cost plus budget. Instead SLS is a pork project desperate to soak up as much funding as possible before it becomes so blatantly obsolete that it cannot be replaced by a variation of the same thing.

If a NASA administrator wants to do something other than defend pork barrel politics then he is limited by what politicians will allow him to do. For politicians, blame the voters. Space exploration is a very low priority among the vast majority of voters. Few care enough to understand how their tax dollars are spent so the lion's share of the budget goes on vote winning fake jobs programs.

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Re: There ARE alternatives

SpaceX is concentrated in a small number of states. To get funding, pork has to be spread among most states. Congress went absolutely berk when the human lunar landing system went exclusively to SpaceX. The Sustaining Lunar Development contract was created for the national team and had funding approved without hitch. Compare that to the stink that had to be created to get funding for space suits that can work on the Moon: Sorry congress, no flags or footprints because the astronauts cannot leave the lander. Budger flags and footprints - Blue Moon cannot take off until after astronauts go outside and remove bits that make it too heavy for the return journey.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: NASA responsible for its budgets

NASA asks for an amount of money to achieve congress mandated goals. Congress always allocates a smaller amount. That smaller amount comes with legal requirements on how it is spent like, for example (one of many to choose from) space shuttle solid rocket boosters:

NASA wanted locally sourced short fat boosters. Congress required they buy from a specific manufacturer half way across the country. The preferred diameter was too big to fit under bridges so NASA had to switch to long thin boosters. The new boosters were too long to be transported around corners so NASA had to buy boosters in segments and join them together. Those joins increased costs and caused deaths.

If you want a single person to blame, I would go with (retired) senator Richard Shelby who was chair of the senate appropriations committee but the situation was more complicated. Shelby was a master of negotiation and brought in votes from senators of both parties by sharing the pork. His state (Alabama) got a generous share of that pork. SLS was his project and he defended it vigorously against competing concepts. Long before SpaceX existed Shelby threatened to defund NASA if anyone from NASA said "depot". (Orbital refueling gets the same performance as a single large rocket using multiple medium sized rockets. This adds economies of scale to the medium size rocket to pay off its R&D that a single purpose large rocket like SLS can never achieve.)

NASA does deserve a share of the blame. Many of the staff recommend projects because are likely to get funded rather than because they are part of a sustainable plan to explore space. In part, NASA needs such people because of the funding they bring. Hiring and promotion/sidelining is decided by the NASA administrator who is always a political appointee. It is currently Bill Nelson, former senator for Boeing Florida.

'AI-written history' of Maui wildfire becomes Amazon bestseller, fuels conspiracies

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Re: The Register has asked Amazon for comment.

At press@twitter.com "💩" has been replaced by "We'll get back to you soon." I assume they will switch back to 💩 when they can afford to buy more toilet roll.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

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Re: Cue the litany of complaints

Blackblaze now operate enough SSDs to generate some statistically significant results on a few models. Only 3 WD Blues, which started operation in early December last year so no significant results for them in last year's annual report. They buy mostly M2s and presumably are able to source genuine hardware, not the crap that gets foisted onto retail customers.

I check with them before buying spinning disks. Perhaps in a few years it will be worth making the same effort with flash.

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

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Re: Is anyone really surprised?

ISP's restricting/charging for specific traffic is a different issue, and has mostly been squashed. ISPs' plan was to run their own versions of the most profitable services and drive competitors out of the business with selective fees to "reduce throttling". One of the obvious laws to apply is using a monopoly in on field to create a monopoly in another.

Twitter is not a monopoly. It is a private business. If Musk wants to enshittify the service to a particular group that is his choice. Affected users can go elsewhere or complain to advertisers. Those steps are clearly effective given how quickly Musk back-tracks.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

I agree that Twitter.2 limiting referrals to businesses Musk does not like is just as legal as Twitter.1 suspending accounts of republicans. The difference is the consequences. When people were angered by what Twitter.1 allowed on their site they complained to the businesses buying adverts who threatened to stop buying adverts. Twitter.1 capitulated. That had consequences too: obnoxious people were limited to unpopular social media sites where they could talk to each other without bothering the rest of us.

Twitter.2's recent actions had sufficient consequences the Musk promptly backed down yet again, although this time with less pissing and whining first.

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

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Canvas mine

Canvas used to be made from hemp or cotton. Old tech used all sorts of materials that grow on trees - such as latex that you would need to make canvas air tight. Canvas can be made from PVC. Trying to use old methods on Mars would require advanced farming. Going the PVC route with modern Earth tech requires fossil fuels, which might exist on Mars if there was life there. It is possible to start with CO2 and ice, make methane and work you way up from there. That would be some impressive modern chemistry to get working on Mars.

Effective Mars technology will probably be a mixture of old and new. Getting a suitable habitat for trees on Mars is difficult but if you solve that problem then your precursor materials source is self replicating - a big advantage over a complex chemical factory.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: How long the colony would last

One accident with an airlock or space suit and the problem would be solved. Either that or use Tesla's range prediction software and customer support on one of the rovers.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

The next two on my list

2.5m diameter hole in the habitation module sealed with a sheet of plastic reinforced with duct tape and held in place with ratchet straps: To get a feel for what air pressure would do to that imagine turning it sideways on Earth and expecting it to support a large dump truck full of gravel.

Catalytic combustion of hydrazine in the habitat to make ~400kg of water: I need to listen to a chemist on this one, but in real life chemical reactions rarely go 100%. With improvised equipment there will be left over hydrazine. The NFPA 704 diamond for hydrazine has a blue 4: very short exposure could cause death or major residual injury. (Mark doesn't say where he is getting his oxygen - I assume it is dinitrogen tetroxide from the MAV.)

I enjoyed the film but it is a clear case of reality making life difficult for story telling.

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

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Re: Sometimes the inverse works

Quiet, you might put a stop to hundreds of millions going to 'digitise the NHS' pork projects that get cancelled and restarted every five years or so.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

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Re: This is the most problematic indictment for him, by far

I hope so, but I would prefer a few more problems. Convicted criminals are still eligible to run for president (Eugene Debs) and could be president while in prison - until he works out how to use presidential authority to get out. If the hearings do not complete before becoming president he could appoint an attorney general to dismiss them.

To get barred from office using article I, section 3, clause 7, Florida Man would have to get impeached by congress (already done twice), convicted by the senate (they didn't) then barred from office by another senate vote and finally there would be some sort of court room battle to decide if barred from office includes the presidency.

To be disqualified by section 3 of the fourteenth amendment, he must swear an oath to support the constitution (already done) then rebel against the United States (indicted is a step towards conviction, but chickens have not yet hatched). After that, more litigation to decide if this rule applies to presidents.

Using the twenty-second amendment (limit of two terms in office) would require insane troll logic. Two years of acting president count as a term. He claims to have won 2020 but has not been in office. It is a matter of opinion where he ever acted like a president - depends on which president you choose as a model.

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

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"adhering to Tesla's core principles"

What would those principles be exactly?

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

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Ice mining on Mars

Away from the equator there is a good supply of ice under a few metres of rubble. The tech to mine it has been tested in Antarctica. You will need a source of heat. On Mars that could be nuclear - which is handy because nuclear needs a source of cold.

Drill through the rubble and a little ice. Install a pressure seal in the ice. Pump in warm water from the reactor. The warm water melts ice and becomes cold water. Use some of the warm water pressure to pump cold water out and divert a portion of it to cool the reactor. When you have got close to the bottom of the ice, move the ice mine to one side and fit out your new radiation shielded habitable space with thermal insulation and all the comforts of home.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Star Trek style warp drive can never work

The speed of light is the limit. Your mass rises quickly when you get close to it. Pick your own practical limit: when your mass is the same as a planet, a star, or a galaxy. If you picked star conservation of mass requires that for you to have the mass of a star the mass of other things that used to have the mass of a star only have the mass you had before you accelerated to nearly the speed of light. Other people are going to be peeved if you do that to the sun. Luckily for you they will die quickly with no chance of catching up with you.

Warp drive cheats by distorting space. You use magical technology to make the distance along your trajectory shorter for the duration of your journey. The problem is that distortions in space travel at the speed of light. To create the required distortion near your destination the distortion has to travel the full distance through space before it gets distorted. To travel five light years in one year you have to start you warp engine over four years in advance so the distorted space is where you want it when you get there.

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

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Re: Woah there !

The Church of Bleach got a mild wrist slap for selling chlorine dioxide solution (a bleach) as a religious sacrament / cure all. They had to switch to selling sodium chlorite solution and dilute citric acid in separate bottles so customers could mix the two together and make their own Miracle Mineral Supplement. That, combined with the US first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" ...) kept the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing in business until they had to flee the country. They got support from Florida man who thought that bleach could cure COVID and are now demonstrating the level of their own intelligence by representing themselves in court.

If they had any sense they would have told people that the route to paradise required human cannibalism then sold bread, wine and a magic spell to convert it into flesh and blood. Far too many people will believe anything.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Second level nerfing

Just tried it. You can now only pick items from a list. Once you have the list, you can use the browser's inspect element and edit html to change the data-index field and h3 content to whatever you want. Hair bleach, drain cleaner and nail polish remover give invalid ingredients. I think you can get around that with Happy salmon bleach, organic nail polish or egg flavoured drain cleaner but I do not have time now. Perhaps someone can get a long pig recipe with those tricks.

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

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Re: No win, no fee!

Normally the owner of a company is not personally responsible for his company's debts. If the owner treats the company as an extension of himself then creditors may be able to pierce the corporate veil - in this case collect debts by taking Musk's Tesla (and perhaps SpaceX) shares. Musk has been working his way through the "Don't be that stupid" list and ticking all the required boxes to allow piercing the corporate veil. On that basis, a lawyer might well take a "no win, no fee" case against xtwitter.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Male or female, I think the correct response is to ask your lawyer about constructive dismissal.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

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Re: So reading between the lines ...

I am not Drax. Some things do go over my head. My first thought on your comment was "err what?". I did a web search for red noise and only found it as a synonym for Brownian noise. Still do not get the joke.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

Yes they are working on Starship HLS. Some of the big pieces show up in aerial photography. The priority at the moment is getting Starship to orbit, so that shows up far more. SpaceX is not short of money. NASA and DoD check costs to ensure that bids are realistic. Launching a Falcon 9 costs less than $20M but their price is currently $67M. Starlink has been revenue positive for months. The tax revenue that SpaceX has brought to the US by taking the market from Ariane and Roscosmos has more than payed for the total US government investment in SpaceX. On top of that, DoD and NASA were getting milked by ULA monopoly launch prices which Falcon 9 ended.

Just because Elon xcretes "work on thanksgiving or SpaceX could go bankrupt" does not mean it is true.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Just one question

Musk likes to take credit for things and you let him. Since the beginning of the year Musk has been spending all his time supporting transphobes on Twitter. Starbase is run by Kathy Lueders. Putting Raptors on a Falcon is utterly stupid from two different directions.

Falcon tooling is set up for 3.7m diameter aluminium tanks. Keep that or you are doing a new rocket. The propellant is different so you need to upgrade ground support equipment and move to common dome to get the right mixture ratio (liquid methane is less dense than kerosine so the methane takes up a higher proportion of the rocket. The engines are more efficient so the over all height may not need to change much). Tank pressurisation is different so you have to rip out the helium system out for the top of the tanks and route new pipes from the engines for the autogenous system. Raptors are bigger than Merlins so you cannot fit 9 on stage one. Luckily they are so powerful you only need three. The thrust structure and plumbing under the rocket need a complete redesign. There won't be a central engine, so you cannot land with just one - which would be equivalent two a three Merlin engine landing. Three raptors are far too powerful to land a Falcon, so throw away the grid fins, landing legs and any opportunity to inspect a used engine to improve design. A single raptor on stage two would create enough acceleration to crush the payload.

At $40M each I can understand why throwing away 36 SLS engines would cause horror. With a promised production rate of 8 per year I can understand why throwing away 36 sounds crazy. With a production rate of 30/month and an incremental cost of $250,000 each raptors get scrapped all the time. Blowing up 36 really is not an issue.

Check out the Centre for Biological Diversity. Not the environment group in Scotland, but the law firm from Washington suing the FAA. Read their complaint. It is like 'election fraud' litigation, not intended for use in a court room but instead for getting donations from the public. If anyone is getting into trouble for CBD vs FAA it is the CBD lawyers for wasting the court's time. Please go to the CBD website and look at who they say they are (lawyers), what they say they do (start litigation) and what they want (your money).

All large rocket launch sites in the US are surrounded by wildlife reserves. Any construction work done on the reserves has to be carried out by the Army Corp of Engineers. Getting that done is an organisational nightmare. Look at the satellite imagery: you will find catch ponds on the Starbase sites dug on SpaceX land. Digging them can be done by SpaceX without waiting for the corps to get their act together. Instead of fresh water quickly running off concrete it leaks slowly from the ponds like rain water into sand - as required by the mitigated finding of no significant impact for the programmatic environmental assessment. The deluge system has two giant concrete catchment pools so the water trucked in for the deluge system can be recycled. When half a dozen agencies do not slap SpaceX with fines and lawsuits will you admit that you are wrong or say it is a deep state conspiracy? There is some youtuber currently cashing in by creating environmental outrage among the credulous. Please apply a little critical thinking and fact checking - and that goes double for the Elon Stans being first up with the wrong answers that makes debunking clickbait twice as hard.

The consequences of an experimental rocket taking out 39a would be NASA having to buy rides to the ISS from Roscosmos. I thoroughly understand NASA being protective of 39a. SpaceX are adding crew access to SLC-40 to address this issue. Work on Starship launches from Florida slowed before the first Starship orbital launch test crater and has essentially stopped. This has happened before - and for the same reason: the mathematical models predicting the scale of ground support equipment capable of surviving an orbital launch were wrong. From a SpaceX point of view, the risk wasting time and money on early construction work that gets demolished is smaller than the potential benefit of having a launch tower ready when Starship is. The biggest cost in bringing something new to market is time. You really do not want everyone waiting around because one part of the system is later than the rest.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Just one question

At first I assumed you were just trolling but I made the effort to check you post history and it turns out that although you understand Musk completely you are very ignorant about rockets.

1) SpaceX does not equal Musk. SpaceX have a crew in place to keep Musk away from important decisions. He was needed for that start-up capital. Now that he spends most of his time at Twitter SpaceX runs more smoothly.

2) Check my post history. You will find I say worse things about Musk than you do, especially in the context of Twitter and Tesla. I find his (minimal) involvement with SpaceX embarrassing and I really hope the consequences of securities fraud catch up with him as soon as possible.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Just one question

SpaceX R&D is move fast and break stuff. Operation missions are very different: successes/launches

Falcon 9: 250/252

Falcon 9 Block 5: 189/189

Falcon heavy: 7/7

Cargo Dragon: 21/22

Crew Dragon: 12/12

Ariane 6: 0/0

ULA Vulcan: 0/0

Boeing Starliner: First did not reach ISS but did get back to Earth. Second: Successful uncrewed test. Third delayed - next year?

Blue Origin New Glenn: 0/0

Blue Origin Biconic Space Vehicle (a crew capsule): NASA funded study abandoned before completion.

I am sure Starship will crash and burn several times and may well take some Starlinks with it. Some uncrewed Starship HLS test missions may crash too. Starship will not be carrying people until it is safe

There is a NASA funded traditional lunar lander in progress: Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander. Perhaps it will get people to the Moon and back one day. I do not expect to live that long, but if cures for cancer and heart disease significantly extend life expectancy then I would bet on Blue Moon before profitable hyperloop.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

Bill is an ex politician so there is no point listening to what he says. Instead, look at what he does. That appears to be promoting people who support cost plus old space contracts and sidelining people who support firm fixed price new space contracts. The race is not US vs China but to spend as much money as possible on SLS before Starship can send wealthy tourists to the Moon.

X tries to win back advertisers with brand safety promises

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Not false advertising

When Musk advertised for a CEO, the job description was clear: Musk would take all the decisions that interested him, the new CEO would have to do everything else and take the blame.

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

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Re: Soooo....

Aiming to low. Take out the racism filters an run it for president.

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

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According to the internet Musk has a purple belt in karate. Zuckerberg exercises effectively, has trained in mixed martial arts and won competitions in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

A normal person would not get into such a fight. A sensible person would concede before getting injured. Musk pisses and whines like he has signed an irrevocable $44B agreement to buy something that was worth considerably less.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

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Re: Would Musk pay to sue himself?

Already happened. The really expensive law firm (WLR&K) that forced Musk to complete his contract to buy Twitter got paid out of a Twitter bank account that Musk bought as a part of a fixed price contract.

When Musk eventually worked out that he had effectively paid WLR&K he sued... Twitter Version 1 executives. Even he can work out that suing a really expensive law firm for doing their job successfully would be an exercise in futility. The executives are not a much better choice. You can bet they are covered by Twitter V1's legal indemnity insurance. Musk could have changed insurance provider for Twitter V2 - if he could find someone dumb enough to take the business. He could operate Twitter without legal indemnity insurance - he might be that dumb but Linda Yaccarino and Alex Spiro aren't. It is possible Twitter V2 is with the same provider as V1 - so his premiums must be set to go up...

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Money

One of the standard schemes is to set up a fake news web site with Google ads, link to it from social media and the RWNJs will cite it as proof of their conspiracy theories until advertising revenue goes through the roof. (Trying the same with liberals gets little traction because many of them are capable of a little critical thinking and minimal fact checking.) Musk clearly plans to cash in by replacing the middle men.

I am surprised the Masato Kanda xcretion handle has been suspended. It would make more sense to put it up for auction.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

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Comparing apple pie to mandarins

To be equivalent, you would need to find some US citizens who emigrate to China, get citizenship there, join their military, swear their oath and accept their salary. If those citizens then sell Chinese secrets back to the US would you call the Chinese hypocrites for prosecuting those spies for espionage?

Google offers to alert netizens when their personal info shows up in Search

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New Google service cancelled already?

I have not told Google who I am, where I live or my phone number and I wouldn't even to use this tool. It is very likely that Google have got this information from someone else, so I tried the link (https://myactivity.google.com/results-about-you) to find out what Google would admit to knowing: "Error 404 (Not Found)!!1"

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

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Mustn't make it that easy

One of the exits from that maze leads to the other maze with a vending machine which will trade a gold piece for a new torch battery.

Japanese supermarket watches you shop so AI can suggest more stuff to buy

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Re: avatar whispering in my ear is going to send me online permanently

Some online shops have sequence like:

"I want to check out please" leads to the "special offers" page.

"I don't want any, I want to check out" leads to the "perhaps you forgot" page.

"Stop @$!|\|6 about and let me check out right now" leads to the "these items are really good" page

"Last chance or I walk away" lets you complete the order.

There is a bad chance that going elsewhere just puts you at the start of a similar sequence.

I have a barcode scanner. It would be really handy to scan empties into a file and xclip the list to a web site. If someone could figure out a way to do it with blockchain and an LLM perhaps it would happen.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

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Re: You can always tell when I come into the office

Before you say nothing, is it by some coincidence the day other people get most of their work done?

Airbus to help with International Space Station replacement

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Re: Bigelow?

Bigelow Aerospace died so long ago that young wipper snappers would not have heard of them. Their timing was awful: inflatable space station modules after ISS but before launch prices fell. As mentioned, one module (BEAM) is currently attached to the ISS. The tech is sufficiently old that others could build them.

I chose them because there are proposed sizes that match modern launch vehicles - a cheat to do some back of the envelope calculations. No great rush to be more accurate. Big space stations will not be financially viable until some sort of cheap mass transport to LEO is available.

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Re: London eye in space

A BA 2100 module is about as big as a Starship could launch. 21 modules in a ring gives a 120m diameter like the London eye. The BA series modules were intended to be zero gravity work shops, so the design would have to be revisited if you want to spin the ring. You will also need solar panels and radiators to get rid of the heat. If you cannot wait for Starship then you could try 23x B330 launched by Falcon 9.

The scale is not technically unfeasible but it would be financial a disaster with only Dragon+Starliner+Soyuz+Shenzou to populate it with tourists. Ask again when Starship is taking a hundred people to orbit and back with a ticket price order of magnitude $100K.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

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I have had power steering fail in an ICE car

Steering on corners you can take at 40mph is fine. Slower corners require planning: select the gear you will need to exit the corner in advance because you will need both hands on the wheel. I stopped to read the instruction manual which said the vehicle is safe to drive without power steering. When I started up again power steering was restored. It failed every two or three months until the problem was identified and fixed during an MOT. Stopping the engine and restarting worked as a temporary fix and is worth trying - but seriously, stop the car somewhere safe. If you want to try it while moving please ensure you have a straight clear path to the edge of a cliff in case the steering lock engages. I would not like to bet on the servo brakes without the engine running. (I have also had the master beak servo explode on a different vehicle: as long as the engine is turning you may still get some delayed help with the brakes but the engine may stall.)

When Tesla announced some new models would be fitted with a steering yoke I thought something very rude. A 1,200kg ICE car is hard enough to control when power steering fails. I would expect a 2000kg electric vehicle to be more difficult. Making the steering wheel into a stylish shape is just asking for trouble.

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

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Re: Banks

The banks lost their money when Musk started shouting that Twitter was worthless: after the banks were committed to fund the deal but before they had Twitter debt in their hands that they could sell on to greater fools. Musk spent months bad mouthing Twitter between signing the merger agreement and actually following through on his irrevocable commitment. Musk got the perceived value of Twitter debt down to 60% of its face value when he took over and has been working tirelessly to drop its value further since then.

Musk had Twitter borrow more than he needed to buy Twitter, which left a large positive balance in Twitter's bank account. Musk has used that money to make the interest payments on Twitter's debt. Things will get interesting that money runs out.

LLMs appear to reason by analogy, a cornerstone of human thinking

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Re: Mirrors reverse back and front

Exactly, but mirrors reversing left and right may be a common misconception in training data scraped off the internet. Unless corrections like yours are also common in the training data mirrors could be a fun source of entertaining ChatGPT output.

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Re: overrun with optimistic bobble-heads

Just wait until this field is overrun by LLMs.

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Re: Haha tricked ChatGPT yet again

The original polar bear puzzle (one mile south, one mile east and on mile north ending where you start) has other solutions:

1+1/(2Nπ) miles from the south pole for integer N>0.

Give ChapGPT something similar to a popular puzzle and it may give back the solution to the original.

A frog can jump three feet along an inclined slippery ten foot plank but slides back two feet before he can jump again. How many jumps are required to reach the end of the plank.

A frog can jump three feet along an inclined slippery ten foot plank but slides forward two feet before he can jump again. How many jumps are required to reach the end of the plank.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Another reason LLMs give wrong answers

LOL Thankyou. It looks like dismantling reasoning by analogy is a common event in ChatGPT's training data and it will apply that pattern to reasonable analogies too. I had not thought of tripping it up that way, I still love the way ChatGPT plays chess.

I wonder if there is enough defective algebra and geometry on the internet that ChatGPT can find fault in valid proofs.

Assume a=b

multiply by a: a*a=a*b

subtract b*b: a*a-b*b=a*b-b*b

Factorize: (a+b)(a-b)=b(a-b)

Divide by (a-b): a+b=b

Substitute for a using assumption: b+b=b

Divide by b: 1+1=1

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Another reason LLMs give wrong answers

Thanks. That as fun. You gave it more prompt than I had in mind. Given the context of argument by analogy as a means of generating false proofs ChatGPT was able to draw on the patterns of words used by others to debunk such fake arguments to thoroughly debunk my example. I am more concerned with what happens when someone queries either a gap in ChatGPT's training data or a popular misconception. I think ChatGPT may try to defend false statements with defective logic.

Pens are long and thin. Worms are long and thin. I can write with a pen so if my pen breaks what should I do?

Will ChaptGPT advise that I go outside and dig up a worm? I doubt that is a common misconception and it may not be a gap in ChatGPT's training. A really fun/dangerous prompt will rely on ChatGPT's internal analogies.

Space has no atmosphere. Space has no gravity. Does gravity work in a vacuum chamber?

Mirrors reverse left and right. Mirrors do not reverse up and down. There is no up or down in zero gravity. Do mirrors work in space?

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Another reason LLMs give wrong answers

Argument by analogy is a technique for generating fake proofs for false statements. It comes under the subheading of faulty generalisations of logical fallacies. The basic pattern is:

*) A has properties x and y.

*) B also has properties x and y.

*) A has property z therefore B has property z.

You can use argument by analogy to prove whatever you want:

My car is big and grey. Elephants are also big and grey. My car runs in petrol therefore elephants run on petrol.

Anyone want to try putting the start of such arguments into an LLM and see how they get completed?

Apple demands app makers explain use of sensitive APIs

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Oh the irony...

Apparently about 1 in 600 AmIUnique visitors disable javascript. The proportion is probably much lower among people who do not go to AmIUnique. Lack of javascript blocks access to a long list of attributes which would provide lots of identifying data. For me it does not matter. Websites apparently see an unusual preferred language that combined with no javascript makes me unique. I do not know where that language is coming from. I checked the settings and they show en-GB.

Lack of javascript wipes out almost all advertising and polls (I do not need to hand over psychometric test answers to find out what Hogwarts house I would be in). Back when I was a PFY, people scored their own purity test results instead of having Zuckerberg do it form them.

Tesla's Autopilot boasts, safety probed by California AG

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: FSD and re-sale

I tried looking for a link supporting my statement and found conflicting results.

When FSD disappears unexpectedly it hits the news hard and spreads. When FSD transfers with the vehicle it hardly generates any news.

Allegedly Musk has said FSD transfers with the vehicle but I did not bother to check because he has said many things that are not entirely true. I have found a few reports of FSD transferring with the vehicle in private sales. There are also horror stories: FSD in test drive, buy the second hand vehicle and it disappears. FSD working fine in a second hand car until new owner registers with Tesla. A vehicle had FSD when documentation said it didn't - this was fixed in a software update.

FSD does disappear if you sell back to Tesla. The next purchaser may choose to buy FSD, but it will be with new terms and conditions more favourable to Tesla. FSD has disappeared at the end of a lease. Check the terms and conditions.

A quick internet search is not going to tell me what the proportions are or if any reports are exaggerated. I could say caveat emptor but I would rather recommend buying from a supplier with a reputation for proper after sales support.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: TSLA crashes

Before buying Twitter, TSLA was around $300/share. When Musk sold several large batches of shares to buy Twitter the price dropped to around $110 recovered quickly to about $250 and is now about $270 (maximum was about $400 - when you see larger numbers they are pre-split). I did not understand the initial high price and I really do not understand the recovery. As nothing so far has had the expected result I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA.