* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4528 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

Investment advisors pay the price for selling what looked a lot like AI fairy tales

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Value of bullshit

For any subject, the number of people who know what they are talking about is a small minority. Share price is set by the majority.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

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Honest review

We have invested heavily and soon we will need some greater fools to buy us out. We tried it and it works great, honest. We thoroughly recommend it ... to our competitors. If your IT people are trash talking it that must be because they are afraid it will replace them. If it did not rake in cash at your friend's company that is either because he is doing it wrong or he should have bought the enterprise version.

Now how about investing in some sure fire high return sub-prime loans or block chain tulips?

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

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Snark is in the eye of the beholder

I interpreted imitating SpaceX explosions as hardware rich development: prototypes optimised for rapid contruction at low cost. That would mean Space One would be ready with an improved rocket ready to launch in months.

I do not know if that was Mr Sharwood's intent or if Space One really are going hardware rich but I assumed it was a compliment. Far better than the more popular alternative: optimising for long delays and great expense to maximise cost plus billing.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

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Old news

The first plan for regulation of space tourism was to wait a few more years until it became clear what regulations would be useful. When the deadline arrived Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both argued they were still too clueless to propose useful regulations so the deadline was extended.

The purpose of regulation is to set a common safety bar for all providers. An accident caused by one provider cheaping out damages the prospects for all. The regulations will come eventually. The tricky part will be getting them to focus on passenger safety rather than bashing competitors.

Those space tourism market size numbers are silly. It looks like they were created so Branson can sell off the last of his Virgin Galactic shares before the shit hits the fan. When that time came for Virgin Orbit Branson lent VO a little operating capitol in return for a claim on all the assets. The asset sale repaid Branson's investment leaving the other investors with a company with nothing but debts. I expect the same plan to work for VG.

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Re: Wellll

The big decisions for the submarine were made by the CEO, not an engineer. The manufacturers wrote back that the parts ordered were not qualified for the depths listed in the purchaser's advertising and offered to build parts of the required strength. The CEO thought he knew better.

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

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Re: On every level: no

No, I do not trust Musk or Bezos. Yes, I am very aware that they are both arseholes. Here are some techniques for failing to get your message across:

*) Preaching to the choir.

*) Accusing an arsehole of doing something that a different arsehole is far more guilty of when there is a long list of horrid things the first arsehole has boasted about doing.

You are not going to convince me because I was convinced long ago (about two weeks after "Funding secured", I started looking for evidence, found Solar City, deisel powered Tesla chargers and thing went down hill from there). You are not going to convince any Musk fanbois - mostly because it is impossible to convince someone with a financial interest in not understanding but partly because any time you get a fact provably wrong they will dismiss anything else you say even if it is right.

I genuinely believe Bezos' "millions of people living and working in space" is a public relations statement, not an ambition he will dedicate his life to. I do think he will stay in the space business until Kuiper crushes Starlink. I think progress on that goal will be glacial and I will be dead before it happens. While Bezos is working on that goal I will not be able to prove his Expanse promise is worth less than an Amazon sourced fake SDHC card so I will stay with the abundant shit that can be proved.

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On every level: no

There is a Starship load of stuff Musk does that I wish he didn't so there is no need to add fiction.

Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space. Progress has been so slow that he is likely to die of old age before we find out if this is genuine intent or just public relations.

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

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Re: Loretta wants a word...

There are different human definitions for the start of space. 50 miles and 100km are both popular. Earth's atmosphere does not suddenly vanish at either altitude. It just gets thinner and thinner until it approaches the pressure of the sun's atmosphere. Likewise the sun's atmosphere doesn't suddenly disappear. It gets thinner and thinner until it approaches the pressure of the galaxy's atmosphere.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

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Some smart devices have strong security

Some manufacturers have put significant effort into ensuring products become non-functional if the purchaser stops paying a monthly fee. Securing against someone with physical access requires skill, attention to detail and firmware updates to patch vulnerabilities. That monthly fee is absolutely necessary to fund ensuring customers cannot do what they want with their purchases.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

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Re: Device names

Type '#' followed by the destructive command, proof read carefully in case you any words out then home, delete, enter.

That is nothing like good enough for commands that trash entire drives. 'mount' will tell you what is mounted where. 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/' will convert persistent names to device names that change after each power cycle/hotplug.

Next go back in time and give all your partitions names with dosfslabel, e2label and so on. The good news is you can now use persistent names that differ by more than a single letter. The bad news is nothing will boot any more because you changed the names. /etc/fstab understands LABEL= for device names. /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt understands root=LABEL=... When the kernel gets upgraded apt has a record of the previous root=... and regenerates /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt with it to foul up the next reboot. Fix that in /etc/default/raspi-firmware

It is still possible to point GUI image editers at the wrong device. Some of them may do some checks to spot if they are aimed in an obviously bad direction. I worry that the authors of such software are not as paranoid as me, that their detection logic has not been tested on installations customised the way I change them and that when they fix some problem it will make the software do something that surprises me next time.

The wonderful thing about command line software is that if anyone proposes a change in behaviour a hord of rabid grey beards waving clue bats will shout 'That will break my scripts' until the proposer takes cover in a deep cave blocked by a cave in.

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Debian

I have not tried Debian on a 5 yet but here is the nasty surprise if you are used to Raspian:

I use a USB to SDHC bridge, install the image with dd, partition, resize2fs the root partition, mount up and restore a bunch of config files from backups.

I use a real swap partition and its existence prevents Raspian from resizing the root partition itself. Debian works differently. It looks for free space at the end of the SDHC card, finds the space I leave so the wear leveling code has plenty to work with and resizes the root partition over and including the swap partition. Things go down hill from there.

I took me a while to find out what was going on from the boot code in the initrd. I should have read the fantastic manual as it is clearly documented in the Debian Image for Pi documentation. Derivative distributions may use the same do-not-resize detector. Once I got that sorted Debian works fine.

Governments not keen on pushing citizen-facing AI services, for obvious reasons

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Opportunity

Busted expensive high-tech product likely to send tax-payers' money to scammers? Why isn't our government investing?

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

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Re: The lawyers who did nothing but damage Tesla want $6 billion. Criminal

The lawyers saved Tesla at least $50B: Job well done.

Musk lost Tesla $6B by not cancelling his bonus for doing bugger all when the share holders called him on it.

Ransomware ban backers insist thugs must be cut off from payday

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Solution to "Cannot recover without paying"

The solution for handling companies that would not survive a payment ban has been around since life started on this planet and was published decades ago by Darwin. If a company goes out of business because of a ransomware attack it can go bankrupt and be replaced by companies that are either not vulnerable or can recover using backups.

My response to the idea of a government bailout for ransomware victims is a stream of bad language that would legitimately result in strong action from the moderators.

The Italian system of confiscating the wealth of victims so they cannot pay up is interesting. For the time being I would leave it as a threat: this is what will happen if companies try to sneak payments around a ban.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

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Re: Seems a bit short sighted

Perserverance is good at trundling about, selecting interesting samples and putting them in tubes. It was not designed to put tubes in the ascent vehicle because:

*) No-one knows what the ascent vehicle will be and they knew even less where Perserveance was designed.

*) The ascent vehicle will not be allowed to land anywhere near Perserverance. It wii be a long trundle to reach it and another long trundle to retreat to minimum safe distance.

*) As mentioned Perserverance may not be functional when the ascent vehicle arrives.

*) Perserverance could get stuck in a place where it is hard to recover samples.

*) There could be better technology for tube transport available when the ascent vehicle arrives.

That last one may well turn out to be a money saver. Martian helicopters have proved to be more practical than expected.

Two other barriers are the price of heavy launch and the impracticality of the planetary protection protocols. Starship will probably reach orbit real soon now. With propellant transfer it can send a large payload towards Mars. If planetary protection protocols get renegotiated into something practical Starship will be able to crash on Mars. After a few RUDs it will be able to land large payloads on Mars. Eventually it will be able to come back but that will be a long way off. In the mean time, it could deliver a flock of ascent vehicles and a swarm of helicopters.

It really would be worth putting Mars sample return on hold until cheaper general purpose technology is ready rather than designing single use tech compatible with current launch vehicle limitations.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

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Re: worsening of everything from media to film to advertising to politics

Perhaps not everything: replacing politicians by generative AI might be a step in the right direction. Instead of the expense of holding elections we could simply have AI predict the results. The danger of self driving cars will be a thing of the past. No-one will have to drive to work because their job will be done by AI. So what if people starve when AI farmers irrigate with Brawndo. Their social media accounts can be maintained by AI and who would know the difference?

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

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Re: Moon landing

Yet again:

Most of the mass of Starship is at the bottom. During a Moon landing the propellant will be at the bottom of the tank. Most of the propellant mass comes from the liquid oxygen which is stored in the lower tank. Starship HLS is as stable as an empty egg shell glued to a 1cm thick stone plinth.

Superheavy takes off from Earth with 33 engines to lift a booster and ship both fully loaded with propellant and a payload on top. Starship HLS lands on the Moon (1/6 of Earth gravity) with the propellant tanks mostly depleted. Current speculation is the tanks extend further into the payload volume than cargo Starship partly to get enough delta V for the entire mission and partly because NASA cannot afford to build enough payload mass to reach Starship's limit with their current (late) Artemis budget.

One Raptor engine at low thrust is sufficient to land Starship HLS including payload and return propellant. Intuitive machines' lander was intended to land vertically. It came down diagonally and tripped over. I am sure IM's recent mission will be very educational for everyone planning to land on the Moon. It is almost as if a bunch of rocket scientists planned to get up to date experience of Moon landings before committing to a final design for sending humans.

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Re: payload ?

The flight profile was fixed so re-entry would occur near the military radars at Hawaii. To achieve that profile without a payload the engines were throttled down well below maximum thrust. The low thrust caused the rocket to use less propellant than was loaded. The excess had to be vented to get the mass low enough for re-entry.

If SpaceX had started with less propellant then the required thrust to stay on trajectory would have been below the minimum thrust for all six engines. They could have done that by not lighting all of them but that would not have been a good match to real use. They could have used a dummy payload but the currently published limit is only 50t of payload down mass. They would have had to add some mechanism to push out at least 50t before re-entry.

There is already hardware in place to unload propellant if a launch gets scrubbed. They decided to go with this equipment as it has worked reliably in ground tests. With hindsight we can see that this plan actually needed the quick disconnect arm attached and the ground support equipment that stores propellant after a scrub.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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LMGTFY

Easy to find with a quick web search. Likewise there is plenty of evidence that one reason Musk bought Twitter was to boost transphobic tweets.

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Re: last Windows OS I needed.

Mine was '98. Choices: put up with this shit or become a penguin.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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Re: something ineffably spiritual

Ignorance outnumbers knowledge in all fields and that is certainly true of programmers. A major contributor to the problem is most employers do not know how to feel the quality - of programmers or software. I do not know the root cause of the post office software disaster: the wrong people, poor description of the problem or lack of time (probably a mixture of all three). I can be certain that crap software outnumbers working software in the training data. That sets my expectations of the quality of the source code output of the modern generation of travesty generators. Apparently some people think they are more productive correcting Copilot output. If ML outputs a significant quantity of valid code I would be nervous about touching it because of the high probability of incoming copyright litigation.

We already have young humans copying bad code examples until they gain enough experience to know better. I am sure ML can do the first part of that faster - and generate huge quantities of garbage training data for Copilot Version 2.

When yet another shovel salesman hypes yet another gold rush my enthusiasm rivals Marvin's.

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Re: "Jensen Huang believes"

Let's see him put nVidia investors' money where his mouth is: ML generated video drivers!

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

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Personal terror

Some human will submit ChatGPT generated code as his own into something I am responsible for that includes a fragment of Oracle copyright code like rangeCheck. The legal bill would be devastating. I know Microsoft has some (probably non-binding) promise to defend people brave enough to use Copilot. Perhaps Microsoft really would step up and provide a defence... generated by their LLM. I am sure it would not be worth the hassle to make them honour a promise.

For every AI horror story we hear about I assume there are ten more where the shit is still falling towards the fan and another hundred that will not get reported.

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Re: Bullshit

Most humans have one mouth and two ears. If you listen twice as often as you speak you may not end up sounding as delusional as a ChatGPT salesman.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

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Re: I thought we learned...

I recently found some DVD-R discs I recorded about 20 years ago. They read fine. There are a couple of important tricks needed to make this work. Ignore the 50,000x recording speed claim on the discs and the drive. Record at the minimum speed supported by the drive. Secondly, check that you can read back immediately afterwards. The real problem with DVD is the tiny capacity.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

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Usual problems

Lift from those vertical take off fans is air mass flow rate time multiplied by change in air velocity. The power required is half mass flow rate times velocity squared. Those tiny little fans limit the mass flow rate requiring a large velocity to get the lift for four people plus luggage, The large velocity gets squared to a huge amount of power - hence the low endurance. The real problem will be the noise during take of and landing (and probably flight at maximum altitude). Reducing the maximum payload to one adult and increasing the fan diameter to 6m would make a start on the noise problem while adding a whirling blades of death issue.

Next up, this does not scale with human air traffic control. It gets interesting when black hats start transmitting on the congestion control radio network. A simple denial of service level attack would have major consequences.

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Re: Drones as a Service?

Whose credit card / phone will you use to pay for the journey?

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

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Re: recognise some of those names

Me too. ID:89 used to run the US copyright system, ID:164 is a time traveller. and ID:1 is infamous for having a privileged account on just about every Windows system. Why did so many sign up on 2022-06-25?

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

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Getting value for money from nukes

To get the most benefit from "do my laundry or I will nuke you" you have to create the impression that you are a paranoid delusion nutter. Paranoid: I am sure there are plenty of people who would kill Putin given the opportunity. Delusional: certainly used to be. A 'shoot the messenger' policy resulted in Putin having a poor understanding of the state of his military. That certainly no longer applies to the extent it used to. Nutter: a genuine nutter would not still be in power. Much of the nuttiness is caused by his statements being for local consumption where people get very different news from the west. Some nuttiness is an act so his threats get some traction. There is probably some genuine nuttiness related to desiring so much power given the personal cost.

I am convinced Putin will never order a nuclear strike. First the order would have to be transmitted successfully, then received successfully, then obeyed and finally the missiles would have to actually work. I am not convinced any of the technology is still functional. I am sure military commanders would respond with 'sorry, I didn't get the memo', 'I pressed the button but nothing happened' and 'the system is not currently functional, send new widgets'. Putin knows this so does not remove the value of the threat by proving it is broken.

The US has a long history of portraying their presidents as nutters on foreign news to get the best value from their weapons.

Europe's datacenter dilemma is that hyperscalers are hogging them all

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Fixes for night time solar

For all capacity required in London build another solar powered data centre in Wellington. Makes a dent in the days without wind problem too. The other problem with this solution can be fixed a fleet of giant hypersonic aircraft to ship night time data centre users half way round the world twice per day.

Alternatively: a giant mirror at Sun-Earth L2

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

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Re: To not have to apply foreign laws domestically.

When the UK was part of the EU we had some say in what EU laws were and they were not foreign laws because we were part of the EU.

Now we have no say over what EU laws are, they are foreign laws, we have to obey them to access the larger market and there is no point going to the expense of creating a separate product specialised for a small market.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Re: It's nuts but

OK, lets pretend I am dictator for life. I have a separate strategy for dealing with dissent from the second rank in the power pyramid and they deal with the next rank down. Here is the way to handle a popular revolution: provoke harsh words from the US president and enemy activity on the far side of the boarders. Put that on the news along with the message: "Unite behind me or the Americans will invade". Round up the popular leaders or anyone with an unpatriotic hair cut and execute them for being US puppets.

An orbital nuke research project makes excellent provocation. Launching a functional orbital nuke costs resources better spent on my palace and palace guard.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

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On the other hand a forced pregnancy group wasted a pile of adverting budget on a group who won't buy from them.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Content and choices

Non-subscribers must be shown an impressive range of content so they sign up and pay money.

Subscribers must be given a lousy choice so they do not watch anything. Streaming content to subscribers is an expense.

(Large DVD collection in the attic format shifted to a NAS for viewing. If you do not have a collection your local second hand shop will get you started for a pittance.)

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Re: What exactly is the cybertruck for?

A bet.

The initial idea was advertised with big promises. Tesla are famous for being slow at starting mass production. Back in the early days putting down a deposit to get a place near the start of the queue looked like a safe opportunity to scalp people who did not have such foresight. Back then, Musk was a clandestine transphobic Nazi. Later, after spending too much time in Texas he thought it would be a good idea to boast of these qualities. In the mean time Tesla has strengthened its litigation team with people selected for their ability as street fighters and prepared for scalpers competing against Tesla for early sales.

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Re: Why stainless steel?

It started with Starship. The first concepts of starship were going to be made from composite materials. They got as far as pressure testing a 9m diameter liquid oxygen tank to destruction and taking delivery of a 9m diameter mandrill to wrap fibres around. Then they worked out that they could cut the weight be switching to stainless steel. Composites have difficulty at cryogenic temperatures and the maximum useful temperature is much lower than steel. Using steel allows a much lighter heat shield and is much less difficult to modify.

Curving stainless in one axis like a cylinder is possible with a large radius. Curves in two axes (sphere or saddle) are hard. Welds are normally weaker than the parts welded. SpaceX had to learn a large amount about working with stainless and Musk was listening. Musk took the idea of a stainless car to Tesla where he does more talking and less listening compared to SpaceX. Cyber truck's flat panels come from the difficulty of curving stainless. SpaceX can now weld two axis curved sheets of stainless really well.

Tesla should have kept cyber truck as a concept for the future until they worked out the issues. Instead they committed to mass production in a material that was known to be troublesome before they had solutions.

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

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Re: SEC interest in Musk

The SEC are investigating Musk's lack of required actions leading up to the purchase agreement. He bought Twitter shares as a passive investor, which is legal up to a point. At some point his shares commanded significant voting control. At that point he was required to file a notice with the SEC who would publicly announce that his share holding had gone beyond the passive investor level. The market would have responded - probably by holding out for a higher price because of the expectation that Musk would continue to buy more Twitter.

We know Musk bought his early Twitter shares through multiple holding companies to prevent news getting out before he was ready. Again, not a problem for a passive investor but naughty when he persisted beyond that level without an SEC filing. The normal way forward is to file late with an apology and the world moves on.

Musk is screaming like a stuck pig. His lawyers are presenting flimsy excuses in a desperate attempt to delay. Last time we heard shit like this Musk paid $44B for Twitter to avoid being deposed. I think that shows there is something really bad Musk does not want to answer questions about.

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Re: Reasons for wasting $44B

1) Musk's childhood dream is to run the biggest internet bank / payment site / online stock broker / pump & dump hype distribution centre. He rushed in to signing a seller friendly $44B purchase agreement for a large captive user base. Reality partially intruded: the regulations to prevent bankers committing securities fraud are way harsher than those for CEOs of publicly traded companies.

2) The thumbscrew that got Musk to stop whining and pay up was that the delays opened him up to being deposed. $44B was less than the cost of being caught lying under oath or telling the truth.

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Car electrification will continue fine without Musk. Musk used to do a good job hyping Tesla's share price allowing access to capital at low interest rates. Musk blew his credit rating on Twitter loans and is now just a legal liability. It least he could not loot $55B from Tesla.

I do thank Musk for funding SpaceX through three Falcon 1 explosions. SpaceX did Crew Dragon despite Musk's help. Short sighted investors would stay with Starship to LEO because it massively reduces the cost of operating Starlink. Starship HLS would also continue because it can deliver profit on its Artemis contract plus potential tourist rides. That gets propellant transfer and storage done. I am not sure if short sighted investors would spring money for Mars but the big ticket items would be in place anyway.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

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Re: What's the next name for AI

I was thinking Deductive Figuring or DeFi for short.

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Re: AI prepare food

Video or it didn't happen. Next people will be saying AI can safely drive a car.

AI PC hype bubble swells, but software support lags marketing

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A first generation AI PC ...

1) is more expensive than an ordinary PC.

2) requires drivers that support a standard API that does not exist yet to make use of AI hardware.

3) will never have a driver update to increase sales of second generation AI PCs.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

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UK in the lead!

So the UK had $74B of fraud and the US had $100B. Given the relative scale of the two economies I think that shows the Conservative's skill at perpetrating fraud far exceeds the Trump administration's.

NASA finally launches PACE Earth science satellite

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Re: Agenda

I really hated the "Biden-Harris Administration's climate agenda" phrase too. It sound like the satellite was launched to provide democrat policy based evidence instead of to provide evidence of reality that should be used to select policy. Jim Bridenstine* was shockingly competent considering who appointed him. Bill Nelson is just about meeting my expectations as a former senator for Boeing.

(* Just noticed Bridenstine and Bridenstein are both common on the internet)

Arm share price bulges after AI pumped revenue to a new record

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Time to change my user ID to Nobody

"Nobody wants to be caught behind with not enough performance when the new application comes out."

I limit purchases to about one step ahead of what I am currently using. If I need more later it will be cheaper to buy it then.

Arm clearly understands how to profit from the AI gold rush: sell shovels.

How Neuraspace aims to clean up orbital clutter with AI

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Planned moves

Starlink satellites already dodge each other automatically, including planned manoeuvres in their collision prediction algorithms. SpaceX have offered the data to other operators. OneWeb satellites orbit much higher so there would only be a conflict on the way up if they launch replacements and on the way down. Amazon could benefit from this data if they launch some batches of Kuiper satellites.

Satellite operators actually communicating with each other will give far better results than a chatbot that says it can do maths. The biggest operator in the industry is already keen to get started. The others are far less vocal so may well have plans we have not heard about.

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Neuraspace's technology relies on collecting different data from different sources to build up a picture of what is happening in orbit.

Or you could get orbital data for everything not a US military secret here. The required models to predict orbital tracks including friction from what is left of the atmosphere are not hard to find. Machine learning can have an advantage where the underlying equations are unknown. This is massively the wrong application for AI.

India to launch android into space to test crewed launch capability

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Practical reasons

On average women are lighter so consume less food and oxygen leaving more mass available for equipment. Also women are not as badly affected by long term zero gravity.

Rocket Lab is a David among Goliaths in the space race

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Re: Nature reserves

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge is adjacent to John F. Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Vandenberg State Marine Reserve is adjacent to Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge hosts the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport.

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Re: Which rocket?

When I criticise Musk (which is quite frequently) I make an effort to get my facts right. There are so many opportunities that screening out the false and unprovable leaves plenty of material. There is a wide range of press. Much of it is slanted to attract a cross section of the market with a specific viewpoint. Even more will aim for outrage over accuracy because it sells.

The quote I was irritated by referred to the largest rocket ever created exploding in a national reserve. The full stack Starships exploded far from Boca Chica,

Press referring to the extensive and spectacular damage to the launch site as an explosion is just click bait. The site was built up using sand dredged from the river then covered in concrete that according to mathematical models was strong enough for one launch. Rocket exhaust cracked an tore up the concrete sending chunks of it beyond SpaceX property. The exhaust continued by excavating a large crater under the launch table. Sand did travel several kilometres. Several universities asked for and received samples from the locals. The samples were shown to be the same as sand from the river with particles sufficiently large that they were not a respiratory hazard.

There were thousands of comments on the internet about loads of concrete dust but I did not see any official document saying there was anything but sand. Concrete did get a mention: SpaceX were asked not to tidy up chunks of concrete to avoid disturbing nesting birds.

There are hundreds of genuinely horrible things Musk has said and done. There is no need to convince me he is an arsehole - I am already there. You are not going to convince Tesla investors because they have a financial incentive to stick there fingers in their ears and shout "La la la la la." Convincing members of the Cult of Musk is an even harder up-hill struggle. Quoting factually challenged click bait will just get anything you do get right ignored by the CoM.