Skip Navigation

Posts
17
Comments
680
Joined
3 yr. ago

e

  • Yeah, just the 2 identical failures on Starship V2 I think destroyed a lot of trust

    and afaik they still haven't had a reentry that hasn't seemed at least somewhat like a miraculous survival... I know they were testing out different types of heatshield tiles on the last launch though which was where a lot of the weirdness was from

    What I was referring to though was the very.. optimistic timelines they've had in the past. HLS was supposed to be ready last year.

  • Interestingly apparently water vapor from rocket launches can be similarly harmful to CO2. Water vapor doesn't usually get into the upper atmosphere, and has a hard time exiting, but still acts as a greenhouse gas.

  • Falcon Heavy is quite a capable rocket, with about 60% of the SLS's payload capacity to LEO when the side boosters are reused (although it's almost never used for LEO, since no one actually needs that large of a payload there...).

    New Glenn can reuse it's whole first stage, but currently has only 47% of the SLS's payload capacity to LEO. (with plans for a larger variant)

    Starship... has been kind of a mess. At least with how their timeline has compared to their goals. They have demonstrated several successful launches, but with the reliability of their past few, I doubt anyone will trust them anytime soon.

    China seems extremely close to having a partially reusable heavy lift rocket, they have said that they'll test it in the first half of this year (LEO payload a little bit higher than Falcon Heavy, but they plan to go to the moon with something very similar). India has some looser long-term plans.

    As a spaceflight nerd, I was thinking today about why I (and everyone else) don't care that much about the Artemis launch. I think it's largely because it's not demonstrating anything new; they already did basically the same mission but without the people in it, and even more advanced missions with people in them were done in the 1960s. The rocket itself though isn't helping, the only things it has going for it compared to other modern rockets are that it's large and probably reliable. The technology is basically just re-used space shuttle parts, there's nothing that seems particularly innovative, and reusing old technology hasn't prevented it from being extremely expensive compared to basically everything else (~20x the cost of New Glenn, Falcon Heavy, or Starship per launch...). It's also worse for the environment in basically every way (expendable, and has solid fuel boosters).

    I kind of agree with what some other people have been saying about NASA for a while now. They should probably just stick to the satellites, rovers, and technology tests, making their own launch vehicle is not really helping anyone. The usefulness of being a government funded thing is that they can do the type of science to help humanity that doesn't turn a profit. They don't really need their own launch vehicle to do their science, and the vehicle itself is so conservative that I'm sure they aren't really learning anything from it. If they were actually capable of producing something economical and better than the corporations then it wouldn't be a problem, but that will never happen with Congress pushing rocket designs that "seem like they would be cheaper" and forcing NASA to route all work through insanely inefficient military contractors.

  • Having re-usable parts is the obvious bit. But actually the worst part for the environment from a lot of rockets is the solid fuel boosters, those leave a ton of weird stuff in the atmosphere that a liquid fueled thing wouldn't (like the Falcon Heavy, Starship, Delta 4 Heavy, New Glenn, Long March 9 and 10...)

  • it's a reference to this xkcd

    edit: as an april fools thing probably

  • Still very fond of WBOR from when I was following the Internet Roadtrip

  • No one's stopping you

  • The US could arm them, but the US government probably fears that they'd turn on the US later

  • Oh, yeah, I didn't see those. I think my point still stands though, really those specular highlights shouldn't be that bright, but the AI can figure out that it's plausible for them to be brighter and that it would fit the target style better.

  • Yeah, probably the main reason it's getting the little bit of praise that it does is that they're showing it off on games with fairly flat-looking skin shaders. Unfortunately a problem with this sort of thing is that getting that "2023" image is the result of giving a whole team a huge amount of time to model one man's face. If you're Bethesda and you just want to get NPCs into Starfield, it would be a similar amount of work. A bit less, since the first people already gave a talk on it, but still much more work then just getting a diffuse BRDF with some subsurface scattering and calling it good. But you also need a process that can be applied to every single NPC...

    And looking at Striking Distance Studios, the company where that 2023 image is from:

    In February 2025, it was reported that most of the studio's developers had been laid off.

    Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the work those people put in will never be directly reused.

    Another reason the DLSS version looks a bit more realistic there is because of the specular highlights on the eyes, for example. They probably aren't reflecting anything real, or else they would be there in the original. But the AI knows that specular highlights add realism and are plausible in this scene, so it puts them there. That's something that an artist could do if given a specific shot and camera angle, but in the general case they can't really do that without causing problems.

  • Fun fact that you may or may not have heard before: the light flicker animation in Half Life Alyx is actually the exact same one used in the original Quake. Half Life 1 was built on the Quake engine, and the same animation was carried over into Source and then Source 2.

    https://www.alanzucconi.com/2021/06/15/valve-flickering-lights/

  • I think with the straight/gay labels, you're not going to be not attracted to someone just because they say that they're a guy or girl. So really there's just some appearances that you find attractive, and some not. For most people, those line up pretty well with femininity and masculinity, with maybe a few other restrictions on top. Any label is going to be a simplification, you can't describe with one word the whole range of people you are attracted to.

  • For reference

  • It does seem still very impressive against other top laptop CPUs.

    https://www.notebookcheck.net/Ryzen-AI-9-HX-PRO-375-vs-Ultra-X9-388H-vs-A18-Pro_19565_20016_18006.247596.0.html

    Although I heard from Jeff Geerling's review that the neo often noticably throttles after a few seconds.

    It also has pretty terrible IO.

    I think the biggest attraction is the build quality, screen, etc. Most cheap laptops seem to cheap out on those a lot in my experience, and Apple did not. If you're not stressing the CPU or GPU, it'll still feel almost as high quality as any other MacBook.

  • I have a 2 core, 2 thread, 4gb RAM 3855u Chromebook that I installed Plasma on, and it's usually pretty responsive.

  • sounds like that's planned but maybe not in yet

  • Clean energy is another example of an investment which obviously saves money in the long term and also improves the economy in the short term. Conservatives don't care about that because they don't care about the long term, and even if they do, they want all of these issues to still be around so they have something to yell about (since apparently voters only care about something being a problem and can't tell if the 'solution' will actually make things better or worse). There's also a lot of lobbyist money that they can keep on getting by preventing these sorts of investments. If we stopped relying on a couple of oil companies, then those oil companies wouldn't be able to give the politicians money.

  • Sodium ion is generally much more stable.

  • I would be at least a little surprised if the algorithm shows women more misogynistic stuff, since I wouldn't expect that to make people use the app more, which is their primary goal. But I don't really know. I was on Reddit and YouTube when I was 15, not that long ago that I would expect the algorithm to be fundamentally different, and never saw anything remotely that misogynistic.