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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you read the reports…

    Normally JPL outsource their Mars mission hardware to Lockheed Martin. For some reason they have decided to do Mars Sample Return in house. The reports argue JPL hasn’t built the necessary in house experience and should have worked with LM.

    Secondly JPL is suffering a staff shortage which is affecting other projects and the Mars Sample Return is making the problem worse.

    Lastly if an organisation stops performing an action it “forgets” how to do it. You can rebuild the capability but it takes time.

    A team arbitrary declaring they are experts and suddenly decideding they will do it is one that will have to relearn skills/knowledge on a big expensive high profile project. The project will either fail (and be declared a success) or masses of money will be spent to compensate for the teams learning.

    Either situation is not ideal


  • The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

    Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn’t tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu’uh (see the articles cost reduction “objectives”).

    The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

    However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don’t count.

    Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.


  • The other person was just wrong.

    Large scale Hydrogen generation isn’t generated in a fossil free way, Hydrogen can be generated is a green way but the infrastructure isn’t there to support SLS.

    Hydrogen is high ISP (miles per gallon) by rubbish thrust (engine torque).

    This means SLS only works with Solid Rocket Boosters, these are highly toxic and release green house contributing material into the upper atmosphere. I suspect you would find Falcon 9/Starship are less polluting as a result.

    Lastly the person implies SLS could be fueled by space sources (e.g. the moon).

    SLS is a 2.5 stage rocket, the boosters are ditched in Earths Atmosphere and the first stage ditched at the edge of space. The current second stage doesn’t quite make low earth orbit.

    So someone would have to mine materials on the moon and ship them back. This would be far more expensive than producing hydrogen on Earth.

    Hydrogen on the moon makes sense if your in lunar orbit, not from Earth.




  • Engineering is tradeoffs.

    A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.

    You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.

    This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.

    If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .




  • Just to add.

    Look at any hobby in your life and break out the money spent vs the enjoyment you got out of it.

    For example the Cinema costs me £10 and a film is 2 hours long, meaning my fun time costs £5 per hour.

    A £100 console would have to provide me 20 hours entertainment for it to be comparable to going to the cinema.

    These days any PS4 game will have 10-40 hours content, but buying them costs money. Popping on CEX website the most expensive PS4 games are £12. Assuning you only get 10 hours of fun from a game…

    The question you should ask yourself is are there 3 games on the PS4 you are interested in playing?


  • So reading twitter…

    It seems much of the “Ammunition shortage” Prigozhin was loudly complaining about was stock pilling. Similarly much of Wagnar was pulled out of Ukraine to rebuild.

    There have been suggestions Prigozhin was planning to launch an attack on Sunday but the Russian MoD attacked a Wagner site forcing him to launch a day early.

    One tweet suggested Wagner soliders had been calling family all day (e.g. before a big operation).

    Seizing Rostok Von Don was a clever initial play, since its a major logistics hub. This allowed him to arm his troops and provides a base if the coup fails.

    It seems the South Military District gave up without a fight, with soliders surrendering.

    Prigozhin has sent a shock force to Moscow, its bypassing major cities and trying to get there ASAP. There is a belief senior Kremlin officials will abandon ship.

    Various helicopters are attacking the shock force but it seems Wagner are using air defence. Various MI-8, KA-52 and a ll-s2 have been shown destroyed.

    The Tik Tok bigrade are trying to attack Rostok, considering they aren’t “true Russians” and were used as barrier troops, this doesn’t seem to be going down well. They are also stripping Donetsk of defenders to do this.



  • I think there is a focus on C/C++ to justify Pythons performance.

    There have been times when the performance of Node js/Python were part of the reasoning for choosing Java/Scala.

    Each time you are regaled with how Python is C/C++ underneath and so faster. Each time you have to ask if they will write C/C++ libraries to ensure the application performance meets our needs.

    Similarly any time you go near lambas you get a comment on how python lambdas are faster because its C running, where as Java has to start a virtual machine, etc…

    3 different companies samething




  • I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet…

    If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn’t Reddit competing in those areas?

    3rd Party Apps aren’t in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn’t Reddit done this?

    LLM aren’t new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn’t Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn’t a huge amount of people needed.

    Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn’t providing those services and so those companies profits aren’t “stolen” from Reddit.

    It’s like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn’t get £1000 for its supplies.