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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • NASA does a hell of a lot more work than just build rockets lol. SpaceX and all the other private space companies focus on a few of the wide array of programs and services NASA does. They certinally have some poor decisions in their history (as does every space program of the 20th century) but comparing SpaceX’s spending with an appropriate context of NASA’s spending is ludicrous. Its not something you can just put into numbers and any comparisons I’ve seen thus far have been wildly skewed in SpaceX’s favor for marketing reasons.

    NASA (and ESA, RosCosmos, others) funding provided decades of R&D SpaceX uses to build its products with and the university curriculums all the engineers at SpaceX learned at.

    Also, we dont know how a NASA that wasnt so de-funded since the 80s would have operated, but it’s well established that the budget cuts and uncertainty those created have been a major factor in its ability to build new programs like Artemis, Orion, SLS, etc. in a manner that would be efficient. SLS was bogged down for years waiting for congressional approval that was repeatedly blocked or maliciously modified last minute by congressional and senate republicans, a form of efficiency knee-capping that the agency never faced in the Apollo or Space Shuttle days.

    have you seen the plastics industry? Let alone consumer packaging

    Not an apples to apples comparison. Check out the many lawsuits and reported criticism of the more careless Starship test flights



  • Also, do you know who built the Saturn V?

    I’m not even going to get into a discussion of NASA competence. There are more than enough records available through widely accepted reporting and media to disprove any of the nonsense Elon cultists spew. Whether you subscribe to the Elon cult mindset or not is your prerogative and not an accusation I’m making…

    Additionally, a significant amount of the funding for starship is coming from NASA, specifically from the Artemis program, to the tune of nearly $4 billion.

    Elon can scream “mars” all he wants but he has virtually zero progress to report other than some wild plans to just throw people in tubes in the general direction. Last I checked, unless I’ve missed something, SpaceX has not put any amount of work into what is required to keep people alive on mars, much less alive on the trip to mars, and seeing as Elon’s track record on delivering promises by self-imposed deadlines is basically 0%… We’ll see if it ever even happens. Especially since he changes the goal post upon “delivery” (see: full self-driving basically never happening on top of killing more people per car than any other self-driving technology, cybertruck having a fraction of the features and capabilities that were promised on top of being extremely unsafe, semi being a massive failure, that ridiculous re-invention of the subway but for cars that makes 0 financial sense, and probably many more items I’m not thinking of at this moment)





  • As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.

    I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.






  • The central point of that article is certinally valid. Something that was worked on for a while with broad congressional support and public support getting vetoed isnt ideal for a democratic process. No resolution on issues is not a good thing since another 3-6-12 months of no regulation for a theoretically netter bill to work through the system will allow for continued abuse by AI behemoths. Newsom is a corpo dem, so idk what people expected, anyway.

    I don’t buy into the AGI FUD. These are word calculators. But these tools are being hooked up to all sorts of things they shouldn’t be hooked up to and the lack of broad privacy regulation in the US puts LLM usage that handles sensitive data and/or decisions firmly into dangerous territory. Business decisions made by irresponsible management with no regard for data privacy or human safety are already a massive problem that actively cause harm, and hooking current AI tools onto these processes only seems to make the problems worse, especially while AI usage is in this gray space where no one wants to take responsibility for the outcomes.


  • Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago… Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don’t want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can’t just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don’t want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the “oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt”… But it doesn’t really work that way.

    Its also possible I’m more sensitive to the problem now that I’m in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can’t. Its a vicious cycle and it’ll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.

    Too much “move fast and break things” from non-technical people, not enough “let’s build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later”. Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.






  • I’ve been windows-free for about 8 months as well. I’m a more casual gamer so i haven’t had to venture out of steam proton yet (but i’ve got bottles on hand to experiment anyway) A few of the games i tend to return to every few years will definitely need bottles.

    I built a beefy system, and I was initially planning on running windows (or one of the de-microsofted builds) on a vm with pass-through GPU (shunting my linux over to the on-cpu gpu when im running it) but so far i’ve had no need to continue setting that up. I proactively placed all my steam games on an ntfs filesystem just in case i do in the future.

    Either way, i’m glad to have the flexibility to make windows work without dual boot, but so far it looks like i was being overly cautious. Probably cant play some games with anti-cheat right now… but i so rarely play those types of game.


  • I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.

    Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.

    I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.

    You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.

    Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.

    Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)

    Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)