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Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 2) 43

It's not that funny. Purges of the military and government are pretty standard practice when taking over a country. You kick out anybody who can't be relied upon to support you. The problem is there tend not to be a big pool of both qualified and politically reliable replacements so by emphasizing the latter the former suffers.

Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:If you thought SEO/affiliate marketing spam is (Score 1) 17

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

Comment Re:Not just emission tests (Score 1) 105

It was that way here until the oil crisis, which shrank cars for a while. Now they are inflated again, but as things are getting crappier here, smaller vehicles are returning. If you have lots of space and fuel is cheap, larger vehicles are lovely. If neither thing is true, they are just more trouble and expense than they are worth.

Vehicles being higher up has little influence on how far their headlights cast, especially given safe following distances they are the least relevant thing. They are just commonly poorly aimed. I thought Europe had inspections for that kind of thing, though? In the US we theoretically do, but I see misaimed headlights constantly.

Comment Re:English dominates vs Tamil && Hindi (Score 1) 46

Technology is the answer, though. I don't plan to learn another script, though I might learn another language. But why should anyone have to? Computers are actually good at recognizing text and doing translations now. That's two legit uses for "AI" that have actually come true. For example I've successfully OCR'd Chinese documentation and translated it and had it not come out in broken English. This really makes one wonder why anyone is still doing bad documentation and ads, but I do still see them regularly. So weird.

Comment Re:Color me skeptical, (Score 1) 154

Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.

It's too bad you lead with this bullshit. Purposely putting their giant rocket within a fart of reaching a stable orbit is a demonstration of exquisite control, not failure. There's absolutely no reason they won't be "reaching orbit" whenever they like next year.

Rendezvous is tricky, but they already do it all the time, and with much higher stakes. Orbital fuel transfer has been done (including by SpaceX IIRC), doing it again with Starship wouldn't really be too surprising. I would be surprised if they have a finished version of a fuel depot a year from now, but not so much if they stick a stripped down Starship up there to practice on.

I'd be really surprised if they fulfill their HLS contract next year, but I'll also be surprised if they don't beat Blue Origin, Lockheed and Boeing, and with a much more capable lander at a lower cost. Artemis looks like it's been watered down into another flag planting mission, but maybe SpaceX will be able to sell lunar transport to somebody who actually wants to do something interesting. Blue Origin and Co definitely won't be.

Mars, whatever.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 1) 154

Would US government rocketry have been successful if not for all the preceding work by a bunch of Nazis? Would the US government itself have been successful if not for all the prceding work by enlightenment philosophers? Would enlightenment philosophers have been successful if not for all the preceding work by Gutenberg and his printing press? Would Guttenberg and his press have been successful if not for the preceding work by a bunch of lazy winos?

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 2) 154

It's true that governments have been big launch customers. Many (not all) launch companies have designed rockets to serve government customers and then also launched private payloads on them. "On the back of" kind of suggests the GP thinks all the private satellites are ride shares on government launches, which just isn't true.

Governments aren't even the majority of the market anymore:

https://www.grandviewresearch....

Comment OK, so put it on the internet (Score 3, Insightful) 46

It's not a surprise if human knowledge which is kept secret doesn't show up in LLMs. And today, not putting any knowledge on the internet is effectively that. The reason all our nerd shit shows up in LLM data is that we made it freely available to all on the open internet.

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