You might consider not using AIDs as an acronym due to the being a rather nasty STI, lets not confuse things by overloading tharpt acronym

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

This, exactly.

The most immediate thing about being cool is that nothing that is forced, is cool. Copilot existing, with some cool demos and higher thresholds on the free version, could possibly gain some opt-in usage. Copilot being forced everywhere means that people are going to associate it with something intrusive, and no amount of marketing is going to undo that.

ChatGPT didn't force anything onto people's desktops or into their spreadsheets, they didn't run TV commercials and they didn't give sponsorships to 101 Youtube personalities...they existed, and they improved the service, and word-of-mouth was all they needed.

If Microsoft wants their level of adoption, they need to stop pushing...but the problem is that nobody will accept a slow ascent, so they need the accidental, unwanted usage to show the 'growth' being demanded by the MBAs.

One day they'll figure it out...probably the day after they have a fire sale on nVidia GPUs that have sat dormant for months.

Point of pedantry: some merchants offer a "cash discount", i.e. they forward the cost of processing only to those with credit cards.

This is partially true, granted...but not entirely. Target may be big enough to interact with Visa directly, but most vendors instead work through payment processors like FirstData or Clover, who work as a middleman to ensure that businesses who *want* to be able to accept Visa/Mastercard/Discover/AmEx can do so seamlessly. There may be rules, but the outcome is that the business doesn't have to negotiate contracts with every card company.

If the merchants aren't giving cash discounts, and a $10 item is $10 in cash or $10 on the AmEx...then they're right, they *aren't* paying a 5% premium by using their AmEx - they're paying a 5% premium when they use cash.

The solution is to do their own work! Or at least check it! This use of AI is like when people just Google for something and copy/paste the first hit.

What the news doesn't show is the millions of people using AI successfully every day. We know that every day people incorrectly use hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, cars, and guns. Yet they are not declared useless. AI is a tool, and in the hands of a someone with genuine interest in using the tool appropriately, it is a useful one. The best path forward is to continue to make fun of the lazy fools who use it as a crutch and don't even read their own court filings.

Hold on I thought there were only to kinds of visa card debit or credit, what am I missing?

Well ebem if us retail were only wallmart and Amazon that would be a duopoly nor a monopoly Y

Most stores still sell the buckets and tubs of generic Lego bricks. I've got six big tubs of them, and sometimes order on Bricklink to get specific colors. It's cheaper than buying sets, by a lot, because there's no licensing involved. And I'd hope all the people that can't seem to see past the sets start buying the generics again so we see more of them, rather than less.

I think Starlink just really messed up their roadmap with the satellite stuff. I know lots of people who do backcountry trails, and when the iPhone 14 came out with the satellite connectivity, a lot of them were quite excited. My guess is that after proving out the SoS functionality, they would have extended it to a paid service for messaging and then started upgrading it to handle more and more data. In the end you'd have a phone you could use anywhere for a hefty subscription fee. Combined with the whole rugged line (Ultra watches etc) they would have had another revenue earning service to lock in a lucrative customer group.

Starlink and their ability to do direct to cell basically destroys that model, so the satellite stuff ended up not being a key feature they could push.

Apple is in such a tricky place now. They have to drip feed features into the iPhone because they don't exactly have any block-buster things to add to it. It's a mature technology and people are just buying them on upgrade cycles now - which is absurdly lucrative for them, but won't generate massive growth.

I think Cook has been relatively at peace with this strategy - he's near the end of his tenure, and got to overseas massive growth as the market developed - but whoever takes over is unlikely to want to just drip feed out features to keep sales bouncing along. So it will be interesting to see what they do from a strategic point of view when that happens.

The whole quantum AI is pretty obviously going to be the next step in sustaining the insane AI valuations. I bet Elon and Altman will start a quantum computing company once the market gets wobbly enough.

They will then be able to say the **magical stuff will happen** as soon as they get the quantum machine running - which they're really close to doing. Even being able to do press releases around stringing more and more q-bits together, will allow them to keep the hype going for another five years or so until they find the next thing to push the bubble (probably something like making quantum computers in space).

Is it illegal if you are salaried? Or how about if you have to take a dump? Or if I think about a problem while eating dinner?

Salaried exempt is a fixed amount of pay per pay period regardless of the number of hours, so they aren't part of this discussion.
You dont' get extra pay for working more than 40 hours doing the same job as you do during regular hours, And they can't pay you less for working fewer hours one day either.

As a salaried worker.. there is no such thing as "clock in" / "clock out time", so it's an unrelated matter. If your employer reduces your pay for a difference in hours less than not working a whole day, then they lose the Overtime exemption.

Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.

See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar

They knew this and decided to maintain Perl 5 alongside Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) for what is looking to be noticeably longer than the 11-year transition from Python 2 to Python 3.