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Comment Re:If you thought SEO/affiliate marketing spam is (Score 1) 15

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:Familiar... (Score 1) 31

I think any dramatic change from how you currently run things to a different way is full of risk. Just because it's Linux doesn't really do much in the face of who knows how much hard coded this or that they accumulated in their infrastructure management.

People's infrastructure management tends to be ugly and locked in to how they do it in various ways.

Azure may be utterly capable, but any difference is a huge headache, particularly the longer the 'old ways' went on and how many people along the way left the company.

Comment The article's premise is flawed (Score 1) 165

The article claims to measure the severity of a memory leak defect based on the amount of memory it leaked -- but most memory leaks (that are severe enough to be noticed) are small leaks that occur at regular intervals, meaning that the program's memory footprint will continually grow larger over repeated operations.

Therefore, do you want a 1MB memory leak? Run the program for a while. Do you want a 1GB memory leak? Run the program for that much longer. Keep going, and you can eventually get to any number you want, to post in your Substack article; this makes the reported numbers arbitrary and therefore meaningless.

TL;DR: Memory leaks are a problem, and they can be avoided with care and proper coding techniques, but claiming that software quality is worse now because the leaks "are larger" is silly.

Comment Familiar... (Score 2) 31

It was widely rumored that in 1998 Microsoft tried to force Hotmail to use Microsoft infrastructure and met with predictably miserable results. Hotmail was more about trying to show off their infrastructure products that as an offering in and of itself.

Microsoft might be a bit more conflicted on github, but clearly that sentiment persists.

Comment Re: Color me skeptical, (Score 1) 150

This assumes you want a lunar habitat. The original flights to the moon were in an era of exploration, they actually did provide some valid scientific results, and we beat the Russians. Growing up in that era, I cheered space flight like no one else. What was accomplished was nothing short of amazing. We no longer need to beat the Russians, so why? The real value of LEO is earth resource monitoring, possibly some manufacturing. Unmanned space flight is far safer and more reliable than manned. The same goes for Mars. What is the return on investment? We will never colonize any other celestial body to remove any pressure on the Earth. Less than 1000 people have ever flown to space in 60+ years of flights. A quarter of a million people have died in a single day in a disaster, and it never put a dent in the population of the Earth. Both efforts no longer look like breakthroughs, but rather more like flagpole sitting or ego projects. Iâ(TM)m willing to be proven wrong.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Insightful) 150

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Informative) 150

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

Comment Color me skeptical, (Score 4, Insightful) 150

Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.
Somehow all in the next calendar year, they expect to regularly orbit, AND orbit a propellant target AND complete propellant transfer AND orbit a stable propellant depot AND perform a dozen or more propellant transfers AND land an unmanned Starship HLS on the moon AND launch 5 Starships to the Mars surface AND land a Starship with a working rover on the moon surface.
His delivery of car functions and price targets have slipped by years.
Is there some reasonableness of the space flight schedule that is inherently more reliable?
I get it, yeah, it is rocket science, but it seems like wishful thinking at best.

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