Comment Re:What does their actual intelligence yield? (Score -1, Troll) 26
Q.E.D.
I'd think so given it appears to have a monochrome low resolution LCD screen and controls that while I'm sure are functional, are far from "gaming grade".
The most interesting part will be what radios it has. The CC1101 in the original Flipper Zero is a great chip. I started using it long ago for work and soon realized it is extremely flexible.
Even there though, I think all the commercial RISC-V SoC suppliers use binary blobs and undocumented peripherals.
Unless they have competition, they will go for wireless "broadband" instead of upgrading to fibre. It's shitty but it's cheap, and they don't care if the service is any good when you have no other choice.
Ironically it was exercise that screwed up some of my joints, due to undiagnosed health issues. It's hard to know what is best to do.
Stressing about it is probably worse than the damage a lot of this stuff is doing. Plus I need coffee, life isn't worth living without it. I'm not joking.
It's true that if it works as intended, Starship would be a fantastic tool. But aside from having doubts about that, it doesn't preclude others from getting them on a similar timescale, just a different way.
Blue Origin demonstrates that. Panned for being "behind" SpaceX, but when they fly stuff it tends to work and suddenly they caught up. The Chinese are the same, and they aren't the only other people working in this area. That said, the rate at which some of the private Chinese outfits have been advancing is really impressive. Okay, they had second mover advantage, but they had that with EVs and batteries and renewables too, and are now way ahead...
I was thinking the same thing. Or maybe near the pole, to look for water. They already have comms satellites in place to communicate with the far side.
I'd say they are likely to try something that is clearly different to what Apollo did, and what Artemis is doing.
Aiming for too big to fail, because his AI stuff is failing and he needs to be sure that you will be forced to bail him out when it does.
The Chinese government is doing basically what the US government did back in the 1960s. Set a goal, make it happen, fund it properly. Gives private companies the confidence to invest in space, even if they aren't directly involved with government projects.
Except they also do it for stuff like electric vehicles and battery technology, renewable energy, railways, semiconductor manufacturing, steel production, and anything else they feel is strategically important to their economy.
Their goal is "before 2030", so 2029 at the latest, and they are on track for that. They either have or are at the prototype stage with everything they need. Their mission is not over ambitious either, it's a medium size lander and proven technologies. Blue Origin is also going with a reasonably conservative lander, but Starship is a much greater risk.
That's an interesting idea. What do they gain from doing a flight around the moon? They get to test the spacecraft in that mission profile, but they have already landed things on the moon so stuff like the comms and navigation is already sorted out. They have a space station so have experience with long duration missions, and the moon is only medium duration.
Artemis didn't test separation and docking in lunar orbit, but Apollo 10 did. The Chinese can already do the docking reliably for their space station.
These days it would make sense to do a fully automated landing and return to lunar orbit first. Apollo 11 was the first landing of the LM because they couldn't do it automated at the time. But if you are in a hurry to get there, going for a crewed landing is certainly an option now.
In any case, they need to fly some more hardware first, even if only in Earth orbit.
There's also been some developments in AI that means that the demand may level off a bit. Google said yesterday that they can now train AI with servers distributed over the globe. If one region has cheap renewable electricity right now, they can move more of it there. So the need to build more capacity and more storage is reduced as well.
There are some similar developments coming from Chinese companies too, particularly around making AI more efficient.
Hopefully by the end of the year we will be seeing reduced prices, and maybe a flood of used storage from failed AI startups.
OTA just seems like such an inconvenient waste of time and resources now. It doesn't help that you need a licence for it in the UK, but even if it was free, it seems like it is easier to just pirate the small amount of stuff that is worth watching. And these days that is approaching zero, and what there is can be streamed anyway.
An engineer is someone who does list processing in FORTRAN.