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Comment It Was Bottomless Well of Bad Craziness (Score 1) 100

I have followed this story with interest from the beginning -- engineering disasters are a fascinating and informative topic -- and the number and variety of terrible decisions are seemingly endless.

There is the story of the connector rings that held the end caps to the hull, not mentioned here, but a disaster waiting to happen all their own.

There were these two metal rings that connected the hull to the end caps, using epoxy, built for the first hull. When that hull was scraped to save money Rush reused them. Only problem was cleaning off that epoxy. There was no approved method of removing the epoxy such that the surface could be rebonded later. But Rush just had his engineers work out some way to scrape it off. So the seal on the rings was not based on any approved and tested bonding process. Worse still, the rings were not requalified for reuse, they were just reused as is without inspection or testing.

It gets worse. Much worse.

The rings were designed and fabricated for only one thing -- holding the caps on the hull. Rush got impatient with his sling recovery system and decided to lift the sub out of the water using hooks and lifting rings mounted on the sub. But there was no provision for mounting lifting rings on the sub. No problem, Rush had lifting rings welded to the hull cap rings.

Not only is just welding a couple of lifting rings to the cap ring a disqualifying alteration of the part simply by doing it, but the use of the hull cap bonding ring to lift the weight of the sub was just insane.

There was a seemingly an unending series of defiantly stupid decisions being made. Every "breaking all the rules" move he made that did not immediately result in disaster justified in his mind breaking even more. As with the launch managers of the Space Shuttle with the cold O-ring problem, each launch in below guideline temperatures without a disaster justified launching at still colder temperatures. Keep this up and you will eventually find out exactly where disaster lies.

Comment Billionaire Bro Internet Apocalypse (Score 3, Interesting) 57

Each billionaire bro's revenue eating business model threatens to consume the lunch and dinner for everyone else, except that no one wants to be the one cooking up the food for anyone.

LLM scraping theft steals property from everyone else, then refuses to pay any revenue for its use, but that will deny the LLM any new data in the future, leading to the collapse of their model as well.

Comment Re:"Touch typing" considered harmful (Score 2) 189

Indeed -- "touch typing" does mean a wide range of things. Traditionally "touch typing" was a skill for people who were professional transcription typists -- they looked at some sort of raw copy and produced a finished typed product. People who did this were rated for their speed, and essentially perfect accuracy was required. And they could not look at their keyboard.

This is a job rarely performed by anyone anymore. There is no reason why a creative typist should not look at the keyboard for example. With electronic typing the extreme accuracy requirement goes out the window.

I do not claim to be a "touch typist" but sort of am as I typed this without looking at the keyboard, fairly quickly, even though I had to back up a few times to type over errors, but I needed to look at the keyboard to find the punctuation for the HTML mark-up I am using for paragraphs.

In practice a learned on the job half-touch approach, with some looking and some backing up is fine but would have gotten you flunked from any professional touch typing course.

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