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Comment Re:"Processed foods"!? (Score 1) 132

Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 1) 39

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

Comment Re:Why does SpaceX need AI? (Score 1) 115

To add to parent post

SpaceX is valuing itself at $28.5 trillion,

      $370 billion of that comes from launches.
            $1.6 trillion comes from Starlink
        $26.5 trillion (~90%) they are attributing to their share of the AI market
SpaceX brought in ~$20 billion in revenue in 2025, but it spent $13 billion on AI data centers, models, GPU's etc. Q1 of this year AI spend

So its an AI company that might also launch spaceships. Or more specifically launching spaceborne data centers. Maybe the case to be made is that ground based data centers are likely to hit a limit in the availability of power infrastructure in the next 1-2 years. i.e. not enough powerplants, nor transformers, nor transmission lines. SpaceX steps in with some pretty expensive orbiting compute and sells that to Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft.

However, I just don't know that SpaceX will be able to launch enough GPU's to make that dollar math work out. And there is the "how does this work in the vacuum of space" part. Reliability, etc. More likely is that there will be
-improvements in the software & hardware to increase efficiency.
-Not every use-case requires AGI, smaller on prem AI's with limited functionality will flourish.
-Firms like Microsoft, Apple, Google, will reduce the AI feature set to only worthwhile areas in their applications, reducing spend
-Data centers will be built overseas in low cost of energy areas

and so forth. it may be the case the AI market cools dramatically before SpaceX can capitalize on it.
Also, you'll have other, better positioned AI companies like Anthropic going public soon to take some wind out of the SpaceX AI investment sails. Open AI has missed the boat, but their IPO will still happen and more billions of investments
Also, also SpaceX will be too big to be meme-y like Tesla was. Musk gets worse the older he gets too.

For those reasons I'm out.

  Yes, I've missed out on TSLA 115% rise over five years, but boy I have been able to sleep fine those years with my risk adjusted, but still well performing boring investments

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 2) 39

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.

All true, but it's worth pointing out that if the Starship lander succeeds it will enable us to do a lot more, a lot faster. The whole "15 refueling flights for every moon trip" seems kind of crazy on its face, but if you look at the costs (assuming Starship works and become fully reusable), it makes the total cost per kilogram delivered to the surface of the moon insanely low and enables comparatively massive payloads to be delivered.

Big risk, big (potential) reward. Running both the Starship and Blue Moon projects in parallel is probably a good risk mitigation strategy, but if Starship succeeds completely, Blue Origin's lander will be a relic. Of course, it's also possible that Starship will just fail, or that it will succeed but be difficult to man-rate, in which case it may become the delivery service for lunar cargos, while people fly on Blue Moon.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 1) 69

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

Comment Re:It's okay, they'll shut it down soon. (Score 1) 69

You should all know by now that as soon as your company commits to this, Google will shut it down: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 2) 69

No, they don't have a free upgrade path for individual (or family) users. The key thing was the custom domain, which is only available with a paid account. When it was available, it wasn't that uncommon for a tech-savvy family to have their own custom domain backed by G-Suite. Now, there's no free option for this anymore.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Comment Re:Will it catch the president? (Score 2) 41

Counterpoint: Is is plausible that he'd be that successful at insider trading when he has failed at every other endeavor he has turned his hand to?

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

Comment Re: Federal Bribery and Taxpayer Abuse. (Score 1) 101

Should it matter? The founders weren't gods, they did their best for their time. They made mistakes, and times have changed.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Amend the constitution, make it illegal.

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Comment Re:Waiting for the seizures and arrests to begin (Score 2) 50

In the United States, simply keeping their cars running after the manufacturer died is a fairly substantial set of crimes. Since they have admitted to conspiracy by forming an interstate group to do it, major Federal organized crime laws have been broken.

Is it? What crimes, exactly? They might be defeating some copy protection, but the entity that owned the software is defunct, so no one has standing to sue.

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