“Somehow I suspect that international politics doesn’t depend on our models for the origin of the moon,” he says.

Creationists entered the chat…

Everything we’ve put into that level of orbit is falling, it is just falling so slowly […] go from a spiral to a more dramatic arc […] Once within the atmosphere

This is not correct.

• Anything in orbit, is constantly free-falling at barely less than 9.8m/s².
• “Orbiting”, is having enough lateral momentum to keep missing the Earth.
• In the absence of an atmosphere, or any other external influence, an object would keep orbiting forever.
• However… Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just end, it gets thinner and thinner instead… up to the Moon and beyond (thanks to the solar wind blowing it out)
• The reason for an object in LEO to “fall”, as in “decrease its orbital height”, is precisely because it’s been in Earth’s atmosphere all the time!

The reason for a “more dramatic arc”, is that as an objects looses orbital height, it keeps hitting ever denser atmosphere, until it ends up losing enough momentum to not be able to complete an orbit, which precipitates things (pun intended).

Adding to @[email protected]’s answer, an interesting tidbit: solar wind, particularly during more solar activity, blows (some of) Earth’s atmosphere all the way past the orbit of the Moon… so at some points in time, the Moon not only falls with style, but also falls through Earth’s atmosphere!

Simple explanation: 21st century tech.

A palm sized quadcopter, has more sensors and processing power, than many 20th century rockets.

SpaceX can afford to build dozens of (relatively) cheap prototypes, fill them with all kinds of sensors, hook them up to StarLink, and gather massive amounts of real-world data instead of some make-believe simulations, even when the rocket turns into thin dust. No video or flight recorders required.

For this latest flight 4, keep in mind that the damage to the flap would have thrown any simulation-based and verified flight computer program into the ground… but whatever they used, managed to adapt, compensate, and essentially land a rocket that was falling apart… all the while streaming live video and telemetry.

In software, a problem once solved is gone forever

That is not correct, and why having tests to detect regressions is important.

Not sure how much “technical debt” SpaceX might be incurring, but my guess is that each of these flights is providing massive amounts of data to plug into simulations of future designs, which might be more valuable than having a single “meticulous design” that would fail spectacularly if something like a rubber seal were to get too cold the night before.

Occam’s Razor is not a proof, it’s a way to prioritize resources onto more likely hypotheses.

last 100 years of radio until we die as a race.

Based on our own experience, over the last 100 years, radio signals have gone from very scarce, to a cacophony of millions of high bandwidth compressed and encrypted emissions that look like random noise from anywhere outside our solar system.

If we consider an intelligence with an evolution similar to our own, “in the clear” transmissions that might’ve reached Earth 200 years ago, would’ve gone completely unnoticed, while now we could be getting the sum of their thousands of Tbps of encrypted memes, and be none the wiser.

On Android, most apps depend on the keyboard.

• Gboard has a configurable suggestions bar where you can pick words, or not.
• Microsoft SwiftKey works similarly, but it underlines the word you’re typing.
• AnySoftKeyboard works like Swiftkey.

Only exception I’ve seen, is Copilot, which shows the suggested word directly, to be selected with [tab], but you can still type a different one.

I’ve noticed no such behavior on Facebook. Have you checked your keyboard settings?

On Earth, there is a table with leap seconds… and sometimes they’re negative. That alone, is a good reason why writing time libraries is better left to people who specialize in writing time libraries.

The relativity part, also made me think: Luna orbits Earth at about 3600Km/h… but Earth’s equator itself, “orbits” Earth’s poles at 1600Km/h… so if one has relativity effects on time, half that speed must be having some relativity effects too, right…? Someone on the South Pole would also see a clock on the equator go some microseconds slower per day… and all the clocks at different latitudes, and everyone relative to everyone else, so you can’t tell “precisely” the time on Earth without taking into account the exact location… 😬

The difference between theoretical math vs. applied math, is that one gives you spherical cows in a vacuum, while the other needs to take into account valve intake shapes and positioning so they can relight the reentry engines while fuel is experimenting those centrifugal forces.

“Will and dedication”, is what SpaceX is doing right now: getting stuff explode until they manage to account for all the variables you need to plug into the formulas… and this is just for the easy rocket science.

Disagree, but we can discuss licensed ETF futures HFT trade copying at any moment.

recycle materials in space to build space parts/ships/stations

If you mean in orbit, that’s orders of magnitude harder than reaching the Moon, and possibly harder than colonizing Mars.

We don’t have some scifi “gravity plating”, with some force fields to keep air in, to build a space dock, or a factory on a space station. Microgravity is fun for the first half hour, after that moving stuff around is a whole challenge on itself, something like screwing in a screw, or a lightbulb, is a separate challenge. Most of the knowledge about processes and logistics we use down the gravity well, with an atmosphere made primarily of nitrogen, goes out the window in microgravity.

The nearest “practical” place to recycle any materials, would be the Moon.

Ownership comes with both rights and responsibilities.

Platforms want as many of the rights as possible, without the responsibilities… which is why they have a contract (TOS) where they explicitly renounce to ownership, leaving it for the user, and only license the rights.

If platforms took full ownership, like in a “work for hire” agreement, they would be responsible for any illegal content a user could upload, since it wouldn’t be the user’s content anymore. Obviously they don’t want that.

A side effect of wanting as much content as possible without owning it, is that… well, they don’t own it. 😎

Fediverse where there’s no owner/seller/buyer of your data or anything else you contributed.

Incorrect. You get ownership of anything that’s yours, then upload stuff under whatever TOS your instance has… what’s that? it has no TOS? Then they’re in for a rough awakening some day. 🤷

Whether there are sellers/buyers… is something we’ll learn in time. For now, user generated content on the Fediverse gets shared with little regard or protection of anyone’s rights, so anyone can make a compilation, bundle it up, slap a price tag on it, and try to sell it.

The difference is: Reddit doesn’t own the content, they can’t stop anyone else from selling it, or giving it for free; only the users could (the actual owners).

There are Reddit content dumps out there, which Reddit can’t stop anyone from using… so not sure what they are selling, but if it’s just that, then they’re scamming people.

From the TOS/EULA, the content belongs to each user, they just license it to Reddit to use as it pleases.

Gold value was also enforced by armies and taxes

The history of gold, and other metals like silver or copper, is quite interesting. They started by having an intrinsic value, then some governments tried diluting it, failed and they went back to intrinsic, then finally the Venetians managed to apply inflation to it, ultimately the gold standard was abandoned by the US in the 1970s… and anyone trying to reinstate it (Saddam, Gaddafi) got on the wrong side of US’s army.

Crypto has no value

It has the value of whatever people assign to it. You definitely can find places to buy groceries with it, or anything else; there are even credit cards in crypto that will convert to whatever the seller wants.

you can’t fractional reserve crypto unless you’re using a second crypto currency backed by a first

Or an ETF. There are plenty of banks offering to “sell you crypto”… except you can’t transfer that “crypto” out of the bank. There is no way to know whether they even have any of it.

Nowadays (post-gold standard) crypto is more similar to gold than to fiat; you can’t eat either, but the value of crypto and gold comes from whatever people freely want to pay for them, unlike fiat’s value which gets enforced through taxes and armies.

Gold is also fungible, and doesn’t get consumed during normal use, just like most popular crypto projects (although some are neither, and explicitly “burning” crypto makes it unrecoverable).

fractional reserve banking can be done with those others but not really with crypto.

You’d think that… but crypto ETFs say otherwise. You can also look into Sam Bankman-Fried, an extreme case of “fractional reserve” (aka: scam).

General rule: not your keys, not your crypto… and you better have the holder of “not your crypto” thoroughly audited on a regular basis.

Because being in debt is not bad… as long as:

• You retain people’s trust in you, so they don’t ask for it back,
• Or, you can get more new debt as you pay the old one,
• And/or, you can force people to STFU about you being insolvent, “or else” (in the shape of an army, an orange face, or whatever).

Debt is only bad when someone asks you to pay all of it back at once, with interests. As long as they don’t, then the more debt you get into, the more stuff you get basically for free.

Everyone likes free stuff.

$331B in debt… that’s 1.6 Musks.

Two bads don’t make a good… and I still haven’t got my cut to say otherwise.

$3.5 trillion… that would be about $400/year per person… how much does the global economy steal?

Can LLMs Really Reason and Plan?

do LLMs generate their output through a logical process?

Shifting goalposts. I’ve claimed a single reasoning iteration for an LLM, per prompt; both “planning” and a “logical process” require multiple iterations. Check Auto-GPT for that.

PS: to be more precise, an LLM has a capacity of self-reflection defined by the number of attention heads, which can easily surpass the single-iteration reasoning capacity of a human, but still require multiple iterations to form a plan or follow a reasoning path.