Makes you reflect on how fewer and fewer people who went to the Moon, are still alive. If we don’t fix that soon, it might turn into a legend, then a myth, then a fairy tale.

standard assumption that matter is evenly spread across the universe

What standard? This isn’t new:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament

Don’t worry, this has been known for some time:

Published: 24 January 2014

Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes’

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14583

😜

Actual Hawking’s paper:

Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes

https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761

The “space race” has always been a propaganda stunt.

There is a reason you don’t hear about every experimental result from the ISS, those are actual scientific achievements and not propaganda, while a guitar on the ISS or how to drink water, end up on the news.

China […] without the politics and waste

Wrong. China’s politics and waste may look different, they’re still there in huge amounts. Institutionalized corruption and cultural corner cutting, whether for a capitalist goal, or a power control and egocentrism goal, are still corruption and corner cutting.

You can run a stress test, and compare your desired response times with the resource usage on the server side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApacheBench

Take into account all the requests needed to load a website, and the fact that:

• if it takes more than 2 seconds, about 50% of your visits will leave
• 3 seconds or more, and most people will start thinking it’s down
• Google tries to keep theirs under 500ms

Loading some content in 100ms, then loading more in the background, is a reasonable compromise. You may want a very quick response time for the first few requests, then put the rest on a possibility slower server, or running at a lower priority.

Is this on the same machine, or multiple machines?

The typical/easy design for an outgoing proxy, would be to set the proxy on one machine, configure the client on another machine to connect to the proxy, and drop any packets from the client that aren’t targeted at the proxy.

For a transparent proxy, all connections coming from a client could be rewritten via NAT to go to the proxy, then the proxy can decide which ones it can handle or is willing to.

If you try to fold this up into a single machine, I’d suggest using containers to keep things organized.

The older something is, the more people grow used to it, but also have had a chance to get burned by it:

• C was released in 1972 (52 years), C99 was released in 1999 (25 years), hasn’t changed much since
• C++ was released in 1998 (26 years), there are 7 versions of C++ with notable changes
• Rust was released in 2015 (9 years), it’s still on the same 1.x version implying backwards compatibility

Rust was created to fix some of the problems C and C++ have had for decades, it’s only logical that people like it more… for now.

Makes sense. As for the opinions, over time people end up cussing the same tools that were introduced to fix their previous problems, all tools can be misapplied 🤷

Neither.

If you can code it in a week (1), start from scratch. You’ll have a working prototype in a month, then can decide whether it was worth the effort.

If it’s a larger codebase, start by splitting it into week-sized chunks (1), then try rewriting them one by one. Keep a good test coverage, linked to particular issues, and from time to time go over them to see what can be trimmed/deprecated.

Legible code should not require “reverse engineering”, there should be comments linking to issues, use cases, an architecture overview, and so on. If you’re lacking those, start there, no matter which path you pick.

(1) As a rule of thumb, starting from scratch you can expect a single person to write 1 clean line of code per minute on a good day. Keep those week-sized chunks between 1k and 10k lines, if you don’t want nasty surprises.

“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.