Viewing profile — bumby

I’m curious where you get the estimate that humans hold “like four” parameters in their mind at once?

Right. As you said, sqlite was developed to fill a specific need, therefore it’s applied research and not basic research. (I wouldn’t even consider it research, but more developmen…

I took “basic research” to mean “fundamental research”. Sqlite is not fundamental research. It’s an exception that proves the rule. It was literally designed for a solving a specif…

I don’t agree, but understand the sentiment.

It’s not basic research in the vast, vast majority of business cases you’re describing. They aren’t Bell Labs doing novel work, they’re usually doing busy work on mundane apps. I’m…

Yeah, I see this. I think in that case, both the sales and development team are deadweight (ie self licking ice cream cones)

What about charging people for electronic books? From an IP perspective, code is just a really bad book.

A less cynical take is that sales connects the people who need a problem solved to the people who can solve it.

Isn’t that what they advertise as a “feature” on their website?

As someone else mentioned, a software-oriented solution is likely to introduce more failure modes because of the number of dependencies, updates etc.

Is the fouling functionality more complicated than one would assume? From a naive perspective, it seems like it would just be a simple photo-eye sensor

You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.

As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you th…

I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.

Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.

As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination …

Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X pro…

Maybe somewhat ironically, I think this is an overly cynical take. People can acknowledge a difference of values and recognize what they consider a destruction of the commons witho…

>”claiming it was impossible” Again, what do you mean by “it”? Economic viability? I already stated I agree with that. Technologically viable? I disagree, since the proof of concep…

That’s kinda the point. 40 years ago it was questionable whether it was technically possible. It was “JWST-stuff”. The forerunners of ULA showed it was feasible. 20 years ago it wa…

Not in scientific edge domains. Eg: quantum computing is shown to be scientifically feasible right now, but nowhere close to having economic viability in a business sense. Same wit…

Economic viability is not the same goal. One is a business goal, one is a scientific/technological one. The goal from the DC-X 35+ years ago was the latter. Certainly, we'd expect …

I think that misremembers or misrepresents history. The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rap…

I think I disagree. I think the administrative overhead makes for additional problems and is certainly imperfect at mitigating the risk. Risk mitigation (where the risk defined her…