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Starbase, LA

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Re: Starbase, LA

#411
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starbase, TX Giga Texas Giga Nevada Terrafab etc There's plenty of examples of this company building these types of projects and following through. Why do you think this one would be any different?

We are literally talking about a case where they aren’t paying contractors they work with

These types of allegations are extremely common with basically every type of construction project, especially when contractors know the client has deep pockets. None of this has been adjudicated by a court. Plus this story is written by someone with bluesky link in their bio by a publication that has an obvious bias:

>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible >Sure, man.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-ai-in...

Re: Starbase, LA

#412
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless of course Musk decides to use the opportunity to advertise Optimus, be it with actually AI able to do it or teleoperator do it.

Optimus ins’t gonna be a master welder, electrician, HVAC technician, general contractor anytime soon.

Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.

Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.

Re: Starbase, LA

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches? Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.

The wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days. A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.

Good point and thank you, I should have specified ongoing/constant rocket launches.

The Solar City timeline should have taught us everything we need to know about these astronomical projections... they couldn't even throw enough billions at solar panels that kinda look like roof tiles to get them to work, and the same cabal wants us to think the next step is space travel and terraforming?

Re: Starbase, LA

#414

I have nothing against humans becoming multi-planetary but this is a luxurious desire at this point in history. We should solve poverty first. This is the kind of project which you do once there are no more problems to solve on earth.

From 1990 to 2025, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from around 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million. I think we're making fast enough progress here to warrant public companies going to space on their own dime and volition.

Re: Starbase, LA

#415
This is madness.

People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels.

Fail

Re: Starbase, LA

#416
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem. It might have been medium difficult back in 1985, but the state of the art has progressed in the intervening 40 years. The constraint of correctness makes things trickier because it further imposes three requirements: completeness, uniqueness, and determinism. Unless the implementer has the skill to pr…

There was no test suite for it available that I could use for correctness checks, so I did what I could. I also implemented IEEE 754 floating point in asm. For that I did have an exhaustive test suite, and passed it 100%.

We didn't have this definition of correctness until 1990 (due to Steele and White), and it wasn't until the past decade or so that we got a published algorithm (most recently, I think, Dragonbox, due to Jeon when he was still working on his PhD at UCSD), with mathematical proof[0], that satisfied all of the requirements of being complete, being unique, and being deterministic.

(Though, Steele-White expresses these slightly differently, as preserving information, having the shortest possible output, and rounding correctly. Completeness, uniqueness, and determinism seem to be equivalent and are easier to prove.)

--

0: Available at https://fmt.dev/papers/Dragonbox.pdf>. It's pretty easy to understand either with a numerical analysis background or after having worked through volume 2 of Knuth's TAoCP.

Re: Starbase, LA

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati... You're just willfully ignorant

Asking for evidence is not "willfully ignorant". People making claims have the onus of backing them up. Anyhow, the link to the canceled projects is: https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt... I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few tha…

I might be biased, but everything under the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the MPS directorate is important. Math is one of those weird fields that tends to touch everything else even if not directly, and it's impossible to know prima facie which areas of research will be useful downstream to the sciences and engineering.

Re: Starbase, LA

#419

Isn't this an absolutely horrible idea to build this here? What happens when the next Category 5 hurricane hits this area? It's an absolute certainty that they will get another Category 5 at some point.

Do you know where NASA's launch facilities are? The Florida coast.

Take a look at this site: https://tropicalcyclonedatabase.com/storm_tracks.html?_v=90

Filter Lifecycle Intensity by category 4 and 5.

You won't see any lines close to land near Cape Canaveral. Though to be fair, Vermilion Parish seems to be far enough west in Louisiana that it doesn't get direct hits either (but some are close).

Then look at the NHC Storm Surge Risk map: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...

Cape Canaveral is mostly 0-3 ft with some >3 ft. Meanwhile the entire immediate coast for the new Louisiana SpaceX location is >6 ft to >9 ft.

I think they'll probably have more a lot more trouble with storms than Cape Canaveral. The dynamics along the Atlantic coast are a lot different from the Gulf.

Re: Starbase, LA

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have. Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.

Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.

If you don't mind the shameless plug, you may want to check my optimistic sci-fi visual novel: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

It's on sale now :).

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