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Starship’s second flight test

spacex.com

221–230 of 235 posts

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#221
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you on drugs? What the hell are you even trying to say? Something something if Elon instead worked in a charity we'd be better off just with no EV's, SpaceX, OpenAI etc... ? I'm downvoting you because you're wasting everyone's time and being demotivational about a great thing. The only true progress is technological.

It's basically a line out of the Expanse series: if you make getting into orbit trivial, and if doing things in space becomes trivial, it becomes conceivable to redirect asteroids so they hit the planet, which would be bad for the people living there. I don't know if it's a realistic problem, my guess is it probably is, but not significantly worse than what we already have with nuclear proliferation. The basic proble…

You're giving him a lot of credit turning a vague angry anti-tech tirade in to that.

However, I tend to agree and say that it would be hopeless to try consider something with a bazillion influential moving parts and as volatile like human civilization something we could try to "make safe" before working on better space access, which itself might well increase our robustness.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#222
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free” in the holistic meaning, not so much as paid monetarily, but requiring you to trade something (registration and login) for access. It’s not necessarily unreasonable in my opinion to expect login to view content or use the site.

There's no strong authentication requirement. As long as you have an extra gmail account or similar or are able to create one that is not connected to your person, you should be able to create a reasonably anonymous twitter account. (No I don't know how to create google accounts without using your residential VPN or avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that)

EDIT: dumb typo, I meant "residential IP"

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#223
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol what. It's like you'd be trying to convince everyone Bing has been the leading search engine for the last 10 years. You don't even mention who would be ahead. Cruise, having to intervene every 5 minutes (literally, look it up) and basing on unscalable HD maps? Get real man. Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's even, designed by the chip designer that has created some of the greatest designs BOTH at Intel…

> Tesla has even custom HARDWARE for their NN's Their chips are actually nice, but you're betraying your lack of knowledge here - the compute hardware isn't remotely the hard part about self driving cars.

Using words like "remotely not the hard part" that is just not true man. There doesn't exist hardware that can do inference with even close to as low as the 100 watts Tesla uses. Also it is not just to drive FSD, it is to provide data, to detect situations of from where to send data as they can't just stream everything to base (check the Autonomy day talk, it's quite interesting), which is needed for the development of the software which we agree is an extremely hard problem.

To further demonstrate this, consider the fact that in the current AI landscape, hardware is actually the bottleneck. Everyone is trying to buy more GPU's NVIDIA simply can't supply fast enough. If Tesla still relied on NVIDIA for the in-car processing, the project would have to be shelved as they'd have to sell Teslas without the hardware, instead of just having it all cars even if they will never use it for running FSD directly on that car.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any hints on how this is going to change civilisation, for non-space nerds?

How much do you think it would cost to send a bottle of water to space? Even on a Falcon Heavy you're looking at spending around $700 [1] to send one 16oz bottle of water. That's a far better than past times, where it'd cost around $25,000 to send it up on the Space Shuttle. But with Starship? You're looking at that price drop to as low as $5! Because of this, trying to meaningfully predict the future is not possible…

Cheaper to buy a bottle of water on the ISS than at a concert or sportsball game. Epic.

A similar dynamic happened with railroads. It's hard to predict just how much change this could cause!

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#225
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free” in the holistic meaning, not so much as paid monetarily, but requiring you to trade something (registration and login) for access. It’s not necessarily unreasonable in my opinion to expect login to view content or use the site.

There's no strong authentication requirement. As long as you have an extra gmail account or similar or are able to create one that is not connected to your person, you should be able to create a reasonably anonymous twitter account. (No I don't know how to create google accounts without using your residential VPN or avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that)

> avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that

You can always buy a prepaid SIM and used hotspot-capable phone with cash.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#226
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.

You could say the same thing about early airplanes, early computers, early radio, early cars… in fact many people did. This bias doesn’t reflect the reality of technological revolutions but is very common. Be mindful of this. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” - Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. Peo…

Not much the same. Your examples were new techs that enables new thing, but no one knew how it useful . For internet access, fiber or 4G/5G cell tower are existing better solution for non-rural ground use. It's great for very rural area (including industry use) and I'm exciting how it make new use case on marine, but it's not so exciting for urban/suburban use.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#227
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't, and they had to implement very severe rate limiting just to keep it from falling over again. Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies.

> Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies. So…you’re upset that you can’t do something for free now?

I didn't say I'm upset, I barely use Twitter, only when someone links to some specific tweet.

I was just noting a clear downgrade in feature set, made (by Elon's own words) so Twitter can better handle the traffic after having fallen over multiple times.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#228
post #190
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't, and they had to implement very severe rate limiting just to keep it from falling over again. Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies.

What rate limiting? The login requirement change is policy, not a rate limit.

There are very strict rate limits as well: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672

I think they have increased them since then, but for a while Twitter was really struggling to serve regular users without hitting them with rate limit errors.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#229
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.

I'm willing to bet that "most" people live in or travel to areas of bad cell coverage often enough that they will definitely appreciate an increase in coverage to literally 100% of the Earth's surface. Starlink capacity and reliability increases will enable a lot more people to ditch bad ISPs, not just people in extremely rural areas, and that can have a big impact on people's lives. Also I would say that internation…

I don't think that would be a big change for the vast majority of people. Very few would even subscribe to an internet service that they will only make use of while hiking or doing other activities that take them to remote places. Maybe if they sell access for a few days and you no longer need any dedicated hardware to connect?

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#230
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that sounds like a big impact on the lives of most people, who are already living in areas well covered by cellphone networks and will never afford to travel to space.

SpaceX Starship is projected to bring the price of space travel down drastically, to the point where non-1%-ers should be able to afford it.

Still not a big improvement for most of the population, maybe a few middle-class hardcore space fans spend their life savings to make 1 trip to space instead of going to some beach resort multiple years in a row. Good for them.
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