FaceDeer

But at least that crappy bug-riddled code has soul!

In Tyreek’s post-arrest press conference he asked rhetorically “what would have happened if I hadn’t been famous?”

Well, now we see. Wrist-slaps with no actual long-term impact.

It’s almost doublethink, people celebrating how the Fediverse is an open protocol for sharing public discussion and then going surprised-Pikachu at the notion that public discussion might be viewed by someone the don’t want to view it.

If you don’t mean for something to be public, don’t post it on a public forum.

I’m Canadian so I’m not a voter in the contest you’re presenting, but if I were I would vote Democrat. And of the trio you present for the Democrats, I would say that the position I’d compromise on would be gun control. Not because American gun culture isn’t bananas and it’s not a serious problem, but because I can’t see any plausible way to fix it in the short term. So might as well let it go for now and deal with the more important stuff that affects more people.

I think a more reasonable compromise would be to give Republicans most of what they want on immigration reform. That seems to be something they consider to be of critical importance, but that I think can be allowed without it causing significant harm. If the American economy starts to suffer as a result of not having illegal immigrant workers then that will be motivation for further reforms. I think it’s important to have the laws try to reflect the realities, though, and having the economy literally depend on large-scale lack of adherence to the law of the land is a bad place to be. Just make sure not to be monstrous about it - don’t do the concentration-camps-for-children thing, try to maintain basic asylum access for those who truly need it, and so forth.

Yup. I would personally love it if the electorate studied the various policies of candidates that wished to be their representatives, decided which ones’ positions were the most beneficial to themselves and to the country as a whole (which is indirectly beneficial to themselves, after all) and then selected that one on a rational basis. If we lived in that world then each candidates’ campaign would ideally focus on debating issues and presenting their views.

We don’t live in that world, alas. I’ve become cynical about democracy of late because the electorate are a bunch of sports team fans who just want “their guy” to win. Well, so be it then. It’s kind of an emergency right now so play whatever strategy keeps the regressive loons out of power.

Could it perhaps be that online communities are in bubbles that focus primarily on his failures and downvote into oblivion any mention of successes he might have had?

…

No, it must be the money that’s wrong.

AI trainers curate the data they use for training. We’ve gone past the phase where people just dump Common Crawl onto a neural net and tell it “figure that out somehow!” That worked back when we had no idea what we were doing or what would produce passable results, nowadays we know what produces better results. “Model collapse” has been known as a potential problem for years. The studies demonstrating it use unrealistic training methodologies to force it to extremes, real training works to avoid it.

And finally, that “57% of content is AI-generated!” Headline that’s been breathlessly spamming all the feeds? Grossly misleading, of course. The actual study found that 57% of the content in their sample that had been translated into other languages had been translated into three or more languages, which they interpreted as meaning it had been AI-translated.

People are so eager to click on “AI sucks and is dying!” headlines.

The suits aren’t technically needed for reentry, since the capsule isn’t supposed to be depressurized at any point during the trip. It’s just another layer of “if something goes wrong.” So if it’s a choice of taking that risk or staying on an exploding ISS you go with the risk. I expect that even if the suit can’t be connected to Dragon’s umbilicals it could still be sealed for at least a few minutes of air during the riskiest bits of the trip.

As with most safety procedures, it’s written in blood.

There is an alternative, in the event of disaster there’s room on board the Dragon capsule currently docked at the station for them to come back down. They’d be strapped into the cargo hold rather than a seat, but that’s acceptable in a disaster situation.

They’re professional astronauts who have worked their whole lives for the opportunity to get into space. Both Butch and Sunny were probably doing the last mission of their career with this trip, so having it extended from 8 days to 8 months could well be a dream come true for them.

And yet this community seems more techno-pessimistic than even /r/technology, which is a challenge.

“Knowing” and “believing” are two separate things. There are plenty of theists who would say “I don’t know that god exists but I believe that it does.”

“Believe or not believe” seems to be an opinion of yours that I’m personally not bound to. I’m fine just accepting I don’t know something that is clearly outside of the grasp of my rational thought or logic.

Whether you believe something or not is not outside the grasp of your rational thought. Just… answer the question. That’s all it takes to know if you believe something, you take a moment to introspect and you say whether you believe it or not.

There’s also a difference between lacking a belief in a proposition and believing in the negation of that proposition. Lacking a belief in something (for example, any particular god) is not the same thing as believing that that god does not exist. Both are atheism, they’re just different kinds of atheism. “Strong atheism” and “weak atheism” are the usual terms to distinguish between them.

Indeed. And Boeing is the main contractor for it so you can be sure it won’t suffer any mishaps.

There’s others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it’s a suborbital tourism vehicle that’s basically just a toy. They’re working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that’s like a souped up Falcon 9 but it’s still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who’s actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.

Indeed, I’m surprised this dumb clickbait title didn’t literally include Elon Musk’s name like so many other “Elon Musk’s <Company Name> Does <Thing That’s Actually Normal But Sounds Bad>!” headlines.

Yes, Elon Musk has some awful views and does some awful things. Doesn’t mean everything he does is therefore bad. Henry Ford was a colossal antisemite, as another example, and did some really weird and awful things to his employees. Unfortunately some of the same personal characteristics that can lead people to be innovative industrialists can often also lead to them being assholes.

Turns out analogies are not the actual thing they’re analogizing, though. Synthetic data - when properly created and curated - has proven to be very useful and effective in training AI.

So now it’s basically people who aren’t going to use this tool complaining that other people who do want to use this tool will get to use it.

Thanks for the clarification. Wasn’t sure how down into the weeds of why Starliner would go boom I should go, but this is clear and I should have been more specific about the “hypergolic” term.

It’s actually a lot worse than just thrusters not working any more. At least according to the unofficial “word on the street” about what’s going on, the details haven’t been officially released yet.

It appears that the cause of the failures was because the thrusters are housed inside compartments that are containing their waste heat. The thrusters were tested individually, but apparently were never tested once installed inside the capsule. The heat is causing teflon valves to fail, which clogs the thruster plumbing and disables them. But the scary thing is that the heat necessary to do that to teflon would also potentially be enough to boil the hypergolic fuel itself inside the fuel lines.

When you heat hypergolic fuel up enough it will spontaneously ignite. It’s got its own oxidizer in it, essentially. Which means those thrusters could well be bombs that could go off if they’re fired too long.

The way they’re talking about moving the unmanned capsule away from ISS, slowly and gently, it sounds like they’re concerned Starliner could literally explode next to the station. That would be, to put it mildly, very very bad.

If any of this is true then this is going to be a colossal scandal. This is Starliner’s third test flight, it’s absolutely incredible that Boeing wouldn’t have figured this out by now and that NASA let them get away with such a shoddy program.