Posts by Flocke Kroes

Skyrora circles Orbex wreckage as UK rocket rival heads for administration

Re: Skyrora

For me it is: "All aboard the Skylark!" (yes IAVO.)

Re: This would be an interesting post-mortem

Wikipedia shows a total of £91.1M + up to €169M of funding. Falcon 1 development cost between $90M and $100M. The DoD was desperate for an alternative to ULA and helped SpaceX at every opportunity. NASA has an incredible range of test facilities and expertise to help aerospace start-ups. The quantity of money was sufficient to create a small rocket in the US. There would be a significant cost to not being based in the US but I have no idea how much.

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Just fork it

If you think the maintainer of an open source project mistakenly rejected your LLM's patch then fork the project. Demonstrate the superiority of your stewardship by reviewing a ton of AI slop yourself.

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

Re: Didn't he just put all his eggs into a different basket

The new basket is the upcoming SpaceX IPO. The half built giga factory in Boca Chica is massively oversized for Starlink. The size made sense for Mars but that adds no value to potential shareholders. A giga factory dependent pipe dream is required to maximise the share value at the IPO. Here it is without pointing at the flies in the ointment:

A huge AI training facility in Lunar orbit.

AI training requires lots of internal bandwidth but not so much to the rest of the world. Fully trained AIs can be downloaded to Earth and run there on smaller data centres. The surface of the Moon has an inconvenient 14 day day/night cycle. This can be avoided by going to Lunar orbit. Data centres in Earth orbit trash astronomy. They risk making access to space difficult with a Kessler cascade. They will eventually fall back to Earth and pollute the upper atmosphere. All these problems disappear by going to Lunar orbit. Launching giant data centres from Earth is impractical. Aircraft and rockets already contest the sky near Florida with only a couple of launches per week. LEO data centres require launches every hour. Launching data centres from the Moon does not conflict with air traffic. The Moon has plenty of silicon. Launching from the Moon does not require rockets so the tyranny of the rocket equation can be eliminated. Rockets are huge because the have to take their own propellant with them. A mass driver on the Moon only needs to launch payload and is completely re-usable.

Now for a big bottle of flies:

Radiation. Lunar dust. AI is a bubble inflated to busting point. Non-existent local workforce. Building a chip factory on Earth is extremely difficult. Multiply that by at least 1000 for the Moon. A Kessler cascade could make access to the Moon difficult. Plenty more reasons I have not thought of yet.

A data centre in Lunar orbit launched from the Moon may well be physically possible but the technology is about as distant as fusion power. The economics are terrible now, may improve but the economics of data centres on Earth are not static either. The good news is that huge problems have never got in the way of investors showering Musk with money before.

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Some random sporting event

I was thinking of ski-boxing to access higher minor version numbers. Will the Linux kernel be complete at version 20.20?

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Re: landing mass

Early promises included a landing payload mass of 50,000kg. The heaviest module I found with a quick search was Kibō: 24,200. Even allowing for possible extras added on to Kibō, packing peanuts and promises being larger than reality there is still some margin.

Cheaper source

My personal preference is to allocate the bulk of funding on creating a future rather than a museum with a placard: "Here lies the remains of the US space program". I do see value in museum exhibits that get children interested in becoming the next generation of a functional space program. After the ISS burns and crashes there will be plenty of redundant kit current the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory: ISS modules, an HTV, ATV, Dragon and Cygnus. That sounds like the basis of an interesting museum exhibit with much reduced cost.

The only good thing I see about this "What if we boost the ISS to a higher orbit" report is that NASA must have already done the work before deciding that de-orbiting was a better option.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: reducing solar incidence on Earth

Orbital data centre fantasies often involve sun synchronous orbit. The satellites never enter Earth's shadow so there is no down time / need for batteries. Likewise the satellites never cast a shadow on Earth.

If you want to global cooling wash these fantasies then move them to Sun-Earth L1. They would cast a shadow on Earth continuously. They would not end up burning in Earth's upper atmosphere. A Kessler cascade would not affect things in Earth orbit. The down sides are latency, comms power, the cost of getting there and even more difficult on site maintenance. Those problems are like all the other space data centre problems: no need to look for solutions until after investors have been fleeced.

UK to properly probe xAI to test if its revolting robo-smut generator broke the law

Re: Idiot.

Musk's real skill: not getting clobbered by the SEC for stock market manipulation and securities fraud. It is almost as if he had a presidential mandate to destroy any part of the government that would investigate his activities.

Musk later used his X account to describe Sánchez as “a tyrant and a traitor” and a “fascist totalitarian.”

Why can't UK politicians earn such a ringing endorsement?

CSAM on X is no accident. It is Musk's deliberate policy.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Not just cooling

nVidia currently uses about 10% of TMSC's capacity. Supplying 2 million x H200 to China requires nVidia to renegotiate their deal with TSMC to get enough chips. Running an H200 requires very approximately 1KW. Launching 100GW/year requires 100 million x H200. nVidia will have to book at least 500% of TMSC's capacity.

Re: Making sense of data centres in space

The key point you are missing is that data centres in space are not something you build to print money. They are things to promise for the future and investment fund managers give him our pension funds now.

Re: afterlife

As a TESCREAL believer, Musk thinks he can become immortal by transferring his consciousness into a computer. The delusion has some self consistency: he thinks he really can keep the money beyond the death of his body. He hopes that going to orbit will keep his hardware safe from vandalism by hordes of starving poor.

If this dystopian future actually becomes reality perhaps we will be saved by ransomware scammers.

Re: In other words

I tried finding what percentage of SpaceX Musk had before and after the merger. If the numbers are available by search engine they are buried deep in a huge pile of useless links. I expect Musk owns a higher percentage of Xai than he does SpaceX (different sources range from 40 to 47% value but about 72% votes). The two companies had many share holders in common. By massively over valuing Xai its share holders increase their share of SpaceX at a bargain price, diluting the value of SpaceX to other investors. Some of the numbers are here. Has anyone seen the other numbers needed to test my hypothesis?

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Data/Instructions

It gets worse. Documentary / fiction? Professional journalist / random fool on the internet? Random fool on the internet / politician?

Unlike AI, humans can interact directly with the real world and test claims by experiment. Even then humans struggle with satire. Even without deliberate AI poison it is amazing that AI can often be near enough right to fool people who are not experts on the topic of their output.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: why is it still news

Musk's specific purpose at Tesla is to make daft promises that get repeated by news sites. The tactic still bumps the share price which is far more important to shareholders than manufacturing or selling/renting things.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

FSD only "works" with clear lane markings. For me that is a 20 minute walk from home to an autonomous swasticar. Longer in the direction of my most common journey.

Re: Needs money

The plan to get the money is a SpaceX IPO around the middle of this year. I really hope Musk commits so thoroughly to AI that he loses control of SpaceX when the AI bubble bursts. A more likely scenario is that after AI fails to make money for a few more years he will promise investors some other new shiny tech he cannot deliver. Is there a limit to the number of times you can fail before investors catch on?

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: Always bad decision...

The phrase I still hear is that engineers lack the background to make business decisions. If management really believe that it is time to demonstrate your business decision making ability by taking yours elsewhere.

Re: It's all down to politics

In the initial design the SRBs were short and too wide to be transported by road or rail. The intent was to manufacture them locally at a purpose built factory. Politics selected Utah and forced a re-design to long, thin and in segments.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Re: If they are freeing up jobs

The important feature of "simple" solutions is that they have been tried before so we already know the results: Kicking out one immigrant does not free one job. It destroys more jobs than it frees. If you get rid of the immigrants the remaining labour pool do not match their work in quality, quantity or price. All the more valuable work is hindered by lack of resources and becomes less competitive. Those businesses suffer then beg the immigrants to return.

Just the Browser is just the beginning: Why breaking free means building small

Re: A network of trust

Sounds like one intent of Mastadon.

Deshittyfication!

I have been a regular visitor to NPR since some billionaire twit started feuding with them on his antisocial media site. An excellent source of news but the front page takes ages to load. A list of small websites took me to NPR's text only site. It loads instantly and has just the headlines in chronological order so I can read down and stop when I recognise one from my last visit. (The Register has something similar.)

This has deleted at least 15 seconds of irritating boredom from each day of my life.

Thank you for this article.

China’s Deepin Linux gets a slick desktop - and, yes, built-in AI

Re: telemetry

Next release: The off switch for telemetry has been removed because nobody in our data set used it.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: IF?

Last time I checked, Teslas still required supervision to drive through Boring company tunnels. That shows the level of confidence they have in their own work. If Teslas really are roaming the streets unsupervised I expect the NTSB will publish accident reports exclusively on X which will not show them to the rest of the world.

Child safety or age-gating for all? UK social media ban plan draws fire

Different approaches required

Perhaps the problem is not the age of the users but the effective maturity of the platforms. I would be happy to ban them all until they grow up.

Another approach would be to teach critical thinking in schools. Imagine if children could spot the majority of lies from social media, scammers and politicians. Of course this has to be limited to children. Can't allow such skills among people elligible to vote.

Price, battery life, performance – that's how you sell PCs

Re: I want optical drives back.

I switched to USB DVD a long time ago so lack of built in discs with laptops does not bother me. I use it to format shift DVDs. I would like to use M-Disc for backup but the price is still 8x a hard disk and I would need an autochanger.

NASA's Artemis II Moon rocket arrives at the launch pad

The new heat shield manufacturing procedure for A1 was to save money. The new materials for A2 are less toxic. Testing the changes with crew saves time and money. Lots of time and lots of money. The extensive testing of the new heat shield cost time and money. I am very glad Isaacman arranged for the results of those tests to be made available to the people outside NASA with the knowledge to understand them. I would still prefer the cost of SLS and launch rate to be improved to the point where another uncrewed test launch is politically and financially acceptable.

Re: Surface suits

"Space suit" is a broad term. The suits for Orion and HLS are flight suits and have very different requirements to Axiom's Lunar EVA suit. There are good reasons for Axiom's suit to be different. Incompatible flight suits for Soyuz, (Shenzou?), Dragon, Starliner and Orion have varying quality excuses. I think Starship HLS and Crew Dragon probably use the same suits. No idea about Dreamchaser and Blue Moon. I think a part of the problem is Orion is cost plus and Dragon is firm fixed price. Requiring compatibility would either have costs a few billion extra on the price of Orion or a decade or two of delays to Dragon. Probably both. Even aiming for compatibility between Dragon and Starliner would have involved NASA having to referee years of arguing between Boeing and SpaceX.

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

Age verification is just complexity without value. Respond to Trump's Greenland tariffs with advertising bans for Facebook and Twitter and block the sites so advertising has no value.Trump squeals like a stuck pig when his financial supporters are targeted.

Bring back sortition.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

Re: Don't shoot the messenger

If there is something I do not like about closed source software I can:

• Put up with it.
• Give money to a monopoly supplier and hope they fix the problem without creating new ones.
• Try something else which may have different problems.

If there is something I do not like about open source software I can:

• File a bug report and hope someone fixes it for free at some random point in the future.
• Fix it myself.
• Hire any competent programmer to fix it for me.
• Try something else - which may have different problems.

The systematic abuse comes from lock in to a monopoly. Closed source software does not improve from the user's point of view without competition. Instead changes are made with the intention to make "try something else" impractical. Open source software does improve with time but the rate depends on whether someone needs the improvement enough to dedicate time or money. Any attempt at making abusive changes or fees results in users trying something else.

Years ago Microsoft tried saying open source was used by hackers and criminals. They stopped because they were effectively saying (a certain flavour of) software security professionals thought Linux was overwhelmingly better than Windows.

Congress throws NASA a lifeline, leaves Mars sample mission to die in the dust

Re: Atmospheric science?

Congress see sense? I am not sure that can happened. What they can see is a threat to the primary purpose of their existence: spending money. What is the point in arguing for days about whose campaign contributors get big government contracts if the president snatches money from those projects and allocates it according to his whims? Congress are fine with cutting off food and medicine for poor people. SLS contractor welfare cheques are a different matter entirely. Suddenly congress grows a backbone.

The hope was that given time the technology would become cheaper. That has certainly happened for launch from Earth but not from Mars. An integrated sample collection and return mission gets you headlines first at the cost of not being able to pick the most interesting samples to return.

Re: China?

China's Mars sample return mission will collect samples from the landing site or nearby. They would only be able to collect one of the NASA/ESA samples if they aimed for one and the lander arrived spot on. The NASA/ESA plan included two helicopters to retrieve scattered samples and deliver them to the ascent vehicle at the landing site. The US plan is more ambitious and would likely target more interesting samples. The Chinese are making steady progress and would likely get samples back first even if the US government funded a mission. The US plan looked as likely to be completed within budget and on schedule as constellation - even before NASA's budget was threatened.

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Well that was a damp squip

Why not promise Mexico will pay for it?

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Re: investor litigation

In theory there are limits to the lies CEOs can tell when they try to attract investors. It would make sense for some kind of penalty for saying you have a working prototype electric truck when all you have is a video of a truck without a power train rolling down a long hill. Claiming you can summon your FSD car from the far end of the car park should also have consequences if the promotional video has lots of prangs edited out.

In practice first round investors like convincing liars. They are useful for attracting replacement investors if the project turns out to be a bust.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: Churlish

My background is physics so I know what gravitational potential is. I checked your link anyway. Now you have me convinced... you add random links to your posts instead of links that support your opinion.

Churlish

Given enough time I am certain Lunar tourism will take off. This one-man-band might sell some reservations but he lacks the knowledge of an enthusiastic amateur and does not come remotely close to the skill set required to actually build anything on the Moon. The schedule is so rapid that it would require the intelligence of a president to be fooled. I think that is rather the point of the white paper. Skyler Chan does not want to waste time courting investors who will spot a non-starter before parting with money.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

Dark patterns

Imagine if this became popular. That would create a large financial incentive to find a pattern that causes Gemini to sign you up for Amazon Prime or worse.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: Here's a thought

The good news is that (so far) AI's cannot hold copyright. On top of that, AI output can include materials copyrighted by others. Distributing AI output may leave you open to litigation from the copyright holder. Even for something trivial like rangeCheck the cost of a legal defence can massively outweigh the cost of a large software project. AI image generation can output trademarks opening another frontier for getting sued.

If your query includes (other people's) personal information such as medical records that query may be used for training data. A similar query from someone else may result in output incorporating that personal information and another opportunity to get sued.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

cancelling Prime account turns it into a simple dumb coffeemaker

I am shocked. Shocked I tell you. Smart devices must not serve any customer useful service if the subscription gets cancelled. A simple button to incinerate unauthorised coffee beans is tolerable but really such functionality should be automatic with the option to turn it off with the premium rate subscription.

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

The other perspective is that the employees did such an amazing job Twitter continued to function despite Musk's best efforts.

Re: Why

Faecal matter. The poop auto reply was widely reported (eg: NPR) because professional journalists give people and companies an opportunity to comment before publishing an article about them.

If you have to perform an experiment like that, use a photo of yourself.

Try posting a link to a video ICE committing murder* on X and see it it gets censored.

* Warning: Like Clockwork Orange. Seeing it once is thought provoking. I will not watch it twice.

Re: someone [...] trying to fix the 'flaws'

Any of the online safety and regulatory compliance employees that did not leave on day 1 were fired shortly afterwards. I have confidence nothing effective will be done until after fines are collected.

Re: Why

The auto reply with pooh emoji software is broken.

New carbon capture tech could save us from datacenter doom

Capture and then what?

Turn to plastics: it is cheaper / less wasteful to turn oil into plastics without burning it first.

Making fuel: requires more energy than the amount released by burning the oil in the first place.

In some distant dream future I can imagine turning CO2 into plastics because there is no oil industry. Likewise I can imagine using nuclear/solar/wind to turn CO2 into aircraft fuel because that might be easier than flying batteries or nuclear reactors.