Posts by Dom 3 430 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"We are seeking views from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations".
We, the purchasers, are irrelevant.
I buy bottled water for my coffee machine (else it dies in six months).
The bottles now have EU-mandated attached caps. So much for
taking back control...
It doesn't take much to enter "thrust ssc cockpit view" into a well-known video site and you will see that certainly in 1997 there was a *hell* of a lot of vehicle control involved to ensure that it didn't just turn into a massive fireball. Perhaps these days such a beast might have a bit of computer aided steering but the rules don't allow it: http://bloodhound1.efar.co.uk/project/car/controls/steering
"The English Electric Lightning was a supersonic fighter aircraft developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the British aircraft manufacturer English Electric. It served as an interceptor for the Royal Air Force (RAF) and was known for its impressive speed and climb rate.
The Lightning was capable of reaching speeds of over Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) and had a unique vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability."
Instead of trying to show that LLMs are intelligent, it's far easier to show that they are *not*.
Some brave people have been making chatGPT generated recipes - "tastes like you've scooped out the garbage disposal" was one comment (OSLT).
My first go with chatGPT was to ask it about shortcomings in the database schema of a certain popular blogging engine. Plausible guff ensued, but certainly not the sort of insight that would come from anybody that knows anything about it. Why? For one reason - it's trained on a squillion blog posts written by people who don't know about - possibly couldn't even understand - the flaws in said schema.
They don't know anything, they don't *think* anything, they don't do anything except in response to a prompt, they certainly don't go "I'm bored, I wonder if I can find a neater proof of Fermat's Last". Or "hey, I think I'll hack the Pentagon and drop nukes in random places for fun".
I am aware that I am repeating myself but I think it's a point worth hammering home even if I am mostly preaching to the converted.
It's in the maths. I've said it before but here goes again... if you want to make sure that the thing as a whole will last the initial mission duration with 95% probability, then each subsystem (let's say six of them) needs a 99% chance of getting there. In which case there's an 80% chance (whatever) of lasting ten (whatever) times longer. Particularly with the rovers - jammed wheel? Drive backwards.
Obvs helicopter more of a go / no-go situation.
Still, it's marvellous that a technology demonstrator has been turned into a useful instrument.
I've yet to hear of an LLM that does anything except in response to a prompt. They don't "think" anything, they don't "know" anything.
The problem is the human operators believing the plausible nonsense that is produced, and deciding to try and actually make that recipe that combines six random ingredients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAcnAlOYNrQ
"tastes like a garbage disposal".
In Spain, no such thing as a maiden name - women do not change their surnames (and why should they?). So in general use you use the first (your father's first) and if being more formal add the second (your mother's first). So many systems there assumed that my middle name was my surname. But my favourite was signing up with Renfe (railways) for a Points card - I got a PDF to download and print which was in the name of... John Smith NULL
Apple has had some flops, but on the other hand it has a history of getting things right as well. Most notably with the "pad" computer format which
was being developed back in the 80s by all sorts - Active Book Company, Apple itself (with the Newton), even Atari (STpad). Finally Apple launched
the iPhone by which time battery and CPU tech had caught up. Consumer VR has a *long* history as well - I had a T shirt in 89 / 90 which had a "virtual" spider
on it and the words "reality sucks - get virtual" (OSLT). Maybe this time?
(NB: *consumer* VR: about the same time as the T shirt people started to say things like "wouldn't this be a great way of training fighter pilots?" to
which the military response was "off the record, yes it is".)
IIRC and usual disclaimers.
I've said it before with respect to the rovers: if you want a 98% chance (or whatever) of the system as a whole achieving the initial goal, then each subsystem needs to be engineered to have a 99.5% chance (or whatever) of lasting that long. Given that, it's quite likely that it will continue way beyond the initial mission. Particularly if it can carry on with a failure - e.g. dragging a broken wheel behind it. A helicopter pretty much needs everything to be working, though. It's still *very* impressive that a technology demonstrator has turned into an important scientific tool.
It's "unidentified anomalous phenomenon", and therefore covers a $thing observed underwater as well as $things in the air.
I'm surprised this article hasn't trotted out the infamous Pentagon videos - gofast, gimbal, etc.
I watched one Youtube video about one of these showing how the HUD info (speed, bank, etc) combined with a bit of maths was more than sufficient to show that the UAP was *entirely* consistent with a weather balloon at lower altitude. I didn't bother with the rest.
The *real* mystery is how come the Pentagon's boffins couldn't do this and end up getting shown up by some random Youtuber.
Obvs., lack of mobile phone vids and pics is cos the visitors from Tannhäuser Gate disable electronics in the vicinity. Unsurprising, cars conking out and so on are a common theme in reports of close encounters of the second kind and are in fact part of what classifies it as "second kind".
I suspect most commentards are like me - would *love* to see something dead weird, but utterly unconvinced that anything's ever happened that couldn't be explained - in normal terrestrial terms - with sufficient data.
If you want a giggle, find a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spaceships_of_Ezekiel, the cover of which is a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
"For spy flights we can do that much more cheapily, and with zero risk using satellites" - the entire SR71 fleet (32 of them) cost a total of one billion dollars. If we assume that's 1966 dollars, multiply by ten. One KH-11 satellite costs about 3 billion. Satellites are nowhere near as flexible as aircraft - they are pretty predictable and if you are Terry Taliban you know what time of day to stay in your cave.
"Concorde [...] never made a profit" - BA certainly ran it at an *operating* profit, once they'd found out that the passengers had no idea what their tickets cost.
Everyone seems to be treating it as an either / or.
One use case for electric motors in airliners is getting the aircraft from the ramp to the runway - by driving the wheels directly. Which would save on fuel and dispense with the need for a tug to back the aircraft away from the gate.
Another use case is to provide additional thrust during take-off / go-around, allowing smaller, lighter turbines to take care of everything once over 200 knots or so.
Obvs, the lunar timezone will be UTC, as it is on ISS. It's the only one that will get universal agreement. The Chinese will do their own thing but until the Middle Kingdom finally re-establishes itself as the pre-eminent power (I'll be dead, not sure about the offspring) they'll play along when talking to other nations.
The headline is misleading - the issue is not about timezones, it's about establishing what the time is when clocks run at different rates.
"You can read up on Relativity (can't be *that* hard, it is over a century old now!) " - we may have a century of literature to read but that doesn't make it any easier to comprehend.
Maxwell's equations are older and arguably harder to derive (or remember). And actually more relevant to earth-bound life.
We've had two *thousand* years of argument over what is now mostly known as "Trigger's broom", but was previously known as the "Ship of Theseus".
And Plutarch was probably re-hashing a pub argument that had been going on for a fair while. My point being that something being old doesn't make it settled.
Apollo astronauts *did* receive geological training. I believe with some initial reluctance but if you go here
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a15/a15.spur.html
and scroll down to 145:41 there's no denying that these two fighter jocks are genuinely excited about
the rock they've just found.
Neil Armstrong and Elliot See were both former military. But unlike the rest they were former military at the time of their missions, allowing NASA to bill them as civilian astronauts.
Of astronauts, groups 1 and 2 all had test pilot experience. Group 3 had some non test pilots - as experience on military fast jets was now sufficient. Group 4 ("The Scientists") had two (out of six) with no military background, of which Schmitt was the first in space. Of cosmonauts, Tereshkova was the first civilian - at the time of selection. By flight she'd been commissioned.
"A gymnast might be a good fit". In pre-Mercury days NASA considered recruiting from all sorts - circus performers even. Going with test pilots might seem obvious in hindsight, and I believe that the fact that they all already had security clearance was one of the factors.
"smaller people with lower calorific requirements" was a nod to the double X chromosome.
Quite. If I were on that mission because of my "internal plumbing" or pigmentation I'd be rightly pissed off that I had not obtained it on merit.
Plenty of qualified candidates of all sorts.
Requirements have changed. The quick thinking, physical strength [1] (etc.) of the 1960s is not needed for current LEO missions.
Rather a calm procedural approach.
If they / we do a Mars mission this may be required again. OTOH a long-term mission like that is not a great fit for testosterone-ridden hulking fighter jocks. Maybe smaller people with lower calorific requirements with good social skills?
[1] Ed White who made the first US space walk was *very* fit. So they didn't realise just how difficult it was to do it. And obvs., being a jock, he would have made it sound easy.
These US Navy videos are not "hotly disputed" - they are thoroughly debunked. For instance the "go fast" video has been shown to be entirely consistent with it being a weather balloon - using only the information on the screen itself (speed, altitude and so on) and a bit of maths. Why the US Navy couldn't do this themselves is the *real* mystery.
Wordpress is *great*. All those bugs and problems I've fixed, the hacked sites I've repaired - serious earner.
Yes, unmaintained plugins are a great source of trouble but the core code is still seriously, uh, sub-optimal.
I was doing a site migration recently and found duplicate usernames. Because there is no unique constraint on the field, and it checks for duplicates programmatically, if you're getting hosed by some sort of bot you *will* hit a race condition and ping! duplicate usernames. I could scarce believe that such a widely-used and developed piece of software could still contain such a beginner's mistake.
I thought maybe this was a legacy issue - no, the default schema *still* does not have a unique constraint on usernames. Unique keys are used in *other* tables so there's no stupid excuse that they are trying to support a MySQL version released in 1963.
I was looking for a driver for one, and typed zip.com into the browser. Oops.
IIRC it was a gay dating site. Nothing there now.
Anyway, I once went into a small company as a freelancer to help a mate who had a part-time IT contract there to do some sort of systems audit. We discovered that there was one individual who'd clock in very early, and then spend the 30 minutes before anyone else turned up looking at VNSFW material. I think we decided it wasn't our problem.
And then there was the director of another small company who asked me to look at his teenage son's laptop...
At least none of them were MPs.
"The people who worked out you could land a thing the size of a car on Mars using a crane turn out to have thought of other things too"
Not just *could*, but that it was actually the *best* way. There's a good video out there with interviews with the engineers involved, where they explain that they were *constantly* asking themselves whether or not the sky crane was both feasible and the best engineering solution.
Would any of our commentards^W regular posters claim to be able to have come up with, and justified, the sky crane idea?
Extending solar panel life on Mars is, we think, much simpler than getting there in the first place. But maybe it is not.
The idle speculation is entertaining; there's still the infinitesimal possibility that someone here has an insight [1] into the problem that has escaped everyone else.
[1] Pun intended.
Yes, we (as part of the Acorn ecosystem) had a bunch of Windows machines for work and a bunch of RiscOS machines for testing etc. When Windows 95 arrived it all looked very familiar!
The RiscOS thing I found most irksome was in fact the scaled scrollbars - brilliant to a point but when editing a very large file, targeting the scrollbar demanded pixel accuracy.
One thing not mentioned is the file format consistency. E.g. there was one bitmap format across all programs.
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