Posts by imanidiot

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

The structure basically rolls on 2 rails on either side of the vertical supports under the launch platform and has a large blast shield fitted on the flame trench side that prevents the exhaust gasses from damaging the structure when in the retracted position. If the platform isn't locked down this shield basically acts like a giant sail and pushes on the whole platform and pulls it from it's alcove and into the flame trench.

There's more photos of the construction and damage here: https://russianspaceweb.com/baikonur_r7_31.html#cabin and more info on the service platform itself is here: https://russianspaceweb.com/vostochny_soyuz_ko.html

You are correct that taking a "spare" from anywhere else is basically as much work as just building a new one at Baikonur.

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

AI company making wildly unrealistic claims and pretending it's entirely normal?

Say it ain't so! How can that be? Surely nobody would expect that!

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Oh dear

That's a very significant event and one that is bound to set them back for a LONG time. The way it's peeled open seems more indicative of a materials problem or a manufacturing quality problem than an engineering problem. It's not a "clean" pop along a defined seam or section, and it's in an area that should afaik not have anything strange going on in terms of structural loads (ie, easy to calculate and engineer for). If this is indeed the case, fixing those issues is going to take a lot of time because it likely means EVERYTHING they've built is now suspect and if they can't verify what EXACTLY went wrong and inspect existing boosters for that defect they have to actually start building a new booster from the very start and throw out everything they have

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: Make a stand

Stories like this is why I am so opposed to concepts like "lean" and JIT production when it comes to low volume production work. Certain persons at my job also keep pushing these concepts, entirely failing to grasp that when you're building 4 (or even 40) of something a year, concepts of how you organize your logistics and production lines are entirely different and sometimes stocks are necessary when lead times are measured in years. Similarly numbnuts throwing out test equipement because of "lean" and "clean desk policy" and "but you never use it"... Yeah, sure it's rare, but when I need to bypass something I used to have the cables necessary to bypass basically anything to anything else. You threw that away, so now we get to play the "swap parts until it works" game. Womp, womp.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

High speed rail is easy.

Easy if you don't have to worry about an existing rail network, don't have to worry about buying out peoples property to put in new lines, don't have to deal with Victorian era infrastructure and monumental bridges and buildings, don't have to deal with taking into account noise and other issues for those living in the area, don't have to worry about cities being close together and necessitating lots of start-stop running. In other words, high speed rail is easy(/ier) if you're not in Europe.

With all due respect to China, achievements like this are mostly down to being able to build the modern rail infrastructure in a way that most of Europe simply can't do and the US refuses (mostly for reasons only the US seems to comprehend).

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

Re: Blue Origin?

Physics has a lot to say about what shape you can make that opening and how large you can make it. They had a lot of issues in earlier launches with the skin around the opening deforming and jamming the door. Iirc they went through like 5 different iterations of the door mechanism and door shape and they still rivetted on additional strengthening plates around the opening after assembly of the V2 airframes had already more or less finished (indicating they had figured out that whatever they had designed was not up to snuff)

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

You are presuming that Steve in this story actually had to make do with sticks and duct tape. When it's highly likely that he DID have far better tools and materials available to him if he and his boss had bothered following proper protocols. I get the idea of "this doesn't seem to be doing anything, let's rip it out" but that's just not how it works in doing any sort of work in IT. Just ripping it out is the "big clubs, thick eyebrows, neanderthal" way of doing things. The only PROPER decision at that point is to leave it alone, take extensive photographs, do whatever other work you can, leave and then finally figure out what that thing is and whether you can remove it. If, after going through the proper process, it's decided it can go, you get another trip to the CoLo (hurray) and if THEN the SHTF you have the defence of: "we went through the proper process and no-one could tell us it was a problem".

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: Doh..

I think I would dislike the aesthetic of having a bright yellow slider there, but at the very least they could put a red dot below the opening when the slider is covering the camera so that you can tell it's misaligned at a glance.

Tesla on the wrong tracks with Fail Self Driving, Senators worry

Re: Not the first time I've seen a video like that

But since those don't exist and they need to get from L2+ where they are now to L4 or L5, they DO need to implement that default behaviour now. That's the whole point.

Autopilot or FSD

The confusion seems to continue. FSD and "Autopilot" are not the same thing. You can have Autopilot without FSD. (The confusion is entirely of Tesla's own making and they don't seem too interested in actually solving the issue)

Re: Not the first time I've seen a video like that

Basically ALL your described scenarios would be perfect for the default behaviour of: The automation stops the car safely before the crossing. If the human wants to proceed before the automation, they can take over.

Re: Not the first time I've seen a video like that

".....did no-one program in a way for the car to recognise a rail crossing, given they're a little more binary in rights of way than normal road junctions?"

No, because Tesla seems to be relying a lot on Machine Learning and using data feeding back from it's cars on the road, rather than traditional "programming" for specific scenarios. On the one hand the idea is that this should allow better flexibility as the FSD "software" can re-apply learned behaviour to other scenarios but on the other hand this means that scenarios that should be obvious to human and synthetic drivers alike are not in the training data, because they don't occur very often and when they do the automation is often disabled so less far less training data makes it onto Teslas servers.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: silly question time

Idiocy, mostly. Misplaced "Pride", stupidity, lack of morals, superiority complex... take your pick.

The pricks that put this into law think Houston is somehow "more deserving" of displaying a real spaceshuttle than the Smithsonian institute (probably the worlds top class collection of historically significant air- and spacecraft, Kennedy Space Center (where the shuttles launched from) or California (where the shuttles were built). And they deemed the one in the Smithsonian easiest to steal through law-wrangling. They claim Houston was "snubbed" for not getting a real shuttle to display (even though the plan submitted to receive a shuttle at the time was extremely lackluster and lacked any sort of broad support even in Houston or amongst Texas politicians, whereas both California and Florida made very clear and thorough bids. Sending one to the Smithsonian was basically a foregone conclusion, what with aforementioned world class collection and conservation expertise).

It saddens me that I have not been able to visit the Smithsonian (and especially the F. Udvar-Hazy center) before the US went to shit, and because I have no interest in visiting the US now I might not get a chance to see Discovery in an unmolested state. I would refuse to visit Houston if they succeeded in forcing the move of Discovery and damaging it to do so.

Re: If it's too big to move...

Whatever they send must have carried at least one astronaut into orbit (might be astronaut(s), can't be arsed to look up the wording right now), so X-37 doesn't fit the bill. An Apollo, Starliner or Dragon capsule would however.

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

If you'd bother to do even a basic modicum of research (or bothered reading other posts here) you'd find that it was FLOWN there on the back of a specialised 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (both of which are now decommissioned and no longer airworthy). The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center where Discovery now resides is right next to Dulles International Airport and even has a dedicated taxiway from the apron at the end of runway 1R to the center. That air transport is no longer an option, hence the need for barges. Please stop being intentionally dense

There's 3 space flown shuttles (Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour) and one test article that has flown aerodynamic flights (Enterprise).

And yes, from a "conserve an artifact in the best way we can" standpoint it's absolutely vital that we avoid all damage we can. Any damage we do now leads to further deterioration down the line. This is simply how museum preservation best practices work. The heat shield tiles are fragile, and get more fragile with age. Breaking some and stressing all of them now will near certainly result in more of them breaking in the future. It doesn't matter that the general "plebs" can't touch or "go into" the artifact (that's what full size replicas like Space Center Houston's "Space Shuttle Independence" are for). Damage doesn't make it "not the space shuttle" but it simply means damage. Damage that cannot be properly repaired. Damage that will remain for the rest of the lifetime of the object. Making sure that we keep Discovery (and other shuttles) in as good a condition as possible NOW means that we can keep coming back to them to better understand their construction in the future. No, the documentation we have alone is not sufficient for that.

I get what you're saying but if you consider Enterprise "good enough" then Houston already HAS a shuttle that is good enough. Independence is a full size high-fidelity mockup that's now sitting on top of the SCA on display at the Space Center Houston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Independence). Anecdotally from museum docents 90% of visitors don't know or care that it's a replica.

Re: ......Airship.........

IIRC, widebeams, while wide, are still often categorized as "narrowboats"..

It was flown in from it's current location on the back of the original, purpose built Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (Modified Boeing 747) and very slowly and painstakingly moved from the airport to it's current location. Reversing THAT move would be possible, but once it's gotten to the airport it'll have nowhere to go. Both SCAs have been decommissioned and are not in any condition to fly. The one in Palmdale (Joe Davies Heritage Airpark) might be able to be made to fly again, but it was used as a parts source to keep SOPHIA flying (now also at the Heritage Airpark) so I don't see that happening. The other one is (ironically I think) already in Houston, with a replica shuttle on it's back

The problem is that the Shuttle would thus have to move to somewhere they can put it on a barge to ship it over water to Houston. And there is no route capable of taking a fully assembled, intact, shuttle from the Smithsonian to anywhere a large enough barge could get.

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

My understanding is that they'd be able to get a barge into Clear lake, and from there it's about a mile to Space Center Houston or any other location in the Johnson Space Flight Center along a very wide parkway. Getting the shuttle into Houston isn't the problem. Getting it out of the Smithsonian is.

The problem is that they clearly stated their intentions when putting it in the bill, but the regulations don't allow to make it apply to one specific object, so they had to make it as vague as they could in order for it to get into an appropriations bill. Now that they have this bill in effect, they just need to get their already positioned "yes man" NASA administrator Sean Duffy to say they want to move Discovery and there you go. It was very clear they want to get a real space shuttle in Houston (God knows why) and since they failed to make a good proposal when Shuttles were actually being distributed (their offer/plan was actually BOTTOM of the list, even after several other sites that didn't get a shuttle) they now have to resort to stealing one. There's 3 options:

Discovery is in the Smithsonian (where it should be) and is the best preserved in an institution known for being capable of taking extremely good care of such large artifacts and world class conservation.

Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The place the shuttles launched from. There's no way to deny that this is a far more important location to the Shuttle program than the place the astronauts trained and where they talked to the shuttles.

Endeavour is at the California Science Center. California historically also has a lot of strong links with the shuttle program. It's where the orbiters were built.

Taking Atlantis from the Kennedy Space Center would be... unexplainable. It's claims to "having a shuttle" are FAR stronger than Houston.

Taking Endeavour from California would be extremely difficult because it was flown there on a Shuttle Transport Aircraft and those no longer fly (funnily enough one of those STAs is AT HOUSTON with a replica shuttle on top of it and anecdotally 95% of visitors can't tell the difference or don't care about the difference). Transporting Atlantis from California would thus mean a very lengthy and slow trip south through Los Angeles to Long Beach or Terminal Island where it gets loaded on a barge. Then another very long and slow trip south through the panama canal, back up north to the Gulf of Mexico and into Houston. Where presumably an entirely new building will have to be built to house whatever Shuttle they get.

That leaves Discovery. Taking it from the Smithsonian is downright sacrilege and will mean doing irreparable damage to the orbiter but it's the only one that's both slightly excusable (to those idiots that think Houston getting a shuttle is more important than preserving the artifact) and slightly doable (as long as you don't mind doing irreparable damage to the artifact).

The Shuttle at Intrepid (Enterprise) isn't "real" as it's a test article that never launched to space. It is thus not eligible under this bill.

The problem is that the current NASA administrator (Sean Duffy) is in the pockets of the Trump admin, so he's going to "yes man" anything they put in front of him when it comes to these outrageous plans. That prick is not going to go along with any plan to send anything other than a spaceshuttle, scuppering the whole thing.

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

right... Good luck with that in the US

"travel on bike lanes, roads, side walks, and driveways"

So... Roads and maybe sidewalks here and there for the majority of time knowing how US cities are usually laid out. US cities are famously unfriendly to anything but car traffic. Something like this would work a lot better in places like the Netherlands that actually have walking and cycling infrastructure, but then if I need anything from the shops it's a 2 minute walk. 5 if I'm less mobile. So something like this would be DOA too. And they're competing against bicycles with a human rider who can do a lot of the logistics at the distribution point for quicker turnarounds (and those companies are struggling already too and will likely/hopefully die off as soon as any sort of economic hard times hit again).

Tile trackers are a stalker's dream, say Georgia Tech researchers

No real surprise there

A company that clearly hadn't given ANY thought to the stalking options their tech could provide continues to not give any thought to the stalking options their tech provides

Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

Re: So, Afghanistan is cut off from the Internet

Unfortunately, random statistics being random, the history of mankind has shown that your prediction for the collapse of the Taliban is unlikely to actually happen. Make enough women pregnant enough times and statistically a relevant amount of the babies will make it to adulthood.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: Message to CEOs : it's hopeless

My boss made all of us sign a "my WFH spot is suitable for my needs and I will not sue the company for my own failure to provide comfortable working conditions" waiver during the whole COVID thing and basically told us that if we felt we couldn't work comfortably at home, we'd just have to come to the office (with proper protective measures in place).

SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs... and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

Looking forward to the swift rescue

If they can succeed it will be an impressive step forward in on orbit servicing and boosting.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: There are many reasons for not wanting inspections to detect problems

So let me guess, even more curiously this IT boss/client rep had a financial incentive to keep the on-call bill nice and padded? I think I might have made a nice anonymous email to someone up the foodchain. Call me petty.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

The limits of vertical mobility

Surely I can't be the only one who figured the vertical limits would be roughly defined by the edge of the roof and the level of the pavement below? With perhaps a few bounces in between if it's not a straight facade?

The boss seems to be developing good working relation with the BOFH. I wonder how long that'll last. Surely he'll get complacent at some point.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

So the boss got away with it?

Seems uncharacteristically friendly of the BOFH to keep the boss around. Not infrequently such a thing would have ended with the boss finding himself having a terrible accident or "confessing to his crimes" and taking the fast way down from the roof. Does the BOFH actually... like this one? Just needed to give him a good poke to keep him sharp?

Some people even liked watching those 2 girls share a cup. And... other substances.

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

Re: Making life hard

Thunderf00t is too fond of hearing himself talk imho.

The tiles used on Starship are basically the same stuff used on the shuttle. And getting rained on wasn't a problem for the shuttle either. (The outer surface of the tile is "glazed" and non-porous so water intrusion shouldn't be much of a problem for a rocket on the pad.)

Re: Is there an award for Best Euphemism?

Lithobraking (smaking into the ground)

Hydrobraking (smaking into the ocean)

Engine-rich combustion (when a rocket engine eats it's own components)

Experiencing a hard start (when things go kaboom on engine start)

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: Solution to a problem

I agree with your last assesment. It's been what I've (very succesfully) been using LLMs for. I am just competent enough in coding to know that I suck at coding, but sometimes in my line of work, it helps to know some coding. So I've been using AI to help me build the code I need to analyze the data I need. This allows me to get the data I want to get to my coworkers faster without having to bother the actual S-dev crowd in the building with inane questions about basic python functions. And I learn some python in the process too. It's all very basic and straightforward stuff, and I don't think I'd be trusting AI to do anything critical where I couldn't understand exactly the code it's giving me and what that code is doing line by line even if I might not yet be competent enough to output that exact code myself.

I don't however see the LLM replacing my job any time soon or the people I hand the data to using an LLM to do the analysis themselves. There's still a layer of understanding context on both input and output sides that is missing, that I fill in with my human brain. I know where to get the data from and what is inside the raw data set, and I know and understand what question the receiving party is asking and what sub-set they require to answer that question. This is still not something that an LLM is going to solve.

Re: AI was 3% better than the Metaverse and NFTs.

Nokia was doomed anyway. They missed the boat on moving to smartphones and their pivot to using MS Windows for Phones was a last ditch effort to remain relevant. As far as phones went at the time they weren't actually all that terrible, but Microsoft repeatedly and chronically kept fumbling the ball on their phone OS which doomed Nokia.

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: That's when it shows how good it is.

In my area of expertise (Mechanical/Mechatronics engineering) it's an utter dunce. I don't consider myself the best of the best in terms of engineers (but I'm not bad either). ChatGPT and other LLMs just aren't useful however. They don't understand context or nuance that can be extremely important in what I do and there is no developing or iterating on ideas. It's just spouting a slightly differently worded version of the same crap.

There's a large percentage of students that are not actually all that bright.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

The ProtectEU regulations are also still on the books and currently have a bit over 55% of the vote. We're going to get reamed one way or the other. And it's going to do absolutely fuck all for those who actually mean to do harm because they don't use the methods of communication that are getting broken by all these new laws and regulations (and it was also never the goal it seems)

BtcTurk suspends operations amid alleged $49M hot wallet heist

SNAFU

Crypto still operating exactly as expected then. It's not really surprising to me that completely unregulated crypto companies are failing in every single respect to learn the hard-learned lessons that the banking industry had forced upon them after losing far too much of people money. I have to wonder how long it'll be before Crypto companies start getting regulated under the same rules as normal banks, losing basically every "advantage" crypto currently has as far as "being unregulated"

NASA won't name the Shuttle picked to move to Texas

Re: My bet's on...

iirc the wording of the bill requires the object to be transferred to have flown in space, which means it couldn't be Enterprise

Moving ANY shuttle to Texas is utter madness. And if they actually picked Discovery.. Expect a long and extended legal fight since NASA gave it to the Smithsonian with "all rights, title, interest and ownership" transferred. It's also entirely stupid as the Smithsonian is probably THE best equipped museum to take care of that shuttle and make sure it survives as an artifact for as long as possible. The Houston space center has pretty much the opposite reputation, nor do they have any clue how they're going to actually display the shuttle properly. On top of that there's no way to actually get the shuttle there since both shuttle carrier aircraft have been taken out of service (one of them is ironically already at the Houston Space Center, with a replica shuttle on top).

ISS is still leaking air after latest repair efforts fail

Re: Might be missing something here

EVA suits are far too bulky to be able to move around inside the station, especially in the Russian section which is... let's call it cozy.

Re: Might be missing something here

Brownian motion is by far not enough to disperse CO2 fast enough to prevent problems. Not to mention CO2 and AIR have different densities which also changes the equation.

Re: Might be missing something here

The problem is that astronauts in 0 G need a certain amount of airflow to stay alive as gravity and convection don't help to move CO2 rich "exhaust" gasses away. Fir the kind of leak NASA is concerned about they'd need basically dead still air, but to create that on the iss it might put a bit too much emphasis on the dead part

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Fail, on fail, on fail on top of fail.

If you're working on the cloud on a single account, this should IMHO be considered your "local" drive. This means you need 2 other backups.

And who the heck programs their program that they're testing on a LIVE environment to need an argument to prevent it from doing actual harm? The default should be NOT doing anything and requiring a specific argument (that is not easily mis-typed) to make it do something other than nothing.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Re: Wrong 2...

This. There is no reason for these keys to be in the training data in the first case, but they're just wholesale scraping entire sites like github with no review, redaction or care in the world

Nah, not ad infinitum. After a few layers it all ends up with a dude named Prakesh sitting in a hot, dark, windowless sweatshop office somewhere in a dilapitated building down a narrow alley in Bangaluru. Who has a "dippy bird" set up to auto-press the "approve" button.

"Is everything ever written (that humans have bothered to maintain/digitize) before the copyright cut off not enough to train a model?"

The problem is that --idiots-- people keep thinking that LLMs are some sort of all-knowing oracle and that they "know" things about recent events. Can't make the LLM believably answer those sorts of queries/prompts without training on recent data. On top of that our languages are still shifting (significantly, to the regret of many) and training on only text written in the previous millennium is likely to result in text that would, to the modern audience, seem very much like an ancient Victorian somehow time-travelled to the 21st century

Ex-ASML engineer who stole chip tech for Russia gets three years in Dutch prison

Re: "I didn't ask"

It's not a virus as such, but it is unfortunately genetically and socially transmittable.

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

Re: AC/air supply?

The APU bleed air absolutely can be used for cabin AC on the A320. (and if you're looking for how something works, there's always a video with an indian guy explaining the topic. Such as this one explaining the Airbus A320 pneumatic and bleed air system)