About six months ago I was auditing my bank statements and realized I've been paying Adobe ~$40 for the past 5-6 years or so, almost $3,000 for software I very seldom used if at all in recent times. Closed my account, downloaded gimp, and won't be using Adobe in the future.
Just as an example: I didn't notice a former landlord had immediately placed a STOP PAYMENT on my rental deposit return (with no notice/reason given, $thousands) until ten months after I had moved out!
I have spent the majority of my blue collar adult life earning <$50k/yr.
I watched the first launch from the southern tip of Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island and recommend that (I stood on the jetty). I also had recently watched 2 falcon launches in Florida and Starship is incredibly more powerful and awe-inspiring to witness.
Plan to get to the park entrance at least 30 mins early because it takes time to walk through to the southern end, and there will likely be a large crowd.
Stayed at Isla Grand Hotel and there were a bunch of other people hanging out the night before, have fun!
Very loud, bring ear protection! The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake. Other than that just comfy clothes you can walk on the sand in. It's a real unique experience, you're in for a treat!
> The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake.
I've never heard it IRL but I absolutely love this sound, also from back then when the Space Shuttle launched. IDK why, but it is just such a perfect sound to me. As if it were the best indicator of the tremendous amount of energy being released there.
There’s an entire portion of this that’s missing in the audio tracks from any launch I’ve watched on tv, YouTube, etc.
The deep bass notes go soo low and have this wild elastic ringing tonal quality to them. Like someone is playing a huge kit of koto drums or something. You can really start to hear acoustic dispersion effects as well.
I have generally been annoyed by the lengthy take off animations in Starfield, but the one thing I find satisfying every time I see one is that crackle of the engines. I can't think of any other game I played that would have this sound, so it immediately struck me as nice attention to detail.
The crackle of the air moving back and forth during a shuttle launch would be so fast and intense that the friction of the air (near the launch pad) would set the grass on fire.
That was such a delightful fact that I had to source it. Tragically, it is not true.
Gee, K. L., Mathews, L. T., Anderson, M. C., & Hart, G. W. (2022). Saturn-V sound levels: A letter to the Redditor. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(2), 1068-1073.
"While this peak level represents acoustic amplitudes that
would propagate nonlinearly to rapidly form shocks and
result in perception of jet “crackle” (e.g., see Gee et al.,
2016), will it melt concrete or set grass or one’s hair on fire?
It will definitely not."
When I was young I had relatives that lived near Heathrow airport in London. Whenever Concorde would take off, the windows in the whole house would end up shaking.
The total power output of Concorde was around half that of a 747, but for takeoff Concorde needed to use after burners - which I guess is the same mechanism at play here.
Maybe for the kids, but I didn’t use ear protection and I don’t remember noticing anyone around me who did. It’s not dangerously or uncomfortably loud from the park in my experience.
Bring binoculars. You don’t need them to see the rocket on the pad but it flies away pretty fast once it’s going, and they’re useful for watching propellant load and noticing other details. I also bring camping chairs, sunscreen, bug spray, and a bottle of water.
What's the advice to the public about not wondering off the beaten track ? I ask because there's special forces in the swamps, looking for troublemakers/saboteurs.
The island is across the water from the launch site, and SpaceX has its own fences and security for the facilities on their side. There’s also an employees only viewing area on the island. There’s also a protected wetlands but that’s unrelated.
Did you just walk into the park? 30 minutes before launch is cutting it really close if you want to drive in and park. If you’re doing that, try and be there by like 4-5 AM if you can.
You won't be able to park at the park anytime near the launch; it will be full. But you can just walk down the beach to the jetty from anywhere else on the island.
That’s why I try to arrive around 4 AM, yes. The only time I tried to get a hotel it was a 60 minute hike to the park from the hotel so I find it a lot simpler to just drive overnight and park at the park.
Yeah I walked in, honestly a split second decision not to go to Starbucks across the bridge in Port Isabell saved me. I veered to make a u-turn after deciding it would be too close and saw a parking spot right there. Walked from the bridge to southern tip and had minutes to spare until it launched.
Is that really a concern? It may not be super healthy but it's not like you are going to a rocket launch every day. Airports are very unhealthy with the PM 0.1 levels but i haven't heard of anyone not flying because of that.
If it's a concern, I'd check again on Thursday & early Friday. At least around me, this summer, their multi-day forecasts were often pretty inaccurate.
That's an awesome/inspiring story, congrats & thanks for sharing. Was it all organic growth in the beginning? What took it from that early phase to the next step?
We introduce new datasets derived from the fol-
lowing sources: PubMed Central, ArXiv, GitHub,
the FreeLaw Project, Stack Exchange, the US
Patent and Trademark Office, PubMed, Ubuntu
IRC, HackerNews, YouTube, PhilPapers, and NIH
ExPorter. We also introduce OpenWebText2 and
BookCorpus2, which are extensions of the original
OpenWebText (Gokaslan and Cohen, 2019) and
BookCorpus (Zhu et al., 2015; Kobayashi, 2018)
datasets, respectively.
Smaller in scale, yeah, but probably high bias towards technical content and written by people who (mostly) care about how to write properly. There is at least 37,354,035 items that could be indexed with lots of it high quality, percentage wise probably higher quality/post than Twitter, Facebook and other sources.
I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).
Yeah, that was the essence of how it became popular to begin with. It was the first time I'd ever seen an irc experience for the masses, thanks to browser tech improving.
I've always thought their video conferencing was better than Google, but eventually zoom just took over. Never tried voice and felt like that was just tacked on because it became trendy due to Clubhouse etc.
If that's you idea of a Reddit replacement, then you've been using Reddit very different from most people.
The issue with replacing Reddit is that you need millions of users to crowd-source all that information that has gone into every minor sub-reddit. I don't think it's sub-reddits like /r/askreddit, /r/pics or /r/politics that people would be missing in a Reddit clone. It's all the small specialized sub-reddit, where you could get help fixing a lawnmower or debate the finer points of the various aspect ratios of national flags.
I wouldn't say it's a replacement, rather it's a new experience focused on what I believe is a shortcoming with current social media sites in that they aren't optimized for live discussion.
For instance you mention "debate the finer points of various aspect ratios". Current social networks are not very good for actual debate, in fact the genesis of Sqwok can be traced to a live debate in r/worldnews where I grew tired of refreshing the page. Many of the alternatives popping up for both Twitter & Reddit are cloning the underlying data model and user interface without offering much more.
Sqwok is different in that it couples some of the familiar aspects of existing social networking with high quality instant messaging, designed from the ground up for live public debate and discussion in a new format. Still has a long way to go but I believe there's a place for it.
> The issue with replacing Reddit is that you need millions of users to crowd-source all that information
Reddit didn't start out with subreddits or millions of people, it was just a fun place to read the news.
Starlette can be considered pure server framework in the lines of CherryPy, wezurg in wsgi/sync world.
Litestar is a lot more battery included with built-in integration to Sqalchemy, many other ORMs as plugin. Built-in security and authentication middleware.
Join our discord, we have good community there too .
