no, but still being super impressive. CEO of a company rebuilding a CAD rendering engine because they put an LLM on top of it. So you describe the mechanical specs of the part you want and it models it. Takes all the tedium out of modeling stuff. Super cool and many applications.
Same author talked about adversarial license plates that trick these cameras with a sequence of black blocks, discussed here in original form [1]. He is interested in breaking both the plate detection (ideal) and character recognition (good). The examples are pretty cool looking.
There were laws in many places where you could fight a traffic ticket because you couldn't plainly recognize a police vehicle, especially when a taillight or headlight is out, but now we pay for graphics to make them more invisible. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." I like the plausible deniability angle, myself
Totally agree that AI is great for this, it will work harder and go deeper and never gets tired of reading code or release notes or migration guides. What you want instead of summaries is to find the breaking changes, figure out if they matter, then comment on _that_.
If a giant chunk of the constellation can act as a truly huge antenna, what can you get from that? Super high resolution? Seek/dwell time on a target that is effectively infinite?
No need for the satellite manufacturer to be the same as the launch provider, and there's nothing at all special about short-lived commodity satellites for LEO constellations. SpaceX is going to be cost-effective at building them given their experience with Starlink, but cost isn't typically a major concern of the US govt, and certainly not a higher priority than concerns about the satellite operator frequently suggesting that access to his satellites might be contigent upon his views on a particular conflict.
> but cost isn't typically a major concern of the US govt
tell that to any project that has had their budget slashed or out right canceled because somebody thought their project was a waste of money. every contractor is bidding unless your name is Halliburton. what's the famous astronaut quote about sitting on top of a rocket built by the lowest bidding contractor?
2/3 of Falcon 9 launches are for Starlink. No outside revenue. SpaceX continues to require new investment rounds. So the whole "driving costs down" thing might only work until investors expect some actual free cash flow.
There have been 11 test launches of starship. You might've missed the last one because it didn't do anything new, except shedding parts and exploding less. There's a pretty good chance that program will never beat the cost of Falcon Heavy, or that the technology, like multiple refueling flights to get beyond low Earth orbit, is ever made workable.
The last Starship launch was indeed unspectacular because it didn't try pushing the envelope particularly hard. The previous launches were much more precarious, with many fire balls. But I'm a strong believer in iterative development. It's bad PR when everyone can see every failed prototype, but the "design it once, simulate, and make sure the first prototype flies without issues" boxes you in to conservative design decisions.
Well, if 2/3 of SpaceX's current launches are for Starlink (which deploys satellites in LEO), isn't a two-stage, fully reusable vehicle optimized for LEO deployment the thing SpaceX would want to build?
In terms of "free cash flow" expectations, are you aware that approximately 90% of "space" revenue and profit comes from satellite telecom services, with launch services accounting for about 10% of the mix? SpaceX's development of a telecommunications constellation (Starlink) is highly consistent with historical industry patterns of what makes profit in space.
If SpaceX only had contract money as revenue, they'd be fine but they probably would not be innovating as fast. The investment rounds are to pay for Starlink build-out and Starship.
How could you even think the opposite to be a better option?
The US does suffer from a serious amount of issues politically (I'm 100% convinced that presidential republics are flawed) but it's still an organization with plenty of checks requiring popular mandate.
No single private individual should ever hold this kind of influence imho, not even if it is Gandhi or a saint and Musk is quite the other end of the spectrum.
Tonne is unfortunately overloaded, the US and the UK have their own versions, but for the rest of the world is on metric, and a tonne is 1000 kg. The Falcon 9 weighing "433 t" reads way more elegantly to me.
Here in Canada (where the mixup of metric vs imperial tonnes is common) we just say "metric tonnes" and move on. Everyone here knows that means 1000 kg.
European colleagues regularly go, "what other kind of tonnes are there?" and we get to share the joke of how silly Americans are for still using imperial tonnes.
I've often seen mt written as the units for metric tons.
There's some ODD behavior where people in the US want to fuck up metric units (MB being the obvious in my lifetime non-engineer renaming of the meaning of a unit). I find the MM of finance confusing (not sure of origin). Calling tonnes, metric "tons", seems to be a US confusing thing. Or spelling metres vs meters.
Or creating units that depend on something country specific like football field (is that FIFA (EU), US, Canadian, Aussie).
FTR no-one I know (other than in old school industry about 20 years ago) used the UK 'Ton' any more. One place of work made this clear by having different pronuncication ('Tonn-ey') as they were an old-school foundry. And the spelling is different from wherever I've seen it.
The nuclear industry was using metric weights fully when I did my apprenticeship in it in the late 1980s. Good job really as I think a conversion error could be catastrophic.
Same goes for gallons though, US gallon is smaller than a UK one.
My understanding was that "ton" is the US / imperial and "tonne" is the metric one, but I see people using them interchangeably here, so I guess whether that's technically true or not is a bit moot!
The spelling "tonne" is only used in countries where there might be ambiguity with the short ton. For the rest of the world, "ton" (abbreviation: t) is the metric ton. Technically it's classified as a "Non-SI unit that is accepted for use with SI," like litres or degrees Celsius.
Unless https://www.math.net/pounds-to-tons is severely wrong, a US ton is 2200lbs, UK 2240lbs, metric 2204lbs. Put a different way, US to metric is a <0.2% difference (the smallest), US to UK is a <2% difference (the biggest).
At a scale of 433 tons, it doesn’t really matter much which kind of tons (unless you’re actually doing the rocket science, of course).
US ton is 2000 lb, not 2200. I spent some time in the US and had never heard of a ton meaning 2200 lb. Unfortunately, that's a 10% error off of a metric ton.
The table at right is based on the kilogram (kg), the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI). The kilogram is the only standard unit to include an SI prefix (kilo-) as part of its name. The gram (10−3 kg) is an SI derived unit of mass. However, the names of all SI mass units are based on gram, rather than on kilogram; thus 103 kg is a megagram (106 g), not a kilokilogram.
The tonne (t) is an SI-compatible unit of mass equal to a megagram (Mg), or 10^3 kg. The unit is in common use for masses above about 10^3 kg and is often used with SI prefixes. For example, a gigagram (Gg) or 10^9 g is 10^3 tonnes, commonly called a kilotonne.
One context where I have seen this used is carbon stocks, e.g. petagram of carbon (PgC):
Curious if auto-merge philosophy changes between libraries and applications. The library definitely has a larger user base to break and a wider matrix of use-cases. IMO, auto-merge is more palatable for an application – do you agree? Especially when you're under SOC2/FedRAMP/etc.
How do you scale this besides keeping the dep list short? Are you reading every item or just scanning for words like "deprecated" or "breaking change"?
How do you prevent exposing yourself to supply chain attacks like the tj-actions/changed-files one [0] if you don't?
I get your question regarding scaling, but that's the job: you can choose to outsource code to 3rd-party libraries, and eternal vigilance is the trade-off.
Assume your 3rd-party dependencies will try to attack you at some point: they could be malicious; they could be hacked; they could be issued a secret court order; they could be corrupted; they could be beaten up until they pushed a change.
Unless you have some sort of contract or other legal protection and feel comfortable enforcing them, behave accordingly.
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