elurg

How the fuck was "public drug use" not already illegal?

Also Pascal.

And C++/CLI uses ^ for "managed pointers" (pointer to .net objects) and % for "managed references" which means there are all-together 4 ways to declare various types of pointers which is super-fun.

Pascal uses this syntax.

Also "pointer to integer" is written as "^integer" which is better than "int".

Syntax also doesn't allow confusing stuff like like "int a, b;".

Most of these products are extremely unhealthy so shrinking portions should be considered a public service.

The US currently has a large advantage is mass-to-orbit capabilities that is set to explode once Starship comes online.

Elon needs to talk less about peace with Russia and more about deploying weapon systems. He can make enough money from it to retire on Mars.

I've been using ChatGPT for language learning by asking it to explain the differences between words. The answers align with what the dictionary says but are far more elaborate and better nuanced.

It wouldn't be possible to get equivalent explanations from native speakers unless you pay them to teach.

You're underestimating the political complication of sending nuclear power to the moon.

Solar panel manufacturing faces no objections.

Car companies deserve to have a severely depressed valuation because they're currently being forced to transition away from internal combustion. The ICE manufacturing industry is the worst one to be in because government are determined to kill you.

Tesla doesn't have this overhang and is also growing very fast.

I asked it how to convert a cell value to an unix timestamp in google sheets and it told to use the "UNIX_TIMESTAMP" and even provided an example.

The function does not exist, it's entirely made up.

What's weirder is that when I told it that the answer was wrong it provided a different solution that was correct.

A lot of stuff is known about it. Both the US and USSR first operated long-duration space stations nearly half a century ago.

Gravity and radiation are well understood and we can definitely build machinery that can tolerate them well for many years.

> we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed.

Why doesn't the ISS count? It gets resupplied every few months but a Mars base would be resupplied every two years so systems only have to scale to last 10x as long.

Only national space agencies have had a reason to invest in keeping humans alive for long periods of time so they are the only organizations that have demonstrated that capability. It doesn't follow that SpaceX couldn't do it - they just didn't have a reason for it so far.

This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.

NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.

A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.

Life support is not particularly difficult if you can just throw mass at it.

It's probably true that Starship would only be capable to support 10 colonists all the way to Mars and that's still pretty damn good. This number will grow if you have a separate life support system on the surface and don't have to rely on the ship but the first missions will indeed have a very small crew.

The FBI seized the laptop in December 2021, nearly an year before it was revealed. They knew it was real but they strongly encouraged media companies to "expect a leak". As a consequence of this the story was strongly suppressed and the general public came to believe the opposite of the truth.

It's true that the FBI didn't force companies to kill the story but the story was still killed as a result of FBI actions. Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?

There is no proof that Joe Biden himself acted improperly but Hunter Biden did receive large consulting fees for performing no work - he spent his time on cocaine and hookers instead. This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.

Providing sources is the most important feature missing in chatgpt and perplexity.ai does indeed attempt to solve it. The other problem is that chatgpt is often factually incorrect and gives no hint of uncertainty.

I've been using perplexity.ai recently and often times the results are more helpful than google and it tends to spew less opaque bullshit than chatgpt.