notfish

you can’t see the majority of starlinks with the naked eye, what you’re seeing is either some other constellation or freshly launches starlinks that are still orbit raising. once starlinks are at altitude they actively manage their reflection angles to avoid bouncing light back at earth

Had to stay up until 2am shutting down our spacecraft. Stupid sun hates to see me get a solid night’s sleep.

My ex coworkers at spacex are pretty damn motivated to get to mars, many of them despite all the Musking happening. I wouldn’t bet against them.

Yeah I’ve wanted to build this for ages (and have tried a couple times). The use case is festivals/sporting events and other places where permanent infrastructure doesn’t really exist. The hard part is keeping messages small if you wanna include any of the token tech you’re talking about - probably, a system where your payment for usage is that you be an active relay node is more effective. Something something trust models, ala existing cert signing models.

Its best for places like football games or festivals, where the traditional network gets overrun

Wild. I was in my 4th/5th years of college during the pandemic and had an internship writing mission planning tooling for lucy. Felt like either two weeks or ten years, coding on the couch while we were pretty sure the world was ending outside. Bizarre times.

Don’t do this, it makes it a huge pain to test bar().

When you write the initial code to figure out bar, just throw that code in a unit test so you can run it any time. Stop throwing tests away!

The target market is the same as normal mining, you probably mine platinum. The cost probably only closes with either starship or mining fuel in space.

In what languages is n % 2 -1 for negative odd numbers?

Edit: apparently JS, java, and C all do this. That’s horrifying

An algorithm is “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer”

How does a giant pile of linear algebra not meet that definition?

If you had spacex’s budget you could make all of these things happen

The audiobooks are pretty well narrated too, great for anyone who needs 160 hours of audio

Musk owns 79% of voting shares of spacex (but yes, only 42% of equity). I guess it depends on your definition of “owns”, but its not unreasonable to say he owns spacex.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if early heat seeking missiles used just a PID controller, since a big part of what makes PID attractive is the ability to implement it with electrical components. Take a pair of IR photodiodes and wire them such that their difference is the error of your PID control, wire the output of the PID to the steering on your missile, and suddenly you have a missile that points at the nearest IR target (on one axis of course).

Modern missiles do better than this, but a missile wired this way with a proximity fuse would hit the target a reasonable amount of the time. Not silly at all if you haven’t invented microcontrollers yet.