The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.

My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.

NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.

Honestly this seems like a way to back-door inject another $800 million into the failing starship program.

I mean we’re sitting here on the lemmyverse having a conversation…

But yeah creators should upload to peertube but they won’t get any meaningful viewership there. The only way to break the network affect stranglehold google/youtube has over video content on the internet is making sure that if you do produce that content it’s available via other channels.

Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org

Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.

2000s were peak libertarian for SP. They were against the war on terror so they didn’t code “Bush-right” but they were extremely libertarian. I remember the media trying to push this “millennials are conservative actually” line by inventing the phrase “South-park republican”

Still I remember them landing some good observations. For instance, in one episode the boys learn how veal is made and become animal rights activists. You can tell TP/MS are not animal rights activists, but after the boys steal the cows the media, police, government, etc all instantly start calling the boys “terrorists.” It really caught the whole post-9/11 zeitgeist of “anybody you don’t like is a terrorist.”

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

“You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building’s roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?”

We’re not ready because we’re using concepts like “raising” to describe the creation of a probabilistic word sequence generator.

Don’t anthropomorphize the algorithm.

The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That’s what Google is paying for.

This is daft though considering that he needs Michigan and the Muslim voters in were one of the Democratic pillars in that state, and he has completely and possibly irrevocably alienated them.

Yep Americans have a choice between the party that aggressively cheerleads and gloats while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes, and the party that “expresses concerns” and “calls for moderation” while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes.

I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.

How’s the head of lettuce doing?

https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/liz-truss-iceberg-lettuce-contest.html

The crowd cheered at the first two items, but had no real idea why the third item was such a big deal.

I’m not sure, I took that to mean a competitor to Palm, which was pretty popular among a niche segment of the population. Although data plans via 3G kinda sucked back then and most Palm users I knew were constantly trying to connect to wifi.

VR has been around in modern form for more than a decade and the only truly novel and useful application is some types of gameplay.

Apple claims that the future is AR but the only novel and useful application is feeding you more ads. This is a massive benefit for them, but not a reason for anyone to buy this thing and subject themselves to it.

Customers: The glass on our iPhone screens keep cracking.

Apple: Glass on both sides of your phone!

On the other hand, we’d been trying to do anything useful with natural language since the 50’s and had thoroughly failed.

That’s really not true. For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s. Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.

What we’ve seen in the last few years (besides continual incremental improvements in already-existing solutions) is improvement in the application of generative tools. So far the uses cases of generative models appear to be violating copyright, cheating on homework, and producing even more search engine spam. It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don’t care if it’s true or not.

Ok then be specific.

Like, before smartphones I was lost in hamburg, looking at a paper map trying to figure out where the heck I was, trying to find the street names hidden in the brickwork of the buildings. I had to have a friendly person help me out. I’ve never been lost like that since smartphones. Give me a specific case where chatgpt would do something like that.

just yesterday I saw a documentary about a sect using their own cryptocoin to pay its members for peddling ayahuasca and other psychedelics

Finally! A use case!