pjscott

8 ms·

1.
by pjscott 18d ago
> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become
2.
by pjscott 2mo ago
There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news
3.
by pjscott 2mo ago
They're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency because of intuition drawn from satellites in geosynchr
4.
by pjscott 3mo ago
From Google's spokesperson, quoted in the article: "This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher tha
5.
by pjscott 3mo ago
Musk made big investments in building AI data centers starting in 2024, continuing through the present. SpaceX got those assets from xAI, spun off from X, via an acquisition. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
6.
by pjscott 3mo ago
Even then, the numbers don't even remotely work out. Consider this "Elon Bezos" person; the combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is about $1.3 trillion or so, and the "Top 0.1%" category in the Fed's
7.
by pjscott 4mo ago
You're right, of course, but "those in government" aren't a single entity. There's always an incentive for one corrupt part of government to take more than their fair share of the loot, and then for the next par
8.
by pjscott 5mo ago
It doesn't track cost of living? The way it's calculated is all about cost of living! In the US, the official inflation numbers are based on a "basket of goods" meant to be representative of a typical person's spe
9.
by pjscott 5mo ago
The wording was a bit unclear. The previous paragraph mentions wanting something cheaper than "those pesky XORs and multiplications". The multiplication is the expensive part; the (very cheap) XORs are just mildly annoying because
10.
by pjscott 6mo ago
> I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. That's not obvious to me. I checked the manuals for sort(1) in GNU and FreeBSD, and neither of them buffer everythin
11.
by pjscott 6mo ago
If money ever starts looking particularly illusory, try thinking in terms of the underlying resources that markets allocate. That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of
12.
by pjscott 8mo ago
So it looks to be just the latency improvement that's noteworthy, then. Thank you!
13.
by pjscott 8mo ago
If you're familiar with the technical specs, I'd be interested in hearing what size of objects the star trackers can sense and at what range. In theory the fancier star trackers can see objects around 10 cm diameter hundreds of ki
14.
by pjscott 8mo ago
Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release: > Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for space safety. In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered
15.
by pjscott 8mo ago
Slowing the adoption of much-safer-than-humans robotaxis, for whatever reason, has a price measured in lives. If you think that the principle you've just stated is worth all those additional dead people, okay; but you should at least
16.
by pjscott 9mo ago
It's a tale as old as schlock journalism: an article seems interesting... until it talks about something you actually know about personally, at which point it suddenly starts saying obvious nonsense.
17.
by pjscott 9mo ago
I'm not too familiar with the JVM so perhaps I'm missing something here: how would that help? The file is tiny, just a few bytes, so I'd expect the main slowdown to come from system call overhead. With non-mmap file I/O
18.
by pjscott 9mo ago
As with all the ahead-of-time compiled languages that I checked, the answer is that it generates non-SIMD code for the hot loop. The assembly code I see in godbolt.org isn't bad at all; the compiler just didn't do anything super c
19.
by pjscott 9mo ago
The common element is that they're written with the most obvious version of the code, while the ones in the faster bucket are either explicitly vectorized or written in non-obvious ways to help the compiler auto-vectorize. For example,
20.
by pjscott 9mo ago
The delta there is because the Rust 1.92 version uses the straightforward iterative code and the 1.94-nightly version explicitly uses std::simd vectorization. Compare the source code: https://github.com/niklas-heer/spee
21.
by pjscott 9mo ago
They have very limited power these days. They advise the House of Commons, as more or less a hereditary think tank. They can delay the passage of bills, though this has been limited to a maximum delay of one year since 1949 (less for some t
22.
by pjscott 11mo ago
They do, technically, allow JIT. You need a very hard-to-obtain entitlement that lets you turn writable pages into executable read-only pages, and good luck getting that entitlement if (for some reason) your name isn’t “mobilesafari”, but t
23.
by pjscott 1y ago
It may comfort you to hear that the Starlink satellites are tiny in comparison to the vastness of their orbit – the visualization makes them appear larger than they are, so you can see them clearly – and that they’re low enough that they’ll
24.
by pjscott 1y ago
I’m also introverted, and I also found this article overwhelming – if I tried to do it all at once, which seems so laughably unrealistic for me that I just wouldn’t try. Instead, probably the best way to read this is as something to appro
25.
by pjscott 1y ago
The rationalist movement has been talking about this since the beginning, and has consistently come to the conclusion that of course the thing to do is admit to our own fallibility and try to do the best we can with our profound limitatio
26.
by pjscott 1y ago
You stated one of their core doctrines, something they’ve been loudly preaching for as long as they’ve existed, as though it was something they disagree with and had never even considered. Can you blame them for a bit of exasperation? For w
27.
by pjscott 1y ago
I remember, from the earliest days, the rationalist movement talking about how cults prey on people and how to recognize it and walk the other way. The Ziz cult checks so many of the boxes that they were warning against back then, years ago
28.
by pjscott 1y ago
You’re right, of course, but there was a minor miscommunication: the exponential space is exponentially proportional to the size of the regular expression, and the linear time is linearly proportional to the length of the string being searc
29.
by pjscott 1y ago
This depends on the implementation of the regex engine; most are potentially superlinear in time, since that’s the easiest way of doing it, and quite fast until suddenly it isn’t. I always check the algorithm being used before I use regular
30.
by pjscott 2y ago
Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact? Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying t

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