Resource extraction on earth is super dirty and exploitative, so I’m all for automating it and moving it to space as soon as it’s commercially viable.

There’s just no way space mining makes money with current tech.

AstroForge thinks they can make asteroid mining work with existing technology. Their CEO did a podcast with Payload a few weeks ago (link, but it’s also on Spotify and elsewhere).

They have a demo sat testing their forge and will launch a 2nd sat later this year to do an asteroid flyby. They think they can launch 20+ satellites on a Falcon 9 that could each return $100 million in platinum to the Earth.

Orbiting or landing on the moon seems like an unnecessary delta-v tollbooth if the eventual target is asteroid mining. Why would you slow down to get to the moon if you eventually have to speed back up to get out to the asteroid belt?

AstroForge is starting to make the case for mining a few thousand kg / $100 million worth of platinum at a time from asteroids to bring home on about a 2-year roundtrip. It seems like the business case there is close to working because of reduced costs for launch and spacecraft construction.

I haven’t heard anyone make a compelling case for Lunar mining yet, though.

I used to use Disa, I think until the FB messenger connection broke? I hate that I have 6 apps in my IMs folder.

Remember that Google Streetview cars were sniffing Wifi networks back in 2010.

For incandescent lightbulbs, his point was that bulbs can burn fast and bright or low and slow, and standardizing on a lifespan of 1000 hours was a sweet spot between performance and longevity. For example, it makes 60W bulbs from different manufacturers more interchangeable and less prone to tricky marketing gimmicks like a “long life” 60W bulb that’s dimmer.

Oof. The ArsTechnica article on this points out that the cost overruns are even worse when you zoom out:

Boeing has now lost $1.1 billion on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

At least this fixed price contract is working out for NASA’s budget.

I hear the Xodus has begun and the bird site is slowly being Xpunged

There hasn’t been much movement to Mastodon this time compared to when the rate limiting was going on. It looks like there was a decent new user spike yesterday, but the rate limit thing caused a big sustained increase for days.

(Based on @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social )

There are so many ways to dunk on him lately that I don’t think there’s a need to misrepresent this stuff. I think we can give him some flowers for being neck deep in the Tesla Roadster and SpaceX Falcon 1 design and release processes almost 20 years ago. But, then he did a Pokemon evolution from that baseline crazy to whatever we’re seeing now.

One of the jobs that I worked for awhile had a bunch of old timers waiting for their pensions to be ready and newer people who only lasted a few years, with basically nobody in between. The old timers seemed weirdly surprised that everyone who didn’t have the same heritage/grandfathered in incentives and benefits didn’t want to stick around. I got to watch the tail end of the transition from the old engineer-run company that all the old guys talked about, to one run by beancounters who stiffed people on raises, bonuses, and promotions when times were good, and had plenty of layoffs when times dropped to ok. Thanks Jack Welch. I left pretty much right after my 401k match was fully vested.

People do that stuff in casual, too, which just blows my mind.

I turned off “all non tactical chats” or whatever the setting is called, and that helped a lot.

Hmm my 4-year-old $100 Brother printer is due for its first toner swap. Generic ones are $20 but Brother owns are like $75. I’m gonna have to see if this applies to mine.

Same. I think they can be great for quick and dirty stuff, especially to lower the barrier to entry for non-CS people.

I work with some people who’ve made quick little scripts for things like data processing, starting with ChatGPT, and fiddling with it to get it to work. When I had to do that a few years ago, I started with random forum posts instead. I don’t see those as being meaningfully different.

So they really just turned off the Apollo token out of spite, then?

That’s weird to me, because it’s easy to go to the search page and see popular hashtags, posts, and “for you” recommendations. I haven’t used Twitter, so I don’t understand what the algorithm offers that those things don’t.

Meanwhile, Mastodon added about 100k users in the last day and should hit 13 million total today.

I really don’t see the appeal or point of Bluesky.

There are 3 quickish bean recipes that I make. There’s a range of effort levels for each.

Chana Masala. Start a pot of rice. Maybe add bullion. Sautee onions, throw in garlic, sprinkle in curry powder. Strain and add a can of chickpeas. Add any can of tomatoes (fire roasted, w/ green chiles, plain). Maybe a little can of diced chiles. More curry powder. Low heat until the rice is ready. Serve the goop over rice. Or mix them.

Lentil soup. Sautee onions. Add garlic. Add broth and bullion. Add carrots, celery, tomatoes, maybe bits of potato, and some spices (I do a random Penzey’s blend, smoked paprika, bay leaves) and boil it. Add lentils. Simmer until it’s right.

Bean tacos. Heat some corn tortillas, either foil wrapped in the oven or fried until they’re crispy. Sautee some onions and peppers (bell, poblano, jalapeno, fresno, isk). Strain and add a can of pinto or black beans. Smash those up a bit. Maybe add tomatoes. Add taco or adobo seasoning and some MSG. Maybe some cubed up leftover chicken. Goop some of that into each tortilla. I like to have pickled red onions in the fridge to add. For sauce, I usually have plain Greek yogurt, so in a bowl, mix yogurt, salsa, hot sauce.

when 3rd party apps won’t or don’t implement those features

A lot of those features weren’t accessible through the API, so the 3rd party apps couldn’t implement them even if they wanted to.

NASA burns up a lot of garbage. They do send some home in the cargo/crew Dragon 2s, but they burn up the entire Cygnus cargo vehicles, and, starting last year, launch garbage bags out of the Bishop airlock.