Because brain activity doesn’t stop when I’m sleeping, it’s more like the brain is just idling.
If we wanna go with computer terms, sleeping isn’t shutdown. Sleeping is sitting on the desktop with no active windows. All the background processes don’t stop when you’re just sitting there and admiring your sick wallpaper.
We (as in humanity) can continue to develop both EEG caps and direct implants. The technology is young and there’s no telling what side benefits and additional functionality either one can have.
And the implant, much like early EEG devices, barely works for now. Imagine what they’ll be capable of 10-20 years down the line.
The SLS is arguable, I’d say. The design requirements were set by the government, but it’s not built by NASA. It’s built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and ULA, all of which are private companies. I don’t think NASA has ever built a rocket, actual construction has always been contracted out to private companies. Even the first Atlas was repurposed from an ICBM built by Convair and General Dynamics.
Point 1: SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development. With the Falcon 9, that process proved wildly efficient and successful, culminating in a launch vehicle so reliable that it’s cheaper to insure a payload on an F9 that already has multiple launches under its belt than a brand new booster. And they’re turning enough of a profit to develop the Starship largely on internal funds, seeing how the early Raptor flight tests were before the HLS contract.
Point 2: Just adding, the Raptor engine is the first full-flow staged combustion engine to ever get off a testing stand and actually fly. The engineering complexity of these things is on the level of the Shuttle’s RS-25.
Point 3: SpaceX were the only ones with more than designs and mockups to present, and they had a reliable track history from working with NASA on the commercial resupply and crew projects. And I see no problem with awarding a contract to a bid that actually fits into the budget.
Point 4: Multiple options was always part of the plan. NASA wants redundancy, so that if one of the providers runs into problems, the other provider can continue (and perhaps even take up the slack) instead of everything coming to a grinding halt. For a perfect example, look at the Shuttle and Commercial Crew programs. The Shuttle got grounded and since it was NASA’s only manned launcher, they had to bum rides from the russians. In contrast, the CC contract was awarded to Boeing and SpaceX. With Starliner’s continued issues, SpaceX has picked up the slack and fulfilled more than their initial contract in launches, instead of NASA having to bum rides from the russians again. The initial HLS contract was supposed to go to two providers, until the budget got cut. Blue’s bid was always the favorite for the second pick.
Is it? Starship has been in development since at least 2012-ish (as the “mars colonial transport” or “its” or “bfr” or a few other names). It hasn’t done a succesful mission yet. ULA’s Vulcan was anounced in 2014, and it works just fine. So I don’t really think it’s actually faster or better, but it IS more showy.
The first time Starship was spoken of was in 2012, yes. The very first idealistic designs of it. The design that’s actually being tested is from 2018. So 5 years to go from “Alright, this is what we’re gonna do” to full stack flight testing. Roughly on pace with their previous rockets, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 took about 4 years.
Absolute and complete lie. Its exactly the opposite. SpaceX did not, and still DOES NOT have a solid design or mockup of HLS. Dynetics and Blue Origin had both.
Blue Origin had (and still has) no experience with human-rated capsules. Their proposed lander had to be assembled in lunar orbit or launched on another SLS. The Dynetics lander was over its own mass budget. It was literally too heavy to do the job it was being proposed for. Meanwhile, SpaceX proposed a derivative of what they were already working on. Blue and Dynetics had no practical development done on their landers, they would’ve relied on the HLS award to even get started on actual development.
The problem is that SpaceX had a bid at the same level of the others, but they lowered it when Kathy Lueders gave them a call (and not the other parties) to lower it. This is spelled out in NASA’s own document:
SpaceX’s bid was just under 3B. Blue Origin bid at a bit under 6B. Dynetics wanted 9B. This information is freely available online. SpaceX was also given the least in design development funding, with 135 million versus Blue’s 579 million and Dynetics’ 253 million. It’s not terribly shocking that a company with a good track record and the lowest bid wins a contract.
No, the contract stated that anything between zero and three were options, based on funding. They said the goal was two, but then budget was reduced. Nobody was told this. The number of contracts was also reduced to one as a result. Nobody was told this. And then Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call, and not the others, to share this information.
They needed a lander contract. The entire Artemis project was already fucked when it comes to the timetable, but delaying the HLS contract would’ve made things even worse. And when the budget got cut, they negotiated with the one bidder who was deemed most likely to still get the job done with the lower budget, as opposed to the other two whose bids were wildly over what NASA could give them. SpaceX bid at 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, BO bid 6 billion and Dynetics bid 9 billion. Losing 50 million is an easier pill to swallow than getting half or a third of what you need.
SpaceX didn’t need a mockup to present. They had prototypes of the base vehicle and a proposal for necessary modifications to perform the contract duties and an established track record of developing ambitious rocket engines and launch vehicles. BO had bits and pieces of other things they were gonna bolt together and a pretty model of how it’ll look like, we swear, scout’s honor. But if you’re talking about the Blue Moon that eventually won the secondary bid, that’s not what they initially proposed.Blue Moon Mk2 is a variant of a lander that’s been in development since 2016, so two years longer than SpaceX’s Starship prototypes. The one that’s planned for a lunar landing this year, Blue Moon Mk1, isn’t the one they bid for HLS. It’s a robotic lander, smaller than the HLS’s Mk2. So fancy that, they won a HLS contract when they bid a variant of something they were already working on, much like SpaceX did. And remember, BO is developing a lander. SpaceX is developing a fully reusable super heavy lift rocket, an interplanetary transport craft and a lunar lander as part of the same package.
AFTER being told to do so. That’s the entire problem. Blue Origin and Dynetics both came forward and said they’d gladly match that bid, but since they didn’t get the special information that was only given to SpaceX, they couldn’t know this.
Finish reading my post. SpaceX’s initial bid was 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, they agreed that they can do the job for 50 million less than what they originally bid. BO’s and Dynetics’ proposals would’ve suffered a much larger hit. And sure, BO got the secondary contract for 3.4 billion, after rethinking their entire proposal. So why did they not submit that one in the first place? If they had, they might have gotten a similar call.
No they didn’t. They had, a mockup of an empty shell into which they might eventually fit the vehicle. And they still have that.
Blue Origin: “Here’s renders and a papier-mâchė model of what our lander will look like. It’s assembled together in lunar orbit, from an automated cargo ship, our own lander and another Orion.” Note that this isn’t what they won the option b proposal with.
SpaceX: “Here’s renders of what our lander will look like. We have a full scale prototype out in Boca and we’re blowing it up to see if our math and simulations are right on how much pressure the tanks can take. It’ll require some modifications, such as larger landing legs and dedicated landing engines.” And their HLS proposal isn’t a vehicle carried in the Starship’s cargo bay, it is the Starship.
what you’re failing to understand is that this 2.94 billion dollar bid was already AFTER they were informed of the budget changes.
I can find no source for SpaceX’s initial bid being higher, let alone 2x higher (to meet your claim that they bid on the same level as BO, not even gonna consider Dynetics).If you have one, I’d like to see it. And if it is the case that SpaceX was picked because they were willing to slash their bid in half, then I would expect BO’s follow-up litigation to be based around that. Instead, BO focused on the claim that NASA didn’t give their proposal proper evaluation and consideration.
I doubt minimizing corporate loss was Lueder’s motivation there. Presumably neither Steve Cook or Jeff Bezos offered Lueders a large enough bribe job matching her qualifications.
That wasn’t my point. The point was that if their proposal had been closer to the budget set aside for the award, as opposed to being double the budget, they might have been contacted to see if they could complete the contract for the lesser amount.
There’s a point at which you learn more from actually building something and putting it through its paces than simulating. It’s a tough balance to strike , no argument there. Simulating until you’ve covered every conceivable edge case and failure mode is ludicrously costly and time consuming. Relying entirely on yeeting shit and seeing how it fails risks missing the edge cases. But so far, I’ve seen little reason to doubt that SpaceX has found a working balance between simulation and practical testing. They’re certainly progressing faster than the industry historically has and the F9 has had no failures, even partial ones, in over 200 flights. That’s a track record that most launch vehicles can’t meet. It’s definitely possible there’s a 1/1000 flaw in the Falcon 9, but until it actually happens and they lose a rocket and/or a payload (gods willing it won’t be crew), it’s nothing but a hypothetical “but what if…” scenario.
No more pre-defined dialog trees for NPCs and more reactive interactions. An example from BG3:
Tap for spoileryou can find evidence that Isobel, the cleric who keeps Last Light Inn safe from the Shadow Curse, is the resurrected daughter of that act’s boss.
But you can’t talk to her, or anyone, about it, since those conversations were never written. With a system that generates NPC dialog on the fly, based on context and the NPC’s pre-defined parameters, you could.
That’s assuming that the generative technology remains stagnant. I wouldn’t be surprised if, eventually, the systems get complex enough to conjure up entire minor quests at runtime. Honestly, it’s just a further development of procedural generation, I don’t see how it’s going to stall out at “meh dialog”.
I see where you’re coming from, but also think it’s a tad hasty to say it’ll never lead to anything but fluff. Excitement should be nourished, cause it’s the people who are excited about new things that will explore what could come of it. Now let’s give 'em time to cook.
I think in two languages and sometimes one of them is better for expressing my thoughts, even if it’s not the language that we’ve been using for the conversation so far. And sometimes it just happens mid-sentence.
In the future direct interfacing between the brain and technology seems likely. The rudimentary technology has already been demonstrated and Musk’s company is working on an implant meant to be a commercial product. My question is about how you see the interface eventually working. In particular I am curious about what the...
Okay, but would you rather be locked in your unmoving body or get brain surgery and have motion again? Would you rather be blind and deaf or get brain surgery and have your senses back?
Your issue, as far as I understood it, was that the brain implants are pointless, cause they do nothing we can’t already do. There’s plenty current medical technology can’t fix, but a brain implant could (one day). Such as restoring sight by bridging cameras to the visual cortex; or restoring control over their body to disabled people, either by bypassing damaged nerves anywhere in the body or connecting prosthetics to the motor cortex. Are those things worth the trouble of going through brain surgery?
Why are you bringing up Musk? I fail to see how Neuralink is the killing blow to the very concept of brain-computer interfaces. Your bias is showing.
It’s true that current BCIs can’t do what I outlined as their potential benefits. Hence, why they’re potential. The technology still needs to develop before those potential benefits can be realised. Personally, I look forward to that day.
It took GantztheDemon 10 days to be able to play Helldivers 2 again. On Feb. 21, TikTok user AJGaming shared a video featuring Gantz killing them. The sequence went viral overnight, garnering 4.8 million views as of this writing. A subsection of the Helldivers 2 community, hung up on the politically charged satire theme of the...
Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia’s reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX’s “compliance with US sanctions and export controls.”...
If you’re gonna hate someone, hate them for what they actually did, not for what their detractors want you to think they did.
Modern news media is fucking awash with cleverly worded half truths that are repeated so often, by so many who don’t take a moment for critical thought, that they become almost a rallying cry. It’s Hunter’s Laptop all over again, but aimed at the left.
Russia’s inability to conquer any of its neighbors is irrelevant. The possibility of them even attempting is unacceptable if you share a border with Russia. Sure, maybe Putin can’t hope to depose your government, but the destruction and deaths before his failure are still a horrifying reality that’ll take years, possibly decades, to recover from.
As for why Sweden felt the need to join, despite not having a single meter of border with Russia, it’s because Finland felt the need to join. The two countries are tightly bound and do not want to end up on the opposite sides of a war. Now they’re much less likely to.
Testing Raptor relighting on the float would be my guess. If the deceleration burn fails, the ballistic trajectory would still bring it down in the IFT-1 and IFT-2 target area.
Title, basically. I know I have issues, but I couldn’t say if it’s depression, ADD, or just general problems. Is the only reason to have a diagnosis so you know what to work on, or are there other benefits such as easier access to therapy?...
It depends. If you know you have issues, aren’t dealing with or handling them to your satisfaction and want help? Absolutely. Therapy, treatment and proper medication generally require an official diagnosis, not to mention potentially being cheaper when you don’t have to pay for all of it yourself. If you know you have issues, but have also developed effective coping mechanisms on your own and negative effects on your life are overall rare, I think it’s fine to keep going undiagnosed, as long as you’re mindful of your problems and how they affect the people around you.
Couple examples from my own life. I knew I was depressed. My friends knew I was depressed. I thought I was handling it okay, but I really wasn’t. So I got a diagnosis, so I could get medication and therapy, that allowed me to build coping mechanisms to hold it at bay. I’m also fairly sure I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum. Where, exactly, doesn’t matter, since I can manage life and socializing just fine, I simply have to think twice about what I say. And when I’m not sure of myself, I have trusted friends to go to for a second opinion. And then there’s the undiagnosed face blindness. A diagnosis won’t help at all, since there’s to treatment or medication. I had built workarounds without knowing I was doing it, years before I found out face blindness was even a thing
In the end, if you’re unsure, you can’t go wrong with getting a diagnosis. If nothing else, it will at least tell you more about yourself and serve as a guideline for how you manage your issues.
It’s more an issue of how you’ll get the second stage to survive re-entry at orbital velocity. Which the current F9 upper stage can’t pull off, seeing how it doesn’t have heat shields. Bolting heat shields on it probably isn’t happening, the added mass would cut into payload capacity too much.
Not “no PvP” servers. Single crew servers. Only you and your crew. Those have been live since December, but they’re quite heavily limited. Can’t use captained ships, can’t progress the trading companies past 40 and you get only 30% of the base treasure value. Still, not having to deal with some jerkwad thinking their fun entitles them to ruin my fun more than makes up for that for me.
Whatever is powering the ship they arrive in puts out more energy than a nuke and that thing would be running for far longer than an explosion. They’re not gonna give a shit about the nuke. At best, you’ll singe the hull, assuming point defense doesn’t blast your piddly little bomb out of the sky first.
I'm with McCoy here (lemmy.world)
Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of threads retract in 1st (arstechnica.com)
Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches (arstechnica.com)
Pedego launches three new 'groundbreaking' e-bikes including Moto, Cargo, and Trike (electrek.co)
Pedego, one of the earliest electric bike brands to enter the US market well over a decade ago, has announced...
How did we get humans on the moon in 1969 and are still struggling to get the Starship rocket to launch properly?
New Nvidia AI demo gives NPCs even more reasons to complain at you (www.pcgamesn.com)
Sometimes when I say danke (thanks or thank you) some of my friends will say (and the spelling is wrong but it's as close as I can get) they will say danata or maybe it's dinata.
I assumed they meant thanks but a Google search doesn’t give me that kind of result. What does dinata mean and what language is it from?
Why would the average person choose a brain implant over a skullcap?
In the future direct interfacing between the brain and technology seems likely. The rudimentary technology has already been demonstrated and Musk’s company is working on an implant meant to be a commercial product. My question is about how you see the interface eventually working. In particular I am curious about what the...
For some Helldivers 2 players, the fascist role-play has gone too far (www.polygon.com)
It took GantztheDemon 10 days to be able to play Helldivers 2 again. On Feb. 21, TikTok user AJGaming shared a video featuring Gantz killing them. The sequence went viral overnight, garnering 4.8 million views as of this writing. A subsection of the Helldivers 2 community, hung up on the politically charged satire theme of the...
Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation (youtu.be)
Russia’s Starlink use sparks probe into SpaceX compliance with US sanctions (arstechnica.com)
Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia’s reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX’s “compliance with US sanctions and export controls.”...
Sweden officially joins NATO (www.nato.int)
The next Starship mission has a tentative launch date: March 14 (arstechnica.com)
Is there any real benefit to getting mentally diagnosed?
Title, basically. I know I have issues, but I couldn’t say if it’s depression, ADD, or just general problems. Is the only reason to have a diagnosis so you know what to work on, or are there other benefits such as easier access to therapy?...
NASA Administrator seems to hint at 2nd Stage recovery (www.youtube.com)
Quote from Bill Nelson:...
Skull And Bones Is Less The Pirate Life And More The Division (kotaku.com)
If we come into contact with aliens (e.g. aliens invading Earth), would there be any laws for protecting the rights and dignity of said aliens?