> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.
NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
There is an incentive to use higher power. Push the edge of safety limits to achieve higher performance from lower cost devices, for example.
It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.
Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc.
Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"
Thing is you can make a 3d printer; it's basically CNC stuff with a different tool. I suppose fabricating your own 3D printer needs to be legally ensnarled as well.
Purely performative power grabbing. There is no epidemic of ghost gun violence. These measures would not stop it if there were. The new legal thicket this creates will exclusively harm innocent people.
This is about notching a victory: making others bend the knee to the prerogatives of some pressure group. Nothing more. Behind it are wealthy pearl clutching virtue signalers. In front of it there are non-profit grifters and politicians with campaigns to fund, and in the middle lobbyists milk both sides. Everyone mouthing obligatory moral panic narratives to keep the money flowing.
> Thing is you can make a 3d printer; it's basically CNC stuff with a different tool.
Yes, but no too. I've built and purchased many 3d printers. You can make a 3d printer, but can you make one that works reliably as something like a washing machine with little to no tinkering or adjustment? Bambu Lab can sell you that for less than three hundred bucks. Just give it a file, feed it plastic, and it will rip.
I can now build a 3d printer that reliable, but only with parts and tools from other people and only after experience. Realistically not being able to buy a 3d printer off the shelf means it's going to be inaccessible for most people.
That came to my mind as well. CSS was one of the earliest major applications of Rust in FireFox. I believe that work was when the "Fearless Concurrency" slogan was popularized.
Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.
If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.
For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time.
Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities.
Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.
And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).
And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.
Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).
We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
My ISDN was sold as "ISDL" by an ISP. Still had the performance you're describing, but it was tied to them. There was no dialing on my part: it was just always up. I'd pay for it today if an ISP offered it at a low cost, as a backup.
I missed the IDSL phase completely. I'm not even sure if it was ever available in my neck of the woods.
For me, it the continuum went like this: Dialup > ISDN > dialup > slow DOCSIS > faster VDSL > faster DOCSIS > [this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas directly surrounding my small city, from multiple competing companies, but none within the city limits]
Anyway, IDSL. That technology skipped right by a lot of what was cool about ISDN. For me, real ISDN was always-on unless I disconnected it for some reason. While still "dialup" in the strictest sense, it was not infrequent to have sessions that went for months without any interruption at all. But I could also do anything else I wanted with it.
And backups: Apparently these days, a person can get a slice of Starlink pretty cheap. In this mode ("Standby Mode," IIRC), it provides a slow, always-on connection -- I think it's $5 per month for ~500Kbps.
The RV and snowbird communities hate it because it isn't free (they used to be able to pause service in off-season without monthly cost), but it sounds pretty good as a fixed, domestic backup: 500kbps is a lot more than 0. (And if this backup needs used for a long time or speed is important, then: 500kbps is way more than enough bandwidth to log in and pay for a month of real service.)
For me it was Dialup -> 802.11 @ 7 miles -> Dialup -> 802.11 @ 11 miles -> ISDN -> WISP -> DOCSIS via Comcast.
> this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas
Not all of them. I'm in what amounts to the North Korea of 'murica: a place that is pitch black at night as seen by satellite photos. There is no fiber. Or, not infrequently, power. I'm on the edge of cable the service area, but it does work, so that's what I'm using.
Verizon built a tower 1/2 mile away, so now my 5G is all the bars, and I could get IP service that way if I wished. Then there is Starlink. Good times, I suppose.
I've got a good friend that moved to an area like that, in Appalachia.
Cell phone is unilaterally spotty (all carriers; I've got the gear to check that).
The cable network doesn't reach that far. DSL doesn't exist there. There's a local WISP that keeps talking about maybe making a move there, but it hasn't happened.
For the first few years we did a cobbled together cellular thing with a grey-market AT&T corpo iPad SIM, an LTE modem, and a directional antenna about 30 feet up. That worked, usually, unless the SIM died again or the singular tower being aimed at needed maintenance. (This was before cellular providers started willfully selling home internet.)
Now he's got starlink as his only WAN. That does pretty well for him, actually. We chat often, and at length, with his phone on WiFi calling and it works fine almost always. And by that, I mean: There's sometimes an audio glitch, and it's hard to pin down what the source is when it happens. It never lasts long.
The cool thing about cheap starlink as a backup is that, aside from the purchase price, it's like no-brainer cheap. I'd use it at home myself if my connection from Spectrum were iffy. (But Spectrum here is astoundingly consistent, so I don't see a need.)
For me it was DAOC. The low latency allowed me to pull off melee combos consistently in PVP with a high alpha range class. That led to years of nerfs upon nerfs, and the game designer is still bitching about it all today.
> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range
In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].
These are super cool and I've never seen one before! I'd imagine most of the passes I'm in are within spitting distance of at least one town so powering a substation isn't out of the question. It seems like most of the installations are very much "middle of nowhere" situations. I hope to run across one of these in person!
It's exists. Car and Driver and other sites have photos.
Obviously it's weird to not showcase the exterior of a Ferrari, that being pretty much the entire point of Ferrari. The cynic in me can't help but think this may be due to the fact that it looks like a lowered Hyundai with a body kit[1].
$566B in margin debt. Is that actually a financial black swan amount of money? If 50% of that got "corrected" into Money Heaven on Friday, would it be more than a bad day at the stock market?
You're right that $566B alone isn't a black swan. That FINRA figure only captures retail and small institutional margin at broker-dealers. It excludes prime brokerage (hedge funds), securities-based lending, and repo markets. Conservative estimates put total leveraged exposure at $10-15 trillion. The $566B is maybe 5% of the iceberg.
I see visible margin debt as both a canary and a proxy. It's a canary because retail cracks first (less sophisticated risk management, stricter regulatory margin). It's a proxy because when visible leverage contracts, it usually means hidden leverage is contracting too. They're exposed to the same assets. When FINRA margin debt starts falling, it's not just a warning, it's confirmation that system-wide deleveraging is already underway.
I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.
NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
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