The thing with Maxar, etc, is the question: what happens if SpaceX just decides to add an extra Earth-facing sensor bay to every single new Starlink sat?

Because the next step for SpaceX would be to start putting hardware that directly undercuts Maxar and others into those bays. Anyone who's doing smallsats should be extremely concerned by the possibility.

SpaceX is already getting in on that MIC game with Starshield - a series of customizable Starlink-derived sats that SpaceX has reportedly offered to Pentagon at bargain prices. So they clearly are trying to get into new market segments, and they aren't subtle about it.

>I don't see how they can be called the best space company when SpaceX exists.

If "the market" in "the best company on the market" refers to the stock market, then it makes some sense. SpaceX isn't publicly traded.

I would be reluctant to invest into any of those "new space" companies myself though. First, space is hard - so many of those who only started out now are likely run out of funding before they make a single cent of profit on their launches. Second: SpaceX is the industry's mad titan. So much of the space industry now exists in the realm of "SpaceX hasn't gotten around to killing them yet".

Yeah, it's really easy to spot yet another Kremlin shill going in hot with whataboutism.

"NTC Vulkan" being tied to Kremlin is not news, but just how involved it was in some of the attacks is certainly new info.

Yes. But electricity is notoriously hard to store. Building enough storage gets really expensive really quick - preventing it from being competitive with natural gas.

It's not an impossible challenge to solve though.

First, the larger a grid is, the more resilient it is to the intermittent nature of renewables, and the less storage it needs. Being able to shift electricity around at great distances is great for grid stability, and a hypothetical planet-scale grid could go full renewable with impressively little storage. A large and robust joint grid, like that of EU or US-Canada, offers a lot of benefits still. Which is why a lot of industry voices are calling for more grid integration, both within the countries and between the countries - like between US and Mexico.

Second, "smart grid" tech can be used to balance the grid on the demand side instead of the supply side. If electricity prices are allowed to change during the day in small intervals, and consumers, ranging from industries and to home appliances, are designed to take that into account, you can get a lot of flexibility by soft-controlling demand. Raise power prices for 19:00 to 19:30, and watch all the ACs pre-heat or pre-cool beforehand to sit the "expensive" interval out, all the parked EVs suspend their charging process, all the washing machines shift their cycle around, all the home-scale batteries shift to using internal power, all the datacenters undervolt their servers, and so it goes. Thus, you get to "eat" a part of the peak on the demand side, and you need less storage capacity to cover what remains.

Third, "full renewable" is not a good goal to strive towards. Fission or possibly even fusion (not yet, but maybe in 20 years?) could make for "green" baseline generation that can be controlled to cover for deficiencies of renewables.

NASA really needs something that's not Crew Dragon and can ferry humans. Not because Crew Dragon is bad but because they really don't want another Space Shuttle type fuckup.

Launching nuclear fuel into space is fairly safe, because it only becomes highly radioactive after the reactor starts running.

So you build and launch your reactor in a fully "stopped" state. You make sure it makes it to its destination. And only then you start the reactor and make the fuel "hot".

The issue with cooling in open space is that there's nothing you can dump your waste heat into.

Things like ISS use special radiators to radiate away waste heat - while small things that can generate a lot of heat for their size, like space suits, use water evaporation to mount a compact heat removal system.

On the surface of the Moon, you have the entire Moon that you could dump your waste heat into.

Of course, actually dumping the heat into the ground is an engineering and construction challenge - so early Moon and Mars reactors might opt for radiators, like the ones ISS currently uses. They would need a lot of them, but it's still doable for small reactors.

It's a tough spot. GPT-4 is clearly no Skynet - but it's advanced enough to be an incredibly powerful tool, in the right hands. An incredibly dangerous tool, in the wrong hands.

Being able to generate incredibly realistic text that takes image and text context into account is a trust-destoying tech, if used wrong. Reviews, comments, messages? All those things we expect to be written by humans? They may no longer be. A single organization with an agenda to push can generate thousands of "convincing" users and manufacture whatever consensus it wants.

/u/SidewaysFancyPrance: still have your comment cached, so here's a reply

This kind of feedback loop has been going for a while now. Humans shaping their environment, and adapting to the environment they themselves shaped. It's a process so old it pops up in the fossil record. It's just stuck on a bottleneck now. Humans got too good at shaping their environment, and evolution no longer cuts it when it comes to shaping humans to match it in turn.

Which means: it's time to take over that part of the process too.

>If we feel like we have to install hardware in our brains to survive, we've failed as a species.

Or: that humans have truly succeeded as a species.

Humans have a history of breaking natural limits. Humankind used to be foragers - until humans got very sick of their food supply being at a whim of their environment and invented agriculture, enabling them to specialize and accomplish more. Humans used to rely on spoken word to teach and spread knowledge - until they invented writing, allowing human knowledge to endure, to resist corruption, to be stored, transferred and replicated much more effectively. Humans used to get culled by horrendous pandemics - until they got tired of dying pointless deaths and started figuring out things like germs, vaccines and disease prevention. Humans used to struggle to understand their world, inventing things like superstitions in a desperate attempt to explain what they could not understand - until they invented scientific method, allowing their imperfect minds to be used to discern the truths of the world.

The thing is, it's not about survival. Humans haven't been a threatened species since the last Ice Age. It's about how humans want to live.

Imagine having intuitive understanding of personal finances. Or an ability to remember and recall strong enough that "where I left that thing?" or "did I forget to turn something off?" never happens in your life anymore. Or just being flat out smarter - better at remembering, understanding, recalling, making the right connections and applying knowledge. Imagine being able to get by on a single hour of sleep a day - and feeling more rested than you do after a full night of sleep now. Imagine being able to pry a drug addiction straight out of your mind just by wanting to do so.

Those things are impossible now. They don't have to remain that way.

First Neuralink devices are expected to work like that. The device only scans the brain for inputs, and uses those inputs to drive peripherals like virtual mouse or keyboard. No neural feedback involved.

We don't really know what the limits of the no-feedback approach are. It could be that you would be able to achieve superhuman typing speeds on those first gen systems, with lots of practice - or that a more in-depth approach would be required for that.

Lots of things. Human brain is painfully limited and borderline inadequate for the requirements the modern world puts on it.

Of course, the current state of the art is nowhere near being able to improve on that. But that's now. BCI tech is really promising still - too many human limitations lie in the brain, and we can't do anything about them without cracking the skull open.

Not good enough to be practical. Not enough power output, not enough long term stability. Power cells are the only option for powering something like Neuralink - at least for now.

Not getting regulatory approval the first time around is a fairly usual thing. Especially for a new product in a fairly new field.

Have they actually announced a self-driving car? I thought it was all in "leaks and rumors" category.

If you can design a basic schematic, you can design a basic PCB. And if you can open and understand schematics for some development boards, you can design a basic schematic.

That being said - it's still way beyond the skill level of an average guy. Sure, it doesn't actually require a PHD - but most people don't even know how to use an Arduino board.

But for those who want to get into hobby electronics or even embedded proper? There's never been a better time to do so.

Cheap and capable PCB fabs, free open source design and simulation tools, downloadable datasheets, open SDKs, readily available components and hardware tools and plentiful resources on how to use all of that. 20 years ago this just didn't exist. 40 years ago, "hobbyist PCB" involved hand drawing the traces, manually etching copper with corrosive chemicals and drilling all the holes - for projects that today would be considered basic.

California shitting on Texas power grid is like that pointing Spider-Man meme.

That's the beauty of solar though - you don't have to wait for the government to do something. You can do "something" on your own.

Can't run nuclear in your backyard - but rooftop solar is getting more and more viable in more and more areas, even without government subsidies or power buyback programs.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that exact order.

A usable laptop can be wiped and resold, and could be used by someone in need of a laptop for years to come - reducing the need for new hardware, and reusing the old hardware. A laptop that was turned e-waste by an unremovable software lock can only be torn down and send into recycling, best case. Dumped into an e-waste graveyard in some hellhole country, worst case.

It's definitely Apple turning devices into e-waste, because they designed a system that has its sole purpose in turning devices into e-waste. Then they included it in every new device with no obvious way to disable it, and no way to bypass it.

If they have done literally nothing, we wouldn't have this problem and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

>Is your argument that anyone should be able to do this when they stumble upon a locked Apple device? How would it prevent theft then, if the thieves could simply wipe the device and set it up as their own or resell it?

Exactly that. It's not Apple's job to police for theft. And they definitely shouldn't be doing it if they do it so poorly it turns thousands of devices into e-waste.

If you have the original Apple ID that was used to set up this machine. You don't have the original Apple ID that was used to set up this machine.

This is definitely Apple's fault. They made a lock that turns a functional device into e-waste and cannot be removed.

If they gave a shit about environment, they would make this lock removable - with removal wiping all encryption keys, essentially destroying all the data on the device. But that's Apple - they only care about three things, and those things are: control, PR and profits.

There are ways to perform an "epigenetic reset" to get a clone without those "premature aging" effects.

People with disabilities like this usually have some way of communication - think Stephen Hawking and his speech synthesizer that was wired to respond to minute muscle movements. So there's a way to communicate with them - but it's difficult and incredibly slow.

Those experimental brain implants? They have the potential to enable people with those issues to use a speech synthesizer reasonably fast, drive a wheelchair, or use a smartphone or a PC about as fast as you and me would.

Of course, it's still an early tech. It's unstable, the implants don't last and a lot of the uses are still being figured out. But if the core issues are resolved, it's going to be a game changer for many people with disabilities.