NieR: Automata

For some reason this New Scientist cartoon lives in my head. Maybe because it challenges the way I think about the future? Or maybe it’s just cute.

Original source, by Tom Gauld

Thanks so much for doing this! I almost forgot to enter.

I won’t be using these features, but I’m not sure there’s cause for concern. The implementation seems very sensible and legitimately privacy-centric. The LLM runs locally and is meant as an very basic email proofreader. The crypto wallet is a likely an extension of the password management tech they’ve already developed, with transaction features that some people care about.

I can see why some people want these features, and I’m glad there are new alternatives.

Musk is gross and SpaceX has some questionable marketing claims that you’ve identified, but I don’t see how anyone could claim that anything about the company’s products are a shitshow.

Falcon 9 has radically changed the economics of the space industry, and has no competition to force lower prices.

Starship has had a very successful testing campaign, and operates within a different development paradigm than Saturn. They’ve shown more progress on more technology in the last year than almost any rocket ever. It won’t be long before Starship has demonstrated all the capabilities you mentioned. While the price tag is large in absolute terms, it will be very cheap relative to the competition.

Dear Moon was not canceled by SpaceX, and no one who follows the industry has ever believed Musk’s timelines.

I guess I’m confused, because everything I know about Starship points towards it being one of the most incredible engineering accomplishments ever. There are lots of other problems with SpaceX’s leadership, environmental impact, and work culture, but aren’t the products inspiring?

What a weird situation. I suppose it’s nice those workarounds exist, even if they’re not ideal.

Interesting! I assume it involves a smart plug and an automation script that monitors battery level?

Wow, Graphene really doesn’t have charging limits?

I assume this is the discussion you referred to, and I think it broke my trust in the project.

Edit: As far as I can tell, many of the frustrating parts of that thread are from random posters and not devs. I’m still annoyed that such a basic feature is considered controversial.

Thanks for this! I’ve spent several dozen hours trying to get SteamVR working well on Linux, and finally gave up.

Is the Monado experience close enough to Windows to be usable? Are you aware of any major tradeoffs?

At this point I accept that Valve probably can’t compete with the billions poured into the Meta Quest 3, but I’m glad they understand there’s an enthusiastic audience for whatever they do next.

Correct, here’s a guide to enabling Wayland.

I’ve never had OP’s problem, but another avenue I’d consider is to set display settings in the nvidia-settings app, which can be opened with a GUI from the terminal. These settings are separate from those in the normal settings menu, in ways I don’t totally understand.

I expected to roll my eyes at this article but it’s actually quite compelling and well written. The Kagi website’s lack of nuanced privacy discussion already turned me off, and now I’m just going to pretend the service doesn’t exist.

What scanners do people recommend?

Game: Elden Ring

This year I decided to start biking to work and it’s been a complete joy. The commute is fairly long, but it’s beautiful and gives me time to reflect and turn my worry-brain off. I’m more productive at work, I feel better about my lifestyle, and my body is really happy about it. I’m lucky to be in a career and geography that allows this, and I’m grateful for all the work that people in my community have done to improve cycling infrastructure.

Thanks so much for doing this!

Vermillion VR, if it’s available! I’ve been curious about it for a while.

This is really nice of you, thanks!

Edit: Sent a PM.

Woah. I assume Thunderbolt will still have latency benefits. For example, we’re not going to have wireless eGPUs, surely? I hope I’m wrong, because wireless PCIe lanes would be amazing.

It’s worth pointing out that they’re now a publicly traded company.

Just wait, soon we’ll all be editing documents using tiny scalpels.

Yeah, the concrete storm wasn’t great last time. They did have some engineering reasons to believe it would work for a single launch, but it seems like there was more subsurface damage to the concrete than they realized. As far as I know the only property that was significantly damaged was related to the company, but I’m sure there were some smaller residential insurance claims for the dust.

Part of the reason Saturday’s launch was delayed was so that more environmental assessments could be performed. A few weeks ago there some government scientists taking samples at the launch site for a baseline measurement to compare against in the future, and the entire project was reviewed by environmental regulators. So, those agencies were very involved in approving the launch license and SpaceX can’t just do whatever the owner wants them to. I guess my point is that it’s not strictly PR-speak, there really are qualified people making these decisions. But I agree that it’s not great to have the facility in the middle of a sensitive wetland, and no doubt there was backdoor politicking. I wish SpaceX would do more to offset the harm they cause, but I still think the StarShip project does more good than harm.

But isn’t the key aspect here “orbit”? I get that the FTS would lengthen the trajectory of some of the debris, but would it be enough to create a stable orbit? The original trajectory was going to splashdown near Hawaii.

I certainly agree that there are lots of environmental downsides to space exploration that are increasingly overlooked, I’m just not sure that there’s anything extra egregious about this flight.

They made a bunch of really cool changes to address the issues from last time, and they seem to have worked almost perfectly. For one, they built a giant water cooled steel plate under the launch mount (affectionately called the Booster Bidet), and the engineering behind it is pretty neat.

They’ve been pretty transparent about their expectations for these early test flights, and today’s achievements match those expectations. For example, they didn’t bother securing all the thermal tiles because they didn’t really expect to survive re-entry.

The rocket didn’t go to LEO. This was intentional, because they knew that this flight was unlikely to survive and they’re as concerned about space debris as you are. All the debris either burned up or fell into the ocean.