The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.

The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.

Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.

Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.

A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he’s been saving for a special occasion.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

I mean, I think he’s a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.

When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren’t even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we’d probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.

Except, there’s some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because “all situations” means “understanding that there’s a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I’m going to assume they are going to do something dumb” or “some guy put a warning sign on the road and it’s got really bad handwriting”

Thus, the real problem is that he’s not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren’t safe either.

It’s important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It’s just that in ages past the VC’s would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder’s dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don’t nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it’s OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they’ll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people’s impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn’t be an engineer but they’ll be a supervisor or something?

It’s kinda un-earned? Like, there’s stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it’s become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won’t happen now.

And, dono, once you’ve solved the hard problems early on, there’s less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that’s going to the top and wouldn’t mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.

The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they’ve gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you’ve shattered the illusion.

tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

All things being equal, however, I’d rather they do the version more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Masterful gambit, sir.

Okay, so understanding that Boeing has been shipping airliners that boing instead of fly or have some bolts missing…

My dad was a frustratingly retired aerospace engineer because there was this period of the 90s where we actually did shrink the defense industry until 9/11 and the contractors started figuring out exactly how to “bribe” people. And one of his side complaints is that any aerospace engineer is probably actually good at being a general-purpose mechanical engineer, except that they’ve generally made the hard stuff actually safe earlier along, but nobody will hire them. His example being fully-automated-digital-engine-controls and fly-by-wire and having three redundant chains.

So, in the aftermath of the whole Toyota throttle-by-wire thing that really didn’t go a whole lot of useful ways, I decided to check out his observation and I did some googling to discover a page where some big company was advertising to the auto industry at large their throttle controllers. And they talk about how they were built with “aerospace technologies” to be reliable and safe. And, looking farther along, it seems like that was not actually three redundant chains, just three threads of execution on the same processor.

Oh yeah, and generally any airplane that does have fly-by-wire and FADEC there is going to always be a set of reversion modes and people have to know about them. Obviously some aspects of this are far stricter because a car can just pull over to the side of the road… but also it needs to do that safely. Witness poor Anton Yelchin dying ignominiously because of the digital gear shifter thing on his Jeep.

But, yeah, the underlying problem is that the cultural expectation is to make cars that will go most places containing capabilities that a vehicle might never actually use in its entire service life and require the minimum amount of knowledge and basically zero knowledge above the collective cultural understanding of a car that’s only mildly changed since a fully-mechanically-linked control system.

As best I can tell, the touchscreen is added at the concept phase by folks who mostly know what’s going to make people look at the car and want to buy it, several years before the car hits the market and well before the actual car electronics teams are involved.

So, yeah, car UI/UX sucks right now because we’re seeing all of the things added to cars a few years ago in response to Tesla and implemented by people who think that just because they programmed a random car-focused microcontroller back in the day that this means that they understand all of the layers involved in a modern Linux or Android or Windows embedded car electronics unit including layer 8 of the OSI stack (meaning: interfacing with humans)

But, yah, dono. I don’t actually have my own car. My spouse got a Mazda a bunch of years ago now and it has actually a pretty good touchscreen interface with physical controls such that if you want to dig into stuff, you can touchscreen but all of the common stuff is switches and knobs. The generation before that had way way too many buttons and it was just gag-me-with-a-spoon. The generation after that removed the touchscreen because the leadership at Mazda decided people were just not to be trusted with a touchscreen and I feel like they went a little too far in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, in airplane cockpit design, they put great pains into having you be able to navigate by touch where necessary such that all of the knobs are differently textured or shaped. And, as I said, I don’t actually have my own car, but I have to say that if I did have a car, I’d want it to be designed like that.

My suspicion is that it’s because the shots are called by people who worked their way up doing automotive electronics. As in the microcontrollers inside of engine control units. So UX is kinda foreign.

I mean, even there, the marketplace of electric cars has expanded. For a while, it was the only car, then the only good car, now I see a lot of people buying fancy brand new not-Tesla cars that don’t seem to have the drawbacks of the earlier not-Tesla electric cars.

One of the problems with the automaking industry is that there’s a lot of stuff where you buy a very expensive machine and have a very expensive setup for said expensive machine (molds, templates, whatnot) and then the cost for almost everything else (materials, person-hours, etc) is lost in the noise.

Scaling up and down a car assembly line is hard so an automaker really wants to plan this out really really well such that the design is done at exactly the right time for the big switchover, you have a constant staffing level for the line, all of the machines are working roughly at their optimum capacity, and you’ve got enough spare cars so everybody can go to the lot and get a car of their choice fast enough to satisfy whatever impulse caused them to want a new one.

So I guess mayyyyybe possibly they are working to get ahead of the seasonality of car buying but I’m betting that what really happened is that they screwed up their planning, possibly because some chunk of the potential buying population doesn’t want a Tesla anymore.