I live out in the countryside. The nearest store is about 2.8km away. Put on some good music, get an ice cream for the second half of the trip, it’s a lovely walk. I could catch a bus back, there’s a stop right by the shop, but my timing is generally shite. If I’d be halfway home by the time the bus comes, I’d rather just walk.

But exactly because of that, they don’t have yeet. Long periods of low thrust are great for long duration missions, like satellites, stations and interplanetary probes, awful for a TLI burn.

Ion and plasma drives. They’re electric and work very well. All the thrust of a hefty fart, but high specific impulse allows them to burn for a long time, so they’re great for maneuvering in the vacuum.

I lose Virtual Desktop for my wireless VR, 3ds Max and Solidworks for CAM. If all I did was gaming, media and browsing, I’d switch. Which is why my HTPC, only used for couch gaming and media, is running Bazzite.

The basics (getting the OS installed, some initial settings to your liking etc) is quick. Managed to go from “completely untouched build” to “we gaming on Linux now boys” in a couple hours and most of that was waiting for BG3 to download on my 100Mbit connection. Pretty much everything I needed worked right on the first boot. Then again, I didn’t have much data to transfer over.

Most of the Falcon 9 launches are for Starlink and are paid for by SpaceX themselves. How is that “the government subsidizing them”? If you want to argue that they’re using money they got from NASA to fund those launches, is your plumber feeding their family from you subsidizing their life?

Yep. And if they fail to deliver on the lofty expectations they’ve created here, the backlash is going to be epic. I don’t want to root for their downfall, but… Imma stock up on popcorn.

A lot of that time, if not the vast majority, is likely performance testing. That’s trivial to automate and can be run across 100+ systems simultaneously.

Because now it’s practically a necessity. Before that, you could easily not put a case on your phone, exercise some basic care with it and you would’ve been fine. None of my previous phones had a case on them. Not a one. Because I don’t drop them, I don’t throw them and I don’t use them for hammering in bolts or whatever. But the camera bump finally got me to put a case on my phone, because the damn thing not sitting flat on a flat surface annoyed me too much.

I suppose I’m somewhat fortunate to have been a poor bastard for most of my life. 25fps with moldy potato settings was just fine, as long as the game didn’t crash or deep fry the CPU, so I’m not as sensitive to the occasional drop below 60fps and don’t feel slighted when I have to turn some settings down. Though I can understand being incensed when you’ve poured thousands into a bleeding-edge gaming rig that’s supposed to handle anything at 4k, maxed out and a stable 120fps and it’s the game itself dragging your experience down.

But the stutters weren’t the only problem people reported early on. There were cries of the game being unplayable, on account of endless bugs, visual glitches and repeated hard crashes. Worst I got was the normal mapping on Cal’s face getting real weird in certain lighting conditions. That’s hardly game-breaking.

I mean if you want to invalidate my lived experience, sure. Played on release on a 5600X, RTX3070 and 32GB of RAM, 1080p, almost everything maxed out. Open areas on Koboh saw a drop to mid-40 fps, but other than that, I had one hard crash and no bugs I noticed.

Cause no one wants to look like the idiot. And when no one has read the article, it’s a lot harder to dispute the claims of what the article is about. It’s a vicious cycle - someone who hasn’t read the actual article makes claims about it, others who also haven’t read it react and before you know it, you’re ten posts deep, arguing about something that may or may not have happened. All it takes is one person to make an under-informed post and another to pick up on it. The difference between thousands and millions of users affects only the probability of it happening.

It’s not Reddit behavior. It’s just the limited capacity we have for dealing with the flood of information we’re exposed to. Between that and the daily stresses of work, family and whatever else a given person has going on, there’s no time to filter out what is or isn’t important, there’s no time for nuance or thought, there’s only time enough for a knee-jerk reaction before the next aggravating thing comes along.

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.

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.

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”.

No more pre-defined dialog trees for NPCs and more reactive interactions. An example from BG3:

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.

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.

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?