And C++/CLI uses ^ for "managed pointers" (pointer to .net objects) and % for "managed references" which means there are all-together 4 ways to declare various types of pointers which is super-fun.
> The Soviets abandoned that project because they couldn't get their 30 engines to synchronize. Maybe this time AI (c) will help solve the problem. We will watch and see.
Worth mentioning that N-1 was severely limited by the state of electronics technology in late 60s Soviet Union. The first 3 launches of the N-1 rocket didn't even have a digital flight computer, they relied on an [analogue system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)#Engine_control_sys...).
The Space Falcon Heavy uses 27 engines and it has a perfect reliability record over five launches. Having many engines on a rocket is a solved problem and it even brings some advantages - you can still reach orbit if you lose one or two of them.
I've been using ChatGPT for language learning by asking it to explain the differences between words. The answers align with what the dictionary says but are far more elaborate and better nuanced.
It wouldn't be possible to get equivalent explanations from native speakers unless you pay them to teach.
Car companies deserve to have a severely depressed valuation because they're currently being forced to transition away from internal combustion. The ICE manufacturing industry is the worst one to be in because government are determined to kill you.
Tesla doesn't have this overhang and is also growing very fast.
A lot of stuff is known about it. Both the US and USSR first operated long-duration space stations nearly half a century ago.
Gravity and radiation are well understood and we can definitely build machinery that can tolerate them well for many years.
> we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed.
Why doesn't the ISS count? It gets resupplied every few months but a Mars base would be resupplied every two years so systems only have to scale to last 10x as long.
Only national space agencies have had a reason to invest in keeping humans alive for long periods of time so they are the only organizations that have demonstrated that capability. It doesn't follow that SpaceX couldn't do it - they just didn't have a reason for it so far.
This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.
NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.
A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.
Life support is not particularly difficult if you can just throw mass at it.
It's probably true that Starship would only be capable to support 10 colonists all the way to Mars and that's still pretty damn good. This number will grow if you have a separate life support system on the surface and don't have to rely on the ship but the first missions will indeed have a very small crew.
The FBI seized the laptop in December 2021, nearly an year before it was revealed. They knew it was real but they strongly encouraged media companies to "expect a leak". As a consequence of this the story was strongly suppressed and the general public came to believe the opposite of the truth.
It's true that the FBI didn't force companies to kill the story but the story was still killed as a result of FBI actions. Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?
There is no proof that Joe Biden himself acted improperly but Hunter Biden did receive large consulting fees for performing no work - he spent his time on cocaine and hookers instead. This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.
Providing sources is the most important feature missing in chatgpt and perplexity.ai does indeed attempt to solve it. The other problem is that chatgpt is often factually incorrect and gives no hint of uncertainty.
I've been using perplexity.ai recently and often times the results are more helpful than google and it tends to spew less opaque bullshit than chatgpt.
As far as I understand the FBI knew that the Hunter Biden story was real but encouraged everybody else to believe that it was a Russian hoax. Doesn't this count as lying? It's not just lying, it's explicit disinformation with an electoral goal.
This went so far that major web platforms blocked all forms of disagreement and the public dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. It was highly effective.
I hate Trump's guts but it's important to acknowledge the enormous amount of effort that went into covering up the behavior of Biden's son.
The distinction between the government "asking nicely" and "making demands" is not strong enough. In theory could Twitter could have resisted but the costs would have been quite high.
The government should be prohibited from making such requests.
It's also apparent that regarding the Hunter Biden story the FBI outright lied in order to make web platforms censor the story.
The argument that "it's not censorship if a private company does it" was always weak.
What these revelations show is that a lot of so-called moderation was done at the explicit direction of government employees. How do you defend this? "it's not censorship if the private company willingly complies with government requests"? A refusal by twitter would have had quite high costs for the company.
The cooperation between private companies and government censors is so deep that this is barely distinguishable from direct censorship.