The (also awesome) writer Jo Walton wrote a great celebration of Ursula Le Guin's life. She wrote in part:
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field…
Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
This doesn't address the ecosystem problems and costs imposed by climate change - but for crops and drinking water, it looks like fresh water created by solar powered desalinization is going to be very inexpensive in the future. [1][2] This is mainly due to the fact that solar power will be almost free in the near future.[3]
It depends on what you are thinking critically about - what is your frame of mind. You don't see a viable business here.
But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.
For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.
Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]
It's not nonsense. To refuel Starship to land on the Moon like the NASA HLS program proposes [1], it will take 16 Starship Tanker flights [2][3]. So 16 launch, transfer propellant, land, refuel and refill propellant on the ground, and repeat.
For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them.
You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles.
Apple | https://apple.com | AIML – Sr Full-stack Software Engineer, Data Operations | FULLTIME | ONSITE / HYBRID (3 days in office, 2 at home) | Seattle, WA, USA
Our team builds software to collect and annotate high-quality data used to train LLMs and other AI and ML models for products across Apple. We're looking for a senior software engineer who can design and build mission-critical, large scale, cloud-based distributed systems, web-based APIs and web apps, and can be the technical lead for projects within our team and across teams. The ideal person would have strong technical skills, strong collaboration skills, and strong people skills. See the job description above for details.
I'm the hiring manager, if you apply your application will come directly to me.
Check out Jeffrey "JB" Straubel's new company, Redwood Materials[1][2]. They recycle lithium-ion batteries. He was Tesla's former chief technology officer.
They are essentially a lithium mine that's using a very high quality ore, ground-up batteries.
Our team builds iOS apps, back-end cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and does AI/ML model training and inference to support Apple's AI efforts. Native iOS (Swift or Objective C) and cloud infrastructure experience are both required. Apply at the link above and include a cover letter. It will come to me.
> But the value is not that we don't need stack overflow, it is that we don't need as many programmers.
I'll believe that when I see it. I lead a team of AI-boosted developers, I'm hiring as fast as I can, and all my company wants out of them is more and more.
If they have 2x, 3x, or 10x output, the company can and will use it all.
Then there is the Tamagotchi Singularity inspired by an XKCD comic [1]. It is a server full of emulated tamagotchis [2] that interact with each other in a simulator, all running code dumped by Natalie's technique. I'm impressed by both these hacks, especially the combination.
From _A Wizard of Earthsea_, the first book, near the end:
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Éa, which is the oldest song, it is said,
“Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
"Every engine, elex box, COPV, etc, gets an Acceptance Test (ATP) as they come off the line to verify good workmanship. (The one time Qual verifies the design. BE4 is qualified). The BE4's on Cert1 have passed ATP, as have many others. This engine failed ATP." [1]
At 07:55 UTC, when Vostok 1 was still 7 km (4.3 mi) from the ground, the hatch of the spacecraft was released, and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected. At 2.5 km (8,200 ft) altitude, the main parachute was deployed from the Vostok spacecraft.[43]
Gagarin's parachute opened almost immediately, and about ten minutes later, at 08:05 UTC, Gagarin landed. Both he and the spacecraft landed via parachute 26 km (16 mi) south west of Engels, in the Saratov region at 51.270682°N 45.99727°E.
An indoor marketplace with shelf space you can lease is actually the business model of most large grocery chains. [1] Food manufacturers rent shelf space to display and sell their products. But these stores are run by corporations, not by the government.
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field… Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
https://reactormag.com/bright-the-hawks-flight-in-the-empty-...