#hard problems

tl;dr:

If starship succeeds, it will lower the per-kg cost of sending shit to space by orders of magnitude.

That would imply that spending a bazillion dollars and several years to shave off a few kg is a catastrophically bad strategy for designing payloads.

But that has always been NASA's strategy, and it doesn't seem to have even occurred to them that they might want to change it.

If starship fails, then maybe you could argue that sticking with the existing strategy would be good. But if starship fails, then NASA is also screwed because they selected it for the HLS part of their Artemis mission anyways.

(Also, NASA's current in-house launch vehicle project is more expensive and less capable than previous generations of their own rockets.)

And a pull quote I found funny:

(Inspired by the long-standing Scunthorpe problem, such items as ‘Your spam solution will not work’ and ‘Your calendar reform will not work’, and mostly my recent discovery of the PoliteType Initiative which ticks many of the boxes but not all.)

You propose a

[ ] bleeping-out [ ] synonym-substituting [ ] send-restricting [ ] character-editing [ ] render-altering [ ] other: ___________________

approach to automatically detect, filter and moderate bad language without the need for human intervention. Your idea will not work. Here is why it will not work.

[ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘Scunthorpe’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘Lightwater’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘Pakistan’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘Enola Gay’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘abbot’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘fatty acid’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘spice’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘classic’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘hearse’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘prickling’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘magna cum laude’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘peacock’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘skyscraper’ [ ] Your filter doesn’t let me say ‘muffled’

More generally, your filter appears to suffer the following flaws:

Is “Software Engineering” really engineering? I’ve definitely heard a lot of takes about this. Some from Real Engineers™, most of them from software developers. But what if we actually asked people who have done both?

Hillel Wayne has taken this apparently novel approach and presents some initial findings in this video. Perhaps software and traditional engineering disciplines, as they are actually practiced, aren’t nearly as different as people imagine them to be, and the actual differences aren’t very well captured by the common takes that people usually bring up in these conversations. Worth the watch.

“Small case study” sounds so much better than “anecdote”, doesn’t it? ;-)

Boss at work: Since our IT company is currently bereft of orders, I encourage employees to look at the initiatives on ActionAgainstCorona dot org and see if there’s any software initiative projects you want to assist on company time that can help pad your resume and our PR.

ActionAgainstCorona dot org: Quality control? Spam removal? You really think someone would do that, just go on the Internet and tell lies?

LET’S END COVID-19 THROUGH AWARENESS TRAINING

MISSION STATEMENT The goal of the project is to implement awareness development training which will end the Covid-19 ,  other contagious diseases , global conflict, mobilize & transform society and boost global organization visions.

The project engages association, private and public organization and people in a diverse & global welcoming community. The project is the definitive source for ideas, information and learning resources, tools, and inspiring transformation for a new world.

it’s like someone piled up every buzzword and optimistic goal faintly related to Covid-19 for their AAC post

AGRICULTURE OUTCOME The agriculture development succeeded through the achievement of piping network of distributions system to water all the inhabitants’ plantations and gardens.        – This improved the community plantations and creates all the food productions.         -Reduced poverty, hungers and malnutrition within the populations.         -Ended robberies of harvest from each other and crimes.         -Created mobilization of work and a vibrant community. 

and then they began piling up things that weren’t even related to Covid-19, and it just goes on and on like that. Both this posting and the AAC site as a whole.

Some more thoughts on past-survival-predicts-future-survival and path-dependence[1] inspired by oligops’ thread:

Probably the most extreme case of this is “industrial civilization”.[2] Obviously this is one of the most important watersheds in human history, and it only happened once, because it spread so fast (in a world that was already pretty well connected). The questions about the specific history of it happening are pretty interesting, but it’s very difficult to know what is just a specific history of a specific place and what’s causally important (much less necessary or sufficient!) since at some granularity, N=1. Yeah, you can look at relative development on different axes across countries leading up to it, but most of the countries you’d bother looking at are all right next to each other anyway and are extremely similar in a ton of ways most of which are presumably not important.

I have a specific interest in the development of writing. As the linked tag suggests, it was invented independently three times (maybe 4, but probably 3). When I say “invented” here, I mean that a civilization developed a system of writing without preexisting access to the very idea of putting speech into physical form. I’ve also written a little bit about some cases of scripts being developed with knowledge of the concept of writing but otherwise from scratch, which is interesting but not the same.[3] To some extent, the fact that it’s so easy to invent once you know that it’s a thing makes it amazing that it was independently invented multiple times at all! (Thank you mountains and oceans for giving us N=3.) And it turns out 3 is a lot bigger than 1. There are some really striking similarities in how writing was bootstrapped in these different instances (pictographic/ideographic/iconic -> rebuses -> more systematic ways of coining things phonetically), so I think we can actually make some pretty solid and substantive claims about this topic in a way that we never will be able to about, say, industrial civilization.

This problem isn’t limited to history, archaeology, or political science. I mean, maybe one day we’ll discover life on other planets, but until then, we’re stuck with an N=1 that’s well within the realm of science while also feeling nearly religious in significance. And that N=1 plays out in a number of other points in our evolutionary tree, leaving plenty of mysteries in its wake. Here’s to hoping for evil Europan squids![4]