Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts on
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:
This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign.
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Your bad language filter will not work. Here is why it will not work.
(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.)
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:
[ ] Filters many innocuous terms
[ ] Ignores many offensive terms
[ ] Doesn’t account for foreign names
[ ] Doesn’t account for English names
[ ] Doesn’t account for technical terms
[ ] Doesn’t account for everyday language
[ ] Alteration sometimes looks more offensive than the original
[ ] Doesn’t inform the writer what the issue is
If your filter were ever to gain widespread adoption, it would trivially be circumvented in its main function by slur measures such as:
[ ] abbreviating to ‘a-hole‘
[ ] misspelling to ‘phaggot’
[ ] synonymizing to ‘dickslurper’
[ ] character substitution to ‘wh0re’
[ ] Regional Indicator Symbol 🇳
[ ] Inserting empty <b></b> tag pairs mid-word
While also having negative impact in several other areas including
Furthermore, the following philosophical objections apply:
[ ] You’ve never bloody well heard of the Scunthorpe problem, have you?
[ ] It’s still censorship even if you like it and mean well
[ ] Doesn’t account for gradual adoption
[ ] Doesn’t account for indefinite opt-outs and hold-outs
[ ] Regexes don’t work that way
[ ] Regexes can’t work that way
[ ] Fonts shouldn’t work that way
- [ ] Fonts shouldn’t perform man-in-the-middle attacks
- [ ] Fonts shouldn’t replace a two-letter word with a three-word phrase
[ ] Heavily bowdlerized synonyms will alter meaning
[ ] Replacing curse words with funny words results in people reading hostility into those funny words
[ ] Widespread collateral damage to innocent people’s conversations
[ ] Likely to teach people more slurs as they notice the filter’s workings
[ ] New slurs will develop that you haven’t accounted for
[ ] Will require more user effort to deal with than the moderator effort it saves
[ ] Imposes an enormous burden on ESL speakers
[ ] This has been tried and failed so many times that we now have stock phrases like ‘Scunthorpe problem’ and ‘clbuttic mistake’ and your approach doesn’t bring anything new to the table
In closing, I would like to say
[ ] Clever idea, but you have a long way to go before this is usable for the general population
[ ] This was a bad idea from the start, and I’m afraid you’re wasting your time
[ ] This is a downright malicious idea, and you’re making the world just a little bit worse
Seriously. I’m pretty sure that a third of the value I provide to my company is heading this sort of thing off. I will routinely see teammates or client/partner teams bend themselves into pretzels, plan out or even implement towers of unsustainable nonsense, all in order to avoid asking some other team to change something (or even just ask for permission to change it themselves). No, sorry, you have to talk to the other team. Technical ingenuity does not exempt you from having a conversation! Go directly to programmer jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
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.
(Also, if you’re someone who has done both professionally, I invite you to share you perspective. If you’re someone who has only done software professionally and would like to speculate about this, please consider that I also read shit on hackernews and what you are about to say may not be that novel.)
Logistics and legibility are hard, a small case study
“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.
There’s also an ad for a pest control company in Medina, and a Nigerian scammer who wants more funds for “expansion, acquire equipment and some other needs“ among the blatantly dishonest ones.
Then there’s entries which look merely garbled, like an organization providing food to needy families in Andhra Pradesh. I would guess they ran the site through Google Translate and clicked on a few likely-looking buttons to indicate they want help.
Someone(s?) at turntheyoutharound has posted two ads. The first for COVID-19 Ethnic Education,
Due to the health disparities in the managing of the COVID-19 crisis among ethnic minorities education is critical
and the second for COVID-19 Ethnic Education,
Due to the uneven distribution of Covid-19 cases among people of color educational initiatives are needed
The “Eternal-ism” movement provides a website link to eternal-ism.org that 404s, and a description which sounds less like a Google Translate product and more like a GPT3 product:
Initiated on the bases of humanitarian journalism, with peace and international solidarity is the least we can own those who suffer the most from injustice, war, outbreak and hardship circumstances the vulnerable communicates and individual needs and deserve at least the compassion and assistance for faith in humanity to be restored and sustainable development goals can be fulfilled or as great as a child smile that we need to protect for brighter future
This movement would like support with anything and everything.
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The most reasonable-looking one I’ve seen so far, with a narrow goal that’s clearly communicated, is ‘Crew Change Now!’, a well-established English charity trying to connect ship-stuck sailors with mental health resources during corona quarantine, and trying to Raise Awareness for this predicament of sailors.
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So the first problem here is logistics.
Your helpful AAC website trying to helpfully connect helpers with people who need help during COVID-19 will suffer a deluge of spammers, scammers and garbled ads.
Before one can even begin helping, someone (whether me or AAC) has to sort through the ads to find the legitimate ones, and then sort through the legitimate ones to find the helpable ones. And if every user like me has to sort through them, that’s a lot of duplicated effort, as well as an unknown amount of people whose heuristics will reasonably say that this site is so full of spam you should concentrate your effort elsewhere.
But the second problem that comes up if AAC tries sorting centrally is legibility.
There’s no sharp, objective line between garbled incoherent spam postings, and postings by an impoverished ESL speaker relying on Google Translate and no proofreader.
And the more leeway you give to the unintelligible, the more space you also open for scammers to put a few words vaguely related to coronavirus before requesting money, and they’ll get a patina of legitimacy from being posted on the AAC site rather than sent by direct email. Furthermore, where many users sorting through the junkpile might individually recognize personally familiar phrases or known Google Translate corruptions or obscure signs of legitimacy, AAC has will no doubt miss a lot of those when trying to toss out junk posts.
But the possibility of AAC doing detailed investigation into each entry posted drives you right back into the problem of logistics.
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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]
[1] I think the issue here isn’t necessarily “path dependence” but rather whether it’s even possible to tell if path dependence exists in situations where you can’t easily make independent comparisons.
[2] In fairness, I wrote this paragraph before I wrote the last paragraph.
[3] Actually, oops that’s in my drafts. But anyhow, both Sequoyah’s invention of the Cherokee syllabary and that one crazy guy’s invention of Pahawh Hmong fit into this category. Things like the Phoenician phonetic innovation over Egyptian (or whoever) and King Sejong’s invention of Hangul are very impressive for the systematic leaps they made over preexisting systems, but there isn’t evidence that they were created by smart illiterate people who just banged something out from scratch (afaik), so I’d count these as a separate category.
[4] Unsure if other people thought the ending of Europa Report was uplifting.
Sixteen years ago, I thought that owning a bar and running a tech startup simultaneously would be a great match for my ADD. Ultimately, what made the late..
An interesting take on how to overcome Goodhart’s law: Keep your proxy measures secret so they can’t be gamed.