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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me “that’s a red bicycle” is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it.

    Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking “what is this thing” or “help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them” or “what kind of spider is this” all the time. They’re not searching for red bicycles, they’re taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.

    And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.



  • NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

    But ultimately it’s still just contracting.


  • NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.

    That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.

    The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).



  • Your original comment said 2050, which is a long way off. SpaceX’s first launch attempt was in 2006, their first successful launch was in 2008, their first successful recovery of a rocket in reusable condition was in 2015, and first reused a rocket in 2017. If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?


  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    Physics don’t change fundamentally between 6 meters and 120 meters

    Yes it does. Mass to strength ratio of structural components changes with scale. So does the thrust to mass ratio of a rocket and its fuel. So does heat dissipation (affected by ratio of surface area to mass).

    And I don’t know shit about fluid dynamics, but I’m skeptical that things scale cleanly, either.

    Scaling upward will encounter challenges not apparent at small sizes. That goes for everything from engineering bridges to buildings to cars to boats to aircraft to spacecraft.


  • The satellite constellation is the natural consequence of cheaper rockets. It’s a true paradigm shift, but the pioneer in this case has only the moat of being able to spend less money per launch. If someone else can deliver payloads to low earth orbit for less than $2,000/kg, then they’ll easily be able to launch a Starlink competitor.



  • The actual key management and encryption protocols are published. Each new device generates a new key and reports their public key to an Apple-maintained directory. When a client wants to send a message, it checks the directory to know which unique devices it should send the message to, and the public key for each device.

    Any newly added device doesn’t have the ability to retrieve old messages. But history can be transferred from old devices if they’re still working and online.

    Basically, if you’ve configured things for maximum security, you will lose your message history if you lose or break your only logged-in device.

    There’s no real way to audit whether Apple’s implementation follows the protocols they’ve published, but we’ve seen no indicators that they aren’t doing what they say.


  • It’s a chain of trust, you have to trust the whole chain.

    Including the entire other side of the conversation. E2EE in a group chat still exposes the group chat if one participant shares their own key (or the chats themselves) with something insecure. Obviously any participant can copy and paste things, archive/log/screenshot things. It can all be automated, too.

    Take, for example, iMessage. We have pretty good confidence that Apple can’t read your chats when you have configured it correctly: E2EE, no iCloud archiving of the chats, no backups of the keys. But do you trust that the other side of the conversation has done the exact same thing correctly?

    Or take for example the stupid case of senior American military officials accidentally adding a prominent journalist to their war plans signal chat. It’s not a technical failure of signal’s encryption, but a mistake by one of the participants inviting the wrong person, who then published the chat to the world.





  • Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.

    Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.

    Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.

    Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.



  • That’s never really been true. It’s a cat and mouse game.

    If Google actually used its 2015 or 2005 algorithms as written, but on a 2025 index of webpages, that ranking system would be dogshit because the spammers have already figured out how to crowd out the actual quality pages with their own manipulated results.

    Tricking the 2015 engine using 2025 SEO techniques is easy. The problem is that Google hasn’t actually been on the winning side of properly ranking quality for maybe 5-10 years, and quietly outsourced the search ranking systems to the ranking systems of the big user sites: Pinterest, Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, even Twitter to some degree. If there’s a responsive result and it ranks highly on those user voted sites, then it’s probably a good result. And they got away with switching to that methodology just long enough for each of those services to drown in their own SEO spam techniques, so that those services are all much worse than they were in 2015. And now indexing search based on those sites is no longer a good search result.

    There’s no turning backwards. We need to adopt new rankings for the new reality, not try to turn back to when we were able to get good results.



  • All the other answers here are wrong. It was the Boeing 737-Max.

    They fit bigger, more fuel efficient engines on it that changed the flight characteristics, compared to previous 737s. And so rather than have pilots recertify on this as a new model (lots of flight hours, can’t switch back), they designed software to basically make the aircraft seem to behave like the old model.

    And so a bug in the cheaper version of the software, combined with a faulty sensor, would cause the software to take over and try to override the pilots and dive downward instead of pulling up. Two crashes happened within 5 months, to aircraft that were pretty much brand new.

    It was grounded for a while as Boeing fixed the software and hardware issues, and, more importantly, updated all the training and reference materials for pilots so that they were aware of this basically secret setting that could kill everyone.