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I'm sure availability of testing methods and equipment has come a long way since the 1860s. As well as quality and purity of materials.

> Iran put all the resources they poured into secret nuclear facilities and missiles

Iran has agreed to open them for inspection several times.

> into economic development, infrastructure, and education

They're embargoed to a point where they can't do this.

> Iran would be in a completely different place today.

Iran's currency is backed by the crown jewels the Shah left behind.


Well that opened a bit of a rabbit hole. Looking at the source code I saw this which made me chuckle:

    RNUMBER  DC    F'16807'            RANDOM NUMBER.
Surely we wouldn't have DailyWTF quality code here. Looking for how it's referenced we find the RANDOM function itself:

    *        RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR.
    *        LEHMER'S METHOD, CACM JUNE '66, P 432.
    *        N(I+1) = P RES Q X N(I)
    *        P = (2**31)-1
    *        Q = 7**5
Following that lead to the original ACM article referenced:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/365696.365712

Which further lead to this rather interesting article on the history of the ROLL function which relies on this random number generator:

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/roll.htm

Neat!


I thought the rate of mining was tied to the maximum transaction rate the network can support?

It's the other way around, and there's no obligation to even carry transactions when mining, although it's incentivised through fees.

Your mining rate is simply your hash rate vs the hash difficulty.

Conceptually, it's analoglous to rolling random numbers in (0,1) until you get to a number smaller than 1/X, where X is large.

How long it takes you to do that, isn't dependent on how many other people are also trying to do that, if you get 1 hit per hour, then lots of other people getting hits doesn't actually stop you getting your 1 hit per hour.

Now, that's not quite the whole truth, as there's a small amount of time needed for propagation of the previous chain, but with an average hit globally of ~10 minutes, that's not actually a big factor.

What could happen to incentivise people is increased fees if blocks get less common due to dropped miners, there'd be more competition to get into blocks if they start filling up.

That combined with the fixed costs such as depreciation as othes mentioned, keeps the risk of this form of failure to a minimum.


> that ship has already sailed

"Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are."

Anyways, if you actually just say, "I don't have a smartphone" you'll be surprised at how accommodating the world remains.

> try using "Parkmobile" without a mobile phone

Okay:

https://support.parkmobile.io/hc/en-us/articles/368547636077...

Was that supposed to be impossible?


Where in that link are instructions provided for someone to use it without a mobile phone? I see instructions for calling, but that still requires a mobile phone (or if we're being generous, a street with a payphone nearby).


> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.

They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition.

NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission.

> Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle.

The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate.

On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use.

Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.


> The world was one way before ChatGPT, and another way after.

If you narrow the scope of "world" to "tech world." In the overwhelming majority of every other sector and profession the impact has been zero. In most non-English speaking parts of the world the impact has been zero.

> It's a factual statement.

The world was one way before Marvel superhero movies and a another way after. That's a factual statement. Did we lose track of value?


This is just false. I live in Vietnam and I see people working and studying with ChatGPT in Vietnamese all the time. You must not live in a non-english country if you think there’s no impact. Everyone here knows about chatgpt.

About 10% of the world uses ChatGPT. About 20% of the world speaks English. Yourself included, which is no surprise, because apparently 40% of Vietnamese possess basic English skills. These numbers are all worth thinking about.

Further 70% of ChatGPT usage is non work related. If it's primary use is as a glorified search engine then what "impact" did it actually have?


I'm sure they do believe they can successfully manipulate the market by lying to it. Elon Musk laid that groundwork a decade ago.

If you meant their "core mission" then every one of their actions belies their complete panic over the obvious failure of their technology.


True; however, this is an aluminium alloy. These typically have lower corrosion resistance and are most commonly anodized because of it. The applied layer is typically 3 to 5x thicker than that formed by pure aluminium oxidization.

You're off by at least 3 orders of magnitude, anodization is like 1,000x~5,000x thicker (5~25µm) than the natural oxide coating (~5nm).

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