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My experience of using ChatGPT to assist in code mirrors this… i was a little slower for a week or so and then I accelerated away. The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy…
Welcome to Edition 6.25 of the Rocket Report! We hope all our readers had a peaceful holiday break. While many of us were enjoying time off work, launch companies like SpaceX kept up the pace until the final days of 2023. Last year saw a record level of global launch activity, with 223 orbital launch…
Pax Americana rests on two pillars: US military might and diplomatic power. By failing to rein in the scale of Israel’s actions in Gaza or in deterring Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, those pillars seem shaky. Bolstering them requires swift and decisive action from Joe Biden. The cost of continued relative inaction is simply…
Crawford and Schulze-Makuch ask a blunt question in the title of their paper in Nature Astronomy: ”Is the apparent absence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations down to the zoo hypothesis or nothing?” The zoo hypothesis posits that we are being studied by beings that for reasons of their own avoid contact. David Brin referred in his classic…
This is how you fight greed-flation Pepsi products are being removed from Carrefour’s shelves in Europe over “unacceptable price increases,” including Doritos and Quaker cereals as well as the company’s famed cola.
Yesterday I posted about how sanctions against China are very very dumb. Here is another good example of why. Elon Musk dismissed BYD in 2011 by laughing at their products during a Bloomberg interview. “Have you seen their car?” Musk quipped. “I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong. And BYD as a company…
Now think about what the data’s telling us. Macro indicators, micro indicators—things are just fine. Well-being—things are crushing, terrible, people are in despair and ruin. This is the Great Divergence in action. How can this be, though? How can these statistics all disagree? Remember, well-being data was invented because GDP and its ilk faced a…
Just like the ESP8266’s popularity exploded when it was added to the Arduino IDE, we’ve got high hopes for the CH32 family in the coming months.
The leadership of ASML had resisted these sanctions because they said it wouldn’t work: what would happen is that China would learn how to make the machines themselves. What he didn’t say, but it is true, is that ASML would not just lose the Chinese market, they would eventually lose the world market anywhere that…
The team overcame a longstanding obstacle that has caused grief for graphene researchers for decades. Semiconductors require a band gap, across which electrons might or might not be able to jump. Graphene’s lack of a band gap meant that many scientists expected graphene electronics to be doomed – until now. “We now have an extremely…
Yet there’s potentially a more sinister angle. California Forever aligns suspiciously with a cultish dystopian movement to build so-called “network states”—private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments. The secret plot to assemble vast swaths of land and build a new city fits…
If you’re not happy with the spec, change it. But once there’s a spec, goodenough is good enough.
Add these factors together: how do you run a society with a constantly, rapidly increasing subset of the population long-term ill? Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it’s wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again.…
While the exact composition of these worlds remains unclear, estimates of their surface temperatures from previous studies point them being significantly colder than Earth. They’re also each less dense than Earth, despite being roughly the same size as our planet. “Our analyses predict that these 17 worlds may have ice-covered surfaces but receive enough internal heating…
Richard Murphy provides a fine takedown of the pernicious role neoclassical economists have played by overstating the risk of inflation and using it as a pretext to cruch wages. However, Murphy, no doubt due to space constraints, understates the scope and nature of damage done by neoclassical economics, which has become the foundation of mainstream…
A discussion of false quantisation, the danger it presents us with and our fucked up digital definition of “the ground”. …not to be conspiratorial, but this virus is weird. I had decided to follow my good mate Tyson Yunkaporta’s advice, and use the occasion of this infection to listen to what information the virus may have…
When I was older, I became enthralled with the idea of epistemology. What is knowledge, and how do we come to understand it? In a Western worldview, the question can be difficult, burdened by philosophical “thinkers” who try to understand the intricacies of what they sometimes label as a “problem.” In an Indigenous worldview, it…
On November 8th, NASA’s Curiosity Rover paused its incessant science work and just watched the day unfold on Mars. The rover used its black-and-white Hazard-Avoidance Cameras (Hazcams) to watch an entire 12-hour day on Mars as the shifting Sun cast shadows across the Martian landscape. NASA chose this day because of the Mars solar conjunction…
The more I see a lack of success in the SETI field, the more I feel our own bio-chem chauvinism is getting the in way… Our own planet teaches us that life is weirdly untethered from our surface dwelling norms. Astrobiologists hunting for the first definitive signs of life outside of Earth often target planets…
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