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…