Musk is gross and SpaceX has some questionable marketing claims that you’ve identified, but I don’t see how anyone could claim that anything about the company’s products are a shitshow.

Falcon 9 has radically changed the economics of the space industry, and has no competition to force lower prices.

Starship has had a very successful testing campaign, and operates within a different development paradigm than Saturn. They’ve shown more progress on more technology in the last year than almost any rocket ever. It won’t be long before Starship has demonstrated all the capabilities you mentioned. While the price tag is large in absolute terms, it will be very cheap relative to the competition.

Dear Moon was not canceled by SpaceX, and no one who follows the industry has ever believed Musk’s timelines.

I guess I’m confused, because everything I know about Starship points towards it being one of the most incredible engineering accomplishments ever. There are lots of other problems with SpaceX’s leadership, environmental impact, and work culture, but aren’t the products inspiring?

What a weird situation. I suppose it’s nice those workarounds exist, even if they’re not ideal.

Interesting! I assume it involves a smart plug and an automation script that monitors battery level?

Wow, Graphene really doesn’t have charging limits?

I assume this is the discussion you referred to, and I think it broke my trust in the project.

Edit: As far as I can tell, many of the frustrating parts of that thread are from random posters and not devs. I’m still annoyed that such a basic feature is considered controversial.

Thanks for this! I’ve spent several dozen hours trying to get SteamVR working well on Linux, and finally gave up.

Is the Monado experience close enough to Windows to be usable? Are you aware of any major tradeoffs?

At this point I accept that Valve probably can’t compete with the billions poured into the Meta Quest 3, but I’m glad they understand there’s an enthusiastic audience for whatever they do next.

I expected to roll my eyes at this article but it’s actually quite compelling and well written. The Kagi website’s lack of nuanced privacy discussion already turned me off, and now I’m just going to pretend the service doesn’t exist.

What scanners do people recommend?

Not OP but I don’t think it’s obvious that people know how bad deep fried food is for them. Health effects of food are complicated and people are bad at nuance! We do a lot of cultural false equivalency about “all bad food is the same bad”, so I find reminders like OP’s helpful.

Vermillion VR, if it’s available! I’ve been curious about it for a while.

This is really nice of you, thanks!

Edit: Sent a PM.

The homepage makes me think that it’s a translation tool similar to DeepL. Is that the part you’re recommending?

Woah. I assume Thunderbolt will still have latency benefits. For example, we’re not going to have wireless eGPUs, surely? I hope I’m wrong, because wireless PCIe lanes would be amazing.

Interesting! Was this a podcast or TV interview?

I agree that some people need harder tones, but I don’t think anyone needs the abusive language that Linus used. If that feels like the only option, I think it probably means the person has gaps in their social toolbox.

It’s worth pointing out that they’re now a publicly traded company.

I would buy a name card to place in front of it that says “Whimsical Porch Rock” because the name is vital to the experience.

Just wait, soon we’ll all be editing documents using tiny scalpels.

Yeah, the concrete storm wasn’t great last time. They did have some engineering reasons to believe it would work for a single launch, but it seems like there was more subsurface damage to the concrete than they realized. As far as I know the only property that was significantly damaged was related to the company, but I’m sure there were some smaller residential insurance claims for the dust.

Part of the reason Saturday’s launch was delayed was so that more environmental assessments could be performed. A few weeks ago there some government scientists taking samples at the launch site for a baseline measurement to compare against in the future, and the entire project was reviewed by environmental regulators. So, those agencies were very involved in approving the launch license and SpaceX can’t just do whatever the owner wants them to. I guess my point is that it’s not strictly PR-speak, there really are qualified people making these decisions. But I agree that it’s not great to have the facility in the middle of a sensitive wetland, and no doubt there was backdoor politicking. I wish SpaceX would do more to offset the harm they cause, but I still think the StarShip project does more good than harm.

But isn’t the key aspect here “orbit”? I get that the FTS would lengthen the trajectory of some of the debris, but would it be enough to create a stable orbit? The original trajectory was going to splashdown near Hawaii.

I certainly agree that there are lots of environmental downsides to space exploration that are increasingly overlooked, I’m just not sure that there’s anything extra egregious about this flight.

They made a bunch of really cool changes to address the issues from last time, and they seem to have worked almost perfectly. For one, they built a giant water cooled steel plate under the launch mount (affectionately called the Booster Bidet), and the engineering behind it is pretty neat.