Computer enthusiast, private pilot, maker and fixer of things. It's always sunny if you climb high enough.
Kentucky, USA
Joined April 2009
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Steven Walter retweeted
I find it funny that some people got hung up on Starship not having gone orbital before Flight 14 when in the grand scheme of things it was completely arbitrary in terms of performance. The 19ish second burn only added about 91 m/s of velocity (a 1.2% increase in velocity)
This capability has been physically capable since Flight 6 which demonstrated a single Raptor relight in space. Heck, Flight 13’s burn was about 14 seconds, but intentionally oriented to primarily do a plane change instead of a prograde insertion burn for continued safety.
Any of the relights COULD have done the orbital insertion burn, the duration was not of any special technical capability. The reason Starship didn’t go orbital until Flight 14 is probably what we should applaud them for the most… SAFETY.
Their methodical approach to getting good data and going one step at a time while hucking the single most massive object ever put into space proves they weren’t just doing things haphazardly, despite the occasional narrative from the outside.
While it’s easy to compare Starship to vehicles like SLS or Vulcan or New Glenn, the reality is the focus hasn’t been on orbit, it’s been all on the “downhill” side of that. Safe and targeted de-orbit, clean reentry, targeted and soft splashdown. That’s the part that has (almost) never been done before.
And here I do have to add a little Space Shuttle admiration for figuring out a lot of these things on its first flight in 1981 (although it came a bit close to not being successful). Pretty amazing there was a vehicle of similar scale capable of such precise deorbit and reentry that it landed on a runway with no go-around capabilities. Crazy.
But Starship is well on a path to absolutely leap-frog the Space Shuttle in terms of performance (already over double and someday 6 fold) and hopefully in terms of full and rapid reuse. I hope we see the latter part speed up even more now that orbit has been demonstrated.
Exciting times ahead!!! Keep going @spacex @elonmusk
Steven Walter retweeted
Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!
Yes, you'll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You'll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you'll never get.
Don't take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?
No. And they won't. Because that's where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.
I've been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you're accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.
Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run!"
You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can't predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won't happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.
The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.
The Microsoft specific problem is Azure - which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.
Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that's not where my long-term fortress is. I'm not saying they're actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.
The bottom line is that it's just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.
The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It's time.
Steven Walter retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
@Tesla feature request: the trip planner should have an "Only stop at Buccee's" mode
Steven Walter retweeted
Water literally falls from the sky. Water shortages are infrastructure failures.
Steven Walter retweeted
For 20 years, a $6 knob that takes one hour to 3D print has been grounding Black Hawk helicopters four times a month, and the contractor responsible won't sell us the part or the IP rights to fix it ourselves.
So instead, American taxpayers have been paying $40,000 every single time to replace the entire system, multiplied by four times a month, for two decades.
That is NOT a procurement problem, that is a shakedown, and it is exactly why right to repair has to be in this year's NDAA.
Steven Walter retweeted
BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork, with the same networking binary black box in question today. Why are they willing to burn the goodwill over it?
There's something most have sensed but never seen it all in one place, the five-law framework China built between 2017 and 2023 ⤵️
So maybe their hand is forced as their "network" is too valuable already? Each law on its own, interesting, okay... Read them together, and add any Chinese company with big reach to the mix you get the complete picture.
1) National Intelligence Law (2017)
All organizations and citizens must "support, assist, and cooperate" with intelligence work. The same law makes it illegal to disclose that cooperation happened. Cooperation is mandatory, and silence about it is mandatory too.
2) Cryptography Law (2020)
Commercial encryption must be state-approved and state-reviewed. When authorities request it, companies must provide decryption keys or plaintext. The state on both sides of that equation is the same one.
3) Data Security Law (2021)
Article 2 gives the state extraterritorial reach over data that touches Chinese national security or public interests. So EU/US data hosting does nothing to make it safe, because jurisdiction follows the company, not the server location.
4) Counter-Espionage Law revision (2023)
The general definition of espionage was expanded to cover "documents, data, materials, or items related to national security and interests." Industrial data is one of the intended targets since the revision.
5) Network Product Security Vulnerability regulation (2021)
Any company or researcher that discovers a software vulnerability must report it to MIIT within 48 hours. From there it flows to CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database of Information Security), operated by the 13th Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. Microsoft's threat intelligence team documented Chinese state-hacker zero-day usage rising after this took effect. Shows the willingness to use the “tools” China built.
Together they describe a system with no neutral exits. Cooperation is required, encryption is real but the spare keys live at the ministry, jurisdiction follows the company across borders, industrial data is in scope, and discovered vulnerabilities flow to an intelligence agency 😬
3D printing became strategic for China in 2020 and joined the “Made in China 2025” plan soon after. Why does 3D printing matter so much? 1/x
Bambu Lab 3D printers: never again.
They're breaking the open source social contract (for the nth time...), and I'm past hoping they'll amend their ways.
youtube.com/watch?v=eb48MdtN…
Steven Walter retweeted
I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.
Take a moment and listen to this 81 second response from Victor Glover after being asked if he had any thoughts leading up to Easter.
I don’t quite think it can be overstated how perfect this crew is for the job.
Steven Walter retweeted
WHOA...
10 million wire grill brushers were just recalled. (3 million were recalled last month).
I did not anticipate this when we made the Smarter Scrubber to address the problem.
We just caught up on production. If you'd like a chain mail grill scrubber that's made in America check out
SmarterScrubber.Com
Steven Walter retweeted
Well. I think I have a new favorite movie. #projecthailmary was a fantastic adoption of the book, specifically Rocky! He was so great! Thank you to everyone who helped make such a unique and wonderful story come to life! @andyweirauthor @RyanGosling
Steven Walter retweeted
That's wrong. GrapheneOS users can currently use around 9/10 banking apps because most haven't adopted attestation to ban using alternate operating systems. Unified Attestation will encourage broader banning of arbitrary operating systems. It will hurt GrapheneOS and others.
I crunched some numbers for my own curiosity. I have roof-top solar, and it's great. However, it seems like some people have unreasonable ideas about running the grid on 100% renewables. Since I now have real-world data from one year of solar production, I did the math...
I won't bury the lede too much: there is an interesting "15/15" rule. That is, you'd need 15x the "nameplate production" in solar, and 15 days of storage if you want to be fully off-grid with no outages. Caveat: this is assuming mid-latitude USA. Further north would be worse, further south better, so this should be a good average.
To be a bit more specific about what "15x production" means. Suppose you use 30kWh per day. If the sun were directly above you 24 hours per day (spoiler, it isn't) and there were never clouds and solar panels were 100% efficient, you'd need 1250W of panels. In the real world, you'd need 15x that amount, or ~19kW.
Needless to say, if you scaled that up to the entire United States, it would be fantastically expensive. My napkin math says ~$1400/MWh LCOE, or 10x more expensive than nuclear.
