I did not but would not be surprised. Scattered among the survivalist, bomb makers, pedos and neo nazis of the early internet there were some amazing communities. I like to think that I found my ppl back then but maybe those ppl found me and set me on my way. Either way, I'm thankful
Your story also reminded me of the early LUG scene, distributed all over the world. We believed and all we had access to were the dirtiest ratshit computers but hey they could boot Slackware or Debian and maybe if you said the right incantation you could get that 10Mb card you got for free but was still the most valuable part to work with cat5 Ethernet so you could download stuff from a local sunsite mirror so you could join in the future.
I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
Friends of mine did for Android or the app stopped functioning. You also had to pay a one time fee to even download it on iOS. But yeah, most users didn't have to.
You've got two large tanks making up the bulk of the stage's structure - one for oxidizer, one for fuel. They have large diameter pipes that feed propellant to the engines. You can't mix the ballast with either the oxidizer or fuel, and you can't feed the engines from anywhere but the propellant tanks...
If you are writing an integration test for some new and potentially bug-ridden code then you might opt to mock, say, the database connection.
Doing so risks having to write so much database logic — with all the potential for getting that code buggy as well — that it’s often better to avoid the mock and test the entire system, end-to-end.
The vehicle is designed to hold all that fuel, plus whatever payload it carries on top, but it's not designed to have heavy loads attached to it in any other way. Rockets are so intensely optimized for weight that sometimes they're barely strong enough to stand upright if you fuel them the wrong way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkdz63agHY.
That's a great video! Thank you for sharing it. A rocket is more like a soda can than a building but it's hard to relate when you see such a massive object!
You can see a similar effect after the explosion at the end of last week's Starship test flight. If you look at where the flames are coming out after the first fireball clears, it kind of pancakes under its own weight there: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zi2SU98BAD8?t=5735s
Oh huh. You really can. I didn't pick up on that the first few hundred times I watched it. That's really cool. It kind of splats down into a 2-d rectangle.
It's been said that the most amazing engineering of the whole Shuttle program was the external fuel tank (and there is one with the static display of Endeavour here at the California Science Center in LA).
I was a little disappointed with the results I was seeing in F#. I thought the .NET + GPT-5.* pull through would be sufficient but it never seemed to work out. Maybe I just wasn’t approaching it correctly.
I am using https://github.com/github/spec-kit and am pretty content. I also tell it in the constitution.md to generate the .fsi files first, then write tests for it before implementation. That might very well be useless superstition since it is soo easy to fool yourself.
Also tell it to prefer easy language constructs with a need to justify anything more complex. I am currently trying to add elmish since its mind numbingly boring explicit plumbing is something I no longer have to do.
My pipeline for this is vscode + prompts + markdown templates + GitHub copilot -> markdown docs -> pandoc to produce.docx -> copilot in word for “nice” formatting -> copilot in ppt for nice decks. LLMs all the way down.
I find it’s easier to version control and diff the .md artefacts, those remain my authoritative source.
I was doing something like this, and then realized at least with claude that it’s so much better at HTML that it’s better to get an HTML-first deck together, which could then be turned into a PPT template and/or PDF directly, depending on needs.
It saved me a fair number of design-tweak steps in the md -> pandoc part of the workflow. Realistically, hand editing claude’s HTML is also easy in most cases, so I didn’t feel like I lost much (for the generative cases). Similarly if it’s mostly what I’ve written directly that’s the source it’ll be in markdown, and I’ve found it’s a faster path to have md -> (LLM-translated HTML deck) -> pdf.
In business: using coworking tools to review and propose filing of emails; manage my files and folders; on a daily basis scour the intranet for interesting and relevant content.
Personal: my wife tutors in her native language to non-native primary and high school kids. They are all using these tools now generate fresh content for practice based on school lesson plans. The kids are improving much more quickly now than they were just a few months ago.
Copilot Cowork in the M365 ecosystem. It inherits all the permissions from my account, has access to exchange to send me emails, and OneDrive to save each day’s summary for posterity and future refinement.
Cue the development of a limpet drone that would be enough to take down one of these birds in a non-destructive way… although perhaps these ones in particular would be uniquely positioned to deal with such adversaries.
I am somewhat relieved to be working in a regulated industry where deterministic outputs are still needed. Maybe when someone has a validated AI model there will be trouble ...
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