A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for cancellation.
The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.
The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive. As long as Artemis is slowly working towards the goal of eventually landing Americans on the surface of the moon and eventually building a habitat they can be injected with money and manpower whenever geopolitical or ideological demands arise. If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success
>The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive.
I don't disagree but I also don't really get it. The US performed the feat almost 60 years ago when the technology to do it didn't exist at the beginning of the program, and people didn't even know if it would be possible.
Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge more than anything. And sending people with the level of automation we have available today is essentially just a political move.
There's the obvious meme of "the US used to be able to do it, but can they still do it?". That wouldn't stand in question if the US had say a Mars mission, but if all the US can show are some low earth orbit activities while China has astronauts walking the moon that makes for a great propaganda point for the Chinese. Something to the tune of "As the American empire declines, the Chinese empire rises"
But the more impactful point is that the Chinese don't want to stop at what the Apollo program accomplished. They want to build a moon base, turn it into a lunar research station and invite other countries to cooperate. If the Chinese are wildly successful on that front, cooperating with them to get access to their moon base might be very enticing. Both for research about the moon and about low gravity. If the US doesn't answer with their own moon base that might end up in a reversal of the ISS situation (where everyone except China was invited to cooperate on the ISS).
Of course we don't know whether the Chinese will be successful in those points. But so far their space program has a great track record. They did manage to build their own space stations and lunar rovers, everything after that is, as you say, mostly a funding challenge
That is equally fair. My position I suppose is that my enthusiasm has been spent on so many half-finished ambitious programs like this that it has all run out by 2026. Constellation, Asteroid Redirect, Artemis. If I was older that would include SEI.
At least this one had real missions fly if it suffers the same fate. The crew of Artemis is among the ones most aware that most space missions never happen. The anxiety of being in these astronaut classes must be unbearable, especially as the ISS ages. I don't know if this mission can maintain public confidence in the program as the world grows more chaotic and people's attentions are not focused on the sky but the ground.
I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.
Right, I forgot about that development. A very late change in program structure, and having your main lander option have an indefinite schedule is quite bad!
You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first time Artemis eats delays.
What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite.
They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.
This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.
> This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.
No doubt, and most of that is due to Isaacman. But when the government party changes, they will replace him. Possibly again with a politician/bureaucrat like Bill Nelson, who is unlikely to similarly shake things up when necessary.
That is also the curse of the US now. If your funding will only last a single presidential term, you can't ensure a livelihood. The instability of US budgeting and the wildly different priorities of incoming presidents is a huge source of uncertainty and cost.
A hit piece, and only a hit piece. If there really was a gay mafia, they'd fear publishing this. The sourcing quality is typical for lavender scare stuff too.
Static stack allocation is the approach that the 6502 really demands, and it's cool to see in a conventional compiler toolchain. See the Cowgol language for another example: https://cowlark.com/cowgol/
That requires the compiler to be aware of non-reentrant functions, though. It might be viable in small-scale codebases as are common in much embedded code, which is where a 6502 would most likely be used.
> If he “was on a deserted island and [plastic] was all that was available,” Rogers says he’d opt for types two [High-Density Polyethylene] and five [Polypropylene]. These are both higher density formulas, used to contain liquids and manufacture items like the rigid plastic forks dispensed at your local takeout restaurant. They have a higher melting point, “and they also don’t tend to chip or shatter as much,” says Rogers. (Still, Hussain’s team found these types of containers shed plenty of microplastics when heated.)
This the part I feel should be focused on. HDPE is notable for being safe to handle during its entire lifecycle, from production to use to recycling. Even when pushed well past its softening point, it does not create any hazardous fumes. A sustainable future does not mean avoiding the use of plastics entirely, it means identifying which are the most useful in the long-term.
Nalgene make HDPE water bottles now. They’re really durable. I’ve had two as my daily use bottles for about 4 years and they’re as durable or more durable than the hard plastic Nalgene bottles I used before.
They've made HDPE bottles for a while. When I was guiding canoe trips 20 years ago, the wisdom among the guides was that the HDPE ones will float, even if you fully submerge them with the cap off, whereas the Lexan ones will sink.
Aren’t the HDPE Nalgene the original one carried in the 90s, then polycarbonate came out, whoops BPE then transition to Lexan?
I loved the HDPE and appreciated it was likely the most inert (aren’t milk jugs HDPE?), but my family says it imparts a taste so we have a ton of Lexan.
probably fine just don't drink hot soup/coffee out of it. I've long since switched over to a glass lined beverage container after I found out about microplastics.
HDPE is very stiff, MDPE is kinda stiff and LDPE is flimsy. Same monomer just cross linked differently with a different production process. Plastic is chemistry magic.
It's just carbon and hydrogen chains. How complex can it be? Surely not so complex to require its own field.
/s
For those unaware of the joke, Organic Chemistry is quite complex. Hydrogen+Carbon can make plastic or Gasoline depending on the details of how it chains.
If we're talking about chemical consequences of alkanes vs carboxylic acids, yes. However, the parent topic is talking about the effect of burning plastics, for which consideration it can be thought of as burning fat in that it (as opposed to other plastics where the byproduct cannot be compared to just burning fat.
If the workplace sucks, as most do right now, there's about three options for what to do:
1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle.
2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore.
3. Don't be present physically in that environment.
Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.
I've tried options 2 and 3 and I prefer spending my time working instead of constantly having to look busy. Remote work (aside from the obvious life and time benefits) in my experience has forced management to evaluate performance based on output and not bums on seats.Change is scary but I don't think this is going away anytime soon.
The big thing seems to be less about GCC, and more a question of, "what should a compiler be?"
He'd be better looking at smaller, less-known compilers, like the Portable C Compiler or the Intel C Compiler. If you want hyper-optimized, better-than-assembly quality, you pretty much have to give up predictability. The best optimizations that are predictable can't be written using modern compiler theory. They instead involve a lot of work, care, and attention that can't be generalized to other architectures. It can require a love for an architecture, even if's a crap one.
It's a tradeoff. Not every compiler needs to be optimized, and not every compiler needs to embody the spirit of a language.
Esperanto was intended as a sort of diplomatic language. It's got flaws, definitely. The sounds and spelling are very much from the creator's native Polish, a lot of important terms are rather obscure («Usono,» from "Usonia" is the word for the United States). That said, it is in the end relatively easy to learn, and it is easy to express the ideas of diplomacy, science, and civil society.
China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason.
> After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France.
It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!
An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük.
Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day.
Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.
Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)
That doesn't sound logical to me. If Zamenhof didn't intend for it to be a primary language, one you learn from birth, then why couldn't it be used by random people still? There has been trading between countries for much longer than Esperanto exists for, especially in border regions or small countries but also across oceans and continents.
Esperanto is from 1887. I was curious what holidays were like at the time:
> According to Stowe (1994), “many nineteenth-century Americans traveled, and many more participated vicariously in the experience of travel by reading travel letters, sketches, and narratives in newspapers, magazines, and published volumes” (p. 3). Similarly, the appetite for travel in the U.K. was also voracious --https://regrom.com/2020/08/26/regency-travel-traveling-abroa...
So also a goal Zamenhof could intend. I don't know how you get to the conclusion that, because it wasn't intended for my mom to use while I was a baby, it wasn't intended to be used by my mom or me on holiday if we're not "diplomats", unless you call any tourist an international diplomat
Western Europe is very different from the Europe that Zamenhof grew up in.
You get so many internationalist movements out of Russia because it already was in many ways international internally. Lots of languages and land, but both travel and speech were restricted by authorities, secret police seemed to hover invisibly everywhere. The language of everything important, the language of rulers, was Russian. Vacations were in-country, if they happened at all.
Looking to the UK, France, and the US is in this case misleading.
I think that view of you is wrong. The distinction is an important one.
By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post.
By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people.
It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.
Right, Esperanto wasn't created for the elite, or only for diplomats. That wouldn't make much sense. Also I don't think GP intended to suggest it, but you clarified it anyway, so all's good.
Frankly, this is why despite my admiration for Esperanto, I do not engage in it.
Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to let people use words carelessly, or loosely.
Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in wordplay, puns, and local culture.
EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.
> Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and
> it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to
> let people use words carelessly, or loosely.
Wtf? What 'no fun allowed'?! In the community is fun allowed how and why are
you making that stuff up based on what actually? What interpretation are you constructing, which is not based on any reality? We have wordplays, puns
and local culture. People do these all the time and annoy the more grammatically
inclined people with it all the time. These conflicts inside the community
are normal any community will develop people who need to care about the language
more and people who care less about any language. That's how new concepts
are generated.
> EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far
> superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is
> to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring
> the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.
The wall of text tried to answer the question sincerely of how they compare.
Also it included my personal bitterness of about people who constantly piss on Esperanto for the wrong reasons. Like such as exactly this post of yours.
And that's also why I stopped writing it. I wrote that it's lacking "functionality", that makes Esperanto more complex. Toki Pona is minimalist,
it can't be the best language in the world for everything. But that does not
make it bad. People enjoy learning it and despite what you try to make
people in the Esperanto-community look like, there are a bunch of them speaking
that language too for its value of minimalism, its value in playing
around with the sapir-whorf-hypothesis regarding depression (it's after all the language of good), its value in finding a community, etc.
You see something, interpret it wrongly and then piss on it, for the wrong reasons.
> Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in
> wordplay, puns, and local culture.
That a niche of people who are inclined to perfectionism, down-beating and snobbishness are also inclined to favor Toki Pona is shown by your comment.
Slight correction: Zamenhof's native languages (so far as we can tell), in a sense of what he spoke at home, were Yiddish and Russian, although he certainly learned Polish at a very young age due to place of residence. Not that it makes much difference in this case - the quirks of Esperanto phonology, such all those affricates and consonant clusters are familiar to speakers of pretty much any Slavic language. Esperanto orthography, on the other hand, appears to be inspired more by Czech than Polish - "v" rather than "w", diacritics over digraphs etc.
That's part of the idea. It's that you slow down, try to figure out what exactly the other person means by what they are saying. In a language with a fixed vocabulary, context becomes even more important than normal.
Got diagnosed this year with mitral valve prolapse. It won't be an issue medically for some time, but it is definitely sobering to feel the heart beating so strongly.
The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.
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