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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • When I was about 6 years old, I had just gotten back from spending a weekend with my cousins who were like my siblings because I was an only child. We had fun running around and playing catch and riding bikes etc. and my cousin showed me monster trucks for the first time ever. So while I was alone in my room I had the tv on waiting for a new episode of monster trucks to come on and throwing a football across the room to myself, jumping onto my bed to catch it.

    On what would be my last attempt, I lobbed the ball, took a couple steps and jumped forward. Unfortunately, I misjudged the distance. The next thing I know I am on the floor trying to sit up and looking around trying to figure out what happened. When I looked down I saw a stream of blood dripping onto my arm and hand. I just screamed until my parents showed up to help.

    I wound up being taken to the urgent care and spending a night at the hospital because I landed face first onto the sharp wooden corner of my bed frame, shattering my nose into 6 pieces and splitting my face open requiring reconstruction and about 80 stitches. Decades later and you’d never know it happened but boy do I think back at how dumb that was lol.





  • That’s the thing though. NASA effectively deemed reuse an abject failure. They just sunk-cost their way through the SLS program until they couldn’t get the budget needed to keep to keep it up anymore. Also, do we even need to mention Challenger and Columbia? Or Apollo 1?

    Elon is no more than a front-man for the band that is SpaceX who is doing the real engineering and hard work on this insanely huge project. All those engineers and workers who put everything they have into it are what is making this possible. The nazi can fuck off and SpaceX will still be able to achieve these incredible goals.

    I’d also like to provide another gentle reminder that the way SpaceX are going about designing, iterating, and testing is completely different from the approach NASA and others have taken traditionally. Even Blue Origin are doing it the “safe” way more or less and are still having tons of problems. This is an extremely difficult thing to do at all. What people like to highlight as failures and “haha <thing> bad” are kinda the point. This past launch they built out a whole new flight profile for super heavy that pushed it beyond its calculated and simulated limits, to see how it behaves, which is why they didn’t attempt to catch this time.


  • Starship block 2 design is significantly larger than shuttle was. Total cargo volume is already multiples of what shuttle could carry to space and is set to get larger in future designs as early as block 3. Shuttle also rode on a largely one-shot SLS rocket that was a lot smaller (by volume) than super heavy. It had reusable SRBs that were recovered but refurbishment was essentially the same cost as new. Meanwhile they have already caught booster multiple times and reused one, beating SLS in just tests.

    It’s important to remember that both super heavy and starship are two separate projects and testbeds doing their own range of things while being literally the largest thing ever built and launched. The carrying capacity to orbit and beyond is completely unprecedented.

    People laugh at the fact that it will take ~15-20 super heavy launches to refill one starship in orbit. But if they pull it off, it will be the only platform capable of bringing up to ~200 tonnes of capacity to the moon and beyond. That’s way more than Saturn V. And eclipses what shuttle ever did. Again, all while attempting to be completely reusable.


  • I believe this is the 4th (or is it 5th?) time starship successfully reached orbit too (just lacking an insertion burn which is on purpose for these tests). But it’s also important to keep in context the fact that starship and super heavy are so big, while trying to be completely reusable and be assembly lined. Very different goals, technology, and ideas happening between the generations. One starship launch intends to replace between 3 and 5 falcon 9 launches if they can nail down the reliability.


  • I think you’re confused about my sentiments.

    It doesn’t matter how well the current apps run, they should be 1st class citizen features seeing as power toys has been around since Windows 95 days as a series of useful tweaks and applications that are ubiquitous enough to exist through till now, including the constant expansion of features since the windows 10 open source version was published several years ago.

    If there wasn’t a dedicated community around these features, then you’d have an argument that they’re superfluous but the project has taken off like a rocket with regular improvements and fixes all these years now.

    The point is that Microsoft is prioritizing so many things with AI/copilot these days, it’s a damn shame they relegate actually useful features to the open source community where performance and integration is likely suffering, despite the community’s best efforts.


  • Windows Power Toys is a suite of programs and tweaks for Windows, one of which is “Run” that behaves similar to spotlight search on macOS. If you have to operate in Windows, I’d say the suite is a must-have for Run, Fancy Zones, File Renamer, Screen Ruler, and Color Picker alone. It’s good software that should be built into the OS but for some reason is not— built and maintained by a dedicated open source community these days as opposed to just a couple individuals from inside Microsoft back in the day when Power Toys was a proprietary tool first released on Windows 95.




  • I would make the case for proxmox on the machine so you can divvy up the hardware as you see fit— but also setup the hard drives as a zfs1 pool (1 redundancy failure allowed). This way you can make multiple isolated machines or use LXC containers directly for apps, services, etc. while benefiting from ZFS’s excellent performance and reliability. I would say that TrueNAS Scale has been a bit of a letdown for me because it feels bloated, easy to make mistakes with complicated setups, and I have less control over the hardware. I don’t like how updates have fully broken apps. That said it is a reliable ZFS wrapper with more bells and whistles in the UI over what proxmox offers— caveat being that both can do everything if you want to take the time to learn ZFS commands.

    There is also the TrueNAS based alternative HexOS that is more beginner friendly for just getting a nice NAS setup fast while still supporting apps / containers.