roystgnr
14hr ago
Ah, I get it - it's that combination of both tropes for that gender you've never seen before? That does get much harder! Two out of three, sure, but...
Personally I wouldn't even count Magneto, since IMHO a key part of the Mary Sue / Marty Stu concept is that they're a viewpoint character that audiences are expected to become invested in, not just a side character. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the comics, but at least in the movies Magneto always seemed to be a deuteragonist foil for Xavier at best. That "can't just be a side character" rule also rules out a couple female examples I've seen in video games, and maybe one from TV.
I think Daenrys Targaryen might be the only example I can come up with! And ... maybe that's the exception that proves the rule? I think the real underlying reason for everyone's disappointment with the Game of Thrones final season was the low quality of the execution once the showrunners no longer had books to work from, but one of the biggest explicit complaints was the way the story turned so many people's favorite Savior character into another villain. Is that a gendered thing, or would people have been equally pissed about Anakin if they hadn't known it was coming?
roystgnr
16hr ago
the change sounds... positive to me?
A regional governor isn't a guy you elect locally to represent his home region, it's a guy hand-picked by the central ruler to control his assigned region. Think Lord Cornbury, not George Washington. It's a form of centralization.
Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.
This, on the other hand, is part of my headcanon too. The separatists are clearly assholes, but they're also just the second-to-last of the series of puppets that Palpatine has been using to manufacture crises and accrue power, and at this stage of his plan the way to avoid such a trap would simply be to not walk into it. I'm honestly not sure whether this was a brilliant decision by Lucas (showing that the physical downfall of the Jedi was a consequence of their moral downfall, that they were all as prone to paranoid attachment and jealousy as Anakin, but for power and control and stability rather than for love) or a lucky-but-ignorant decision by Lucas (thoughtlessly internalizing a false lesson of the US Civil War, the idea that because separatism for an evil cause is evil, separatism can simply be assumed to be inherently evil), but it worked.
roystgnr
16hr ago
That just means we get to argue about whether it's funnier to call him a "Marty Stu" or a "Gary Stu".
Assuming we argue here, that is. I guessed that TVTropes would have something about how "Mary Sue Tropes are too contentious to provide specific examples", but AllTheTropes was supposed to be the "We're not interested in Censorship", "Debate is Encouraged" fork and even there it's "No examples, please; Mary Sue Tropes are by their nature YMMV Tropes, and we don't need the flamewars."
roystgnr
19hr ago
The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.
How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".
I do like the idea of exploring your interpretation of the Force, but I also like interpretations just the opposite of yours, even if they draw as heavily on the prequel as on the original trilogy.
So that's what I'd do: interpretationS, plural.
Much of the genius of early Star Wars was that it hinted at a much larger universe than it had time to show on screen. Lucas started unnecessarily spoiling this pretty quickly ("I am your father", okay, but "sister" too? How small is this "galaxy", anyway?), and after everyone had time to reflect in between trilogies and then continue the spoilage anyway, it just became more clear that those hints of grand scope were only a lucky accident (C3-PO and Chewbacca had to get memberberry parts too? seriously?) ... but we could try to recapture some of that scope, on purpose, by establishing a universe that's at least ideologically large. Show more places where Han's "hokey religion" attitude was just common sense, because there were only ever ten thousand Jedi among millions of planets. Show more of the core Sith point of view that makes it so dangerously tempting. Show the various contradictory lies that the Sith spread until they took on lives and followings of their own. Show which Jedi beliefs might only be true "from a certain point of view" and at least leave room for a little doubt with the rest.
On the other hand, TFA actually loved hinting at mysteries, which was wasted when that prep work just got thrown out by TLJ, leaving little more than a paint-by-numbers rework of ANH behind. The prequel trilogy did more hinting at grand scope (if only by accident, in between the spoilage), but it got buried by wooden dialogue and cartoonish set pieces. It's easy to pick out one thing at a time that we could have done better, but I'm sure I'd have done a dozen different things worse as a director.
Now, as a producer, if the whole sequel trilogy had been mine to make, the major changes would have been easy: insist on having three scripts in advance (even if the second and third might be heavily changed later), insist on either more closure for the first two movies' endings or giving all three movies to the same director or both, and don't let that director be either a "mystery box!" guy or a "subvert expectations!" guy.
Oh, and I would absolutely excise the schtick where they have to practically retcon the rebels' huge victory to try to make them the Loveable Underdog again, but that's another obvious big-picture improvement that could be very easy to screw up entirely when we get down into all the critical little details.
roystgnr
4d ago
Some medicines have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of side effect severity for different people even. I used Flonase on and off for a couple years, and never had any issues with eye pressure as far as my optometrist could measure. Allergists were thrilled by the stuff, because "maybe it'll give you glaucoma if you're susceptible and use it for years on end and don't check for warning signs" from nasal steroid sprays was still a big step up from "you can clear up your congestion for a few days, after which you have to stop or the rebound effect will just give you double-strength congestion for much longer" from nasal decongestant sprays.
Anyway, you don't want to use anything for years for sinus relief, regardless of side effects. If you've got congestion problems that last longer than the few weeks at a time of bad pollen seasons, get yourself taking allergy shots. They're very inconvenient (for me it was three shots a week, tapering down to one a week as they increased in dosage, for months and months) but very effective (I went for about two years unable to breathe through my nose after moving to a new neighborhood with more and different pollen; a decade or more after my shots I get congested maybe a few days a year during a bad year).
roystgnr
6d ago
That's a bit of a motte-and-bailey, though, isn't it? He said "files and folders"; you say "autoexec.bat or config.sys". Even in a perfectly working system there's value to be had in being able to sort your own data (independently of application) and in being able to look through others' sorted data. You're talking about people who can't change spark plugs and he's worrying about people who can't steer. (although that metaphor works both ways, in the world of "car, drive me to my brother's house" and "computer, show all the meme images I edited that have a cat in them")
roystgnr
6d ago
A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child
This is true, but probably not in the sense that you mean it. There may be exceptions in terminology somewhere, but in general charter schools in the United States do not charge tuition. The price you must afford to send your kid to charter school isn't paid in cash, but in the currency of executive function: do you have the foresight to get your kid on an admissions list ASAP (we didn't try until our oldest was moving from a decent-enough elementary school to a weaker selection of middle schools, and so it wasn't until two years later that she got into a charter), and can you reliably shuttle your kid(s) to a more distant school, possibly with a less-standard schedule, without the school bus services that any public school will offer?
You could outdo charter school selection effects in any mid-size public school district by just using an admissions test (most charter schools aren't allowed to use one), but even where this happens it's just hanging on by a thread.
roystgnr
8d ago
The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.
Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.
The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.
There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.
roystgnr
8d ago
If you look at top 50 (by box office receipts) 2020s movies, and restrict to American movies, Oppenheimer (at #13) is the top entry that isn't a sequel to or a remake of or a movie version of some already-highly-successful narrative IP from an earlier decade ... and then the second-highest entry is Elemental, at #48??? Did I miss a bunch?
We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.
I know this isn't a new trend, but I hadn't realized just how bad it's gotten. In the 2010s we've got Zootopia at #38, Bohemian Rhapsody (not counting a song as narrative IP) at #46, The Secret Life of Pets at #50, and that's it, so essentially no better.
But back in the 2000s we see Avatar at #1, the first Pirates of the Caribbean (not counting a theme park ride as narrative IP) at #32 (then up to #3 and #6 in sequels), The Da Vinci Code (based on a successful book, but a 2003 book) at #24, a couple Ice Age movies (sequels to a 2002 movie), 2012 at #27, Up at #29, one of the Twilight sequels (based on a 2005 book), Kung Fu Panda at #34, The Incredibles at #35, Hancock at #36, Ratatouille at #37, The Passion of the Christ at #38, Madagascar at #50 and its sequel at #40, Night at the Museum (based on a 1993 book, but not an already-highly-successful one like Harry Potter) at #46, and The Day After Tomorrow at #50.
Now, note that I didn't say I was looking for good, just successful and original. I can't say I'm proud of the culture that gave us Twilight, Dan Brown, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, or even Dances With Smurfs. But at least it was a noticeable fraction (looks like around 1/4) of a culture! The idea of original culture was clearly on its way out, even then, though - the originality fraction for the 1990s is around 2/3, way more than I want to list out in a comment, and that's despite not including a swath of embarrassing entries like the 2000s did.
Clearly the peak of popular original culture was the late 90s (I'm going to say 1999 - The Matrix was right about that being "the peak of your civilization"), and although it's a priori suspicious that @Iconochasm and I identify this peak as being when we were in high school, it's a fact supported by data, not just nostalgia. Suck it, kids these days.
roystgnr
11d ago
For two hundred years people like you have been trying to squelch English speakers' opportunities to feel like fancy snooty French people once in a while. Well, you see the trajectories at the end of that graph? No more! Our time is now. We're not even saying "OM-idj" now, oh no, you lost that chance at compromise. Our speech will now be a full-throated "oh-MAHZH" to the romance languages!
Oh, they're still asking for and getting billions from the US govt; the differences between them (and Blue Origin) vs Boeing or Lockheed are that they're spending way fewer billions (probably over $10B for the whole Starship program R&D before SpaceX is done, but SLS and Orion are over $50B now), a minority of that spending is from the government (SpaceX's two HLS contracts total a bit over $4B, Blue Origin's one a bit under), and the spending disbursement is tied to milestones rather than to "here you go; if stuff's not working come back and ask for more" (though the milestones are way too front-loaded; these are very stringent contracts by NASA R&D standards but they're weak by any non-R&D standard).
I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault
SpaceX bidding "Elon time" estimates rather than realistic schedule estimates might have been part of how they beat Blue Origin for the original HLS award, and this delayed Blue Origin's award by a couple years of legal/policy wrangling. If SpaceX's delays are more than a few years' worse than China's, and Blue Origin's are less than a couple years' worse, and there aren't any "Artemis II heat shield failure" or "Axiom discovers a huge flaw in its suits" level problems from others, then China will put astronauts on the moon before we return astronauts to the moon and it'll be in part because of that bid+award. Fingers crossed for Blue Origin, though; the New Glenn was supposed to first launch in 2020 and eventually got pushed back to 2025. Fingers crossed for Artemis II, too; it feels insane to launch humans in a reentry vehicle where we haven't yet done an unmanned test of our planned fixes for its chunks-were-breaking-off-the-heat-shield problem.
I disagree that China beating us here is a big deal, because "put a few men on the moon for the first time at $4B+ a pop marginal" (inflation adjusted) was a bad goal in the first place, and changing the goal to "for the seventh time" doesn't make it any better, whereas "plant ISS-scale skyscrapers on the moon for a fraction of the price" (or even "plant 20 tons a pop on the moon via commercial rocket flights") actually has some interesting long-term possibilities.
On the other hand, even my autist-adjacent heart sees some symbolic value to lapping China in the flags-and-footprints race, because: China has just beaten us in the Barbecue-In-Space Race! I reiterate: taikonauts are now enjoying steaks and bone-in wings fresh out of the oven! At least Sputnik had the decency to limit itself to a culturally-neutral "beep beep beep"; China's is driving a stake of shame into the very heart of America!
This argument only makes sense if they managed to maintain the distance over those 11 years
Then it's a good thing they've been maintaining some distance! In those years they've:
- Increased Falcon 9 payload capacity over 50%
- Added downrange booster recovery options
- Added booster recovery from and reflight after missions beyond LEO
- Begun launching national security payloads and NASA flagship payloads
- Tested and made operational a super-heavy launch vehicle, also partly-reusable, launching it 11 times so far with no failures
- Began reuse of their unmanned space capsule
- Had the longest streak in history of successful operational launches of any rocket, then the longest streak of any company, by what is now the most reliable launch vehicle in history
- Human-rated Falcon 9
- Tested and made operational a manned space capsule, in the first manned launches from the US since Shuttle, and launched several dozen astronauts to orbit with no failures
- Surpassed the total on-orbit flight time of any other manned launch vehicle (and of a few space stations)
- Done launches with GEO insertion
- Added fairing recovery
- Added extended fairing options
- Launched payloads to the Moon (orbit and landing), asteroids, and Jupiter
- Increased their flight rate 20-fold, flying it far more frequently than any other launch vehicle in history, and more in total than any vehicle save Soyuz
- Reused recovered boosters, now up to 30 times each, exceeding Shuttle for most-reused orbital rocket stage ever
- Launched and are now operating enough active satellites to exceed the currently-active total of everyone else in history, by a factor of 2, with several million users and a million more every few months
- Launched the most powerful rocket in history, nearly by a factor of 2, then recovered three of them and reflew two of them
- Launched the largest single spacecraft ever (i.e. [edit: not] counting on-orbit assembly) into space
- Successfully reentered and did a soft splashdown with the largest reentry vehicle ever, with the first live video of reentry ever, then did it again 4 times
Some of those are just firsts for SpaceX, but several are firsts for anybody in history. They are by far the most successful space launch developer in history, and have not been slacking ... and I'm just mentioning their technical achievements, which are secondary to what's actually best about them. The list above is a side effect of the work done lowering the cost of space access.
if what they're doing is retarded
Long ago, you had no idea what you were talking about, but you at least noticed it when I pointed out that SpaceX was indeed already flying astronauts, and you intended to do better. You still have no idea what you're talking about, but now you have no idea that you have no idea - you believe you know so much that you can call the people who are more correct retarded! I don't see how you can come back from that, but you have to try! I know that orbital refueling logistics is a lot more complicated than "look up, SpaceX put that light in the sky and it has people in it", and so I don't think I can get it past your biases this time, but I promise, there is a reason why everybody who hasn't been lobbied by SRB manufacturers is in favor of it, there is a reason why Blue Moon is also planning to do it, and there is a reason why even SLS, the epitome of huge disintegrating-totem-pole rockets, turned out to be unusable for its core mission without it. If we wanted to be the first to get flags and footprints on the moon, we should have canceled Artemis 8 years ago and saved $50B, because it turns out we already did that 50 years ago. If we want to do anything serious on the moon, then doing it 20 tons (Blue Moon Mk2, 4 launches per mission) or 100 tons (Starship HLS, definitely less than 20 per) at a go is the way to do it, but more importantly doing it at a high cadence to help amortize costs and reduce risks is also the way to do it. The marginal cost of a dozen launches even of a fully expended Starship is still cheaper than a single SLS launch.
roystgnr
14d ago
When you accused @RandomRanger of "shifting the goalposts", was that an honest concern of yours? I never said a word about Tesla.
I'm curious about when you think Tesla's competition was a decade behind Tesla, but mostly I'm just going to assume that you're shifting to Tesla because, when in the grip of Musk hate, all his companies look alike? They're not. The one building 2.5% of the world's cars and the one launching 85% of the world's spacecraft are in pretty different places.
It's definitely possible that the competition could catch up to SpaceX; I wish there were more even trying to catch up. Blue Origin is trying, though, and they're nearly a decade behind. Not a hyperbole decade, a look-at-the-calendar-and-subtract decade. RocketLab is trying, and with luck they'll succeed with the first Neutron flight next year and they'll only be 11 years behind.
I'm really excited about Stoke trying to surpass SpaceX; their first effort will never carry people but it's the first thing outside of China that could potentially undercut Falcon 9 on light cargo; they're the only serious attempt so far at rapid full reuse other than Starship.
In the context of the "new space race with China", it doesn't bode well that most of SpaceX's prospective competition is in China. LandSpace is probably ahead of Blue Origin, despite being 40% as old. If Starship fails, it's possible that after another ten years we'll be able to say "the Chinese offering as good or better cars launch vehicles for cheaper". Just waiting for that probably wouldn't be good American space policy, though. Ideally we'd have a second homegrown SpaceX, but we don't, and until we do they're both metaphorically and literally carrying us.
roystgnr
14d ago
Most of his launches are in-house for Starlink
So far this year SpaceX has launched forty non-Starlink missions. That is no longer as many launches as the entire country of China, but it is more launches than any other country in the world, including (by a margin over 50%) the combined non-SpaceX remainder of the USA. It is more launches than all non-US non-China countries combined. It is also still more launched payload capacity than the entire country of China.
The fact that he launches even more for Starlink expands this accomplishment; it does not diminish it.
SpaceX is, obviously, empirically, numerically, by hundreds of percent, the only institution currently capable of competing with China in space.
Oh - but I nearly stopped while still just talking about cargo! Last time we talked about the options to launch humans I was hopeful for Starliner, but last year's flight had continuing reaction control system issues that ended up with its two test pilots waiting for extra SpaceX seats to bring them home again, and Boeing and NASA still haven't announced any potential timeline for an upcoming flight. SpaceX are currently still the only ones outside of China and Russia who operate a manned orbital spacecraft; their 4 manned launches in 2025 exceed China's 1 and Russia's 1 (hopefully soon to be 2).
Early next year SpaceX's US competition plan to put Orion in space with people on board for the first time, which is very exciting but terrifying. I want to use a kinder phrase than "flaming garbage", but I do see the photos in that article where literal pyrolysis tore chunks of its heat shield off like literal garbage. Orion's reentry capability is at the same "well, it did survive" stage as the Starship tests' ... or worse, because much of the Starship tests' damage is intentional, and unless you count ablation none of Orion's was. But, Musk will be flying another few dozen or hundred Starships before they dare put a human on board during reentry; NASA's Artemis policy, by contrast, is YOLO.
His competition is slowly catching up to him
Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter.
I am non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed. It's unlikely to have any more significant delays (we're just a few days out from the first launch window), and so long as it has no delays worse than have already occurred, their landing attempt will come slightly before the ten year anniversary of SpaceX accomplishing the same. It is awesome (though again I feel I must explicitly state that I'm not being sarcastic) that the leading team among SpaceX's most serious long-term competition may now be less than a decade behind them! But to anyone without a weird grudge against Musk, it's not tempting to overstate the magnitude of that awesomeness.
roystgnr
15d ago
The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me.
In general "grrr greedy capitalists" is only ever a satisfying answer in the same sense that "grrr Schrodinger equation" is. Technically both ideas explain a whole lot, but if you're ever looking for an explanation for why something changed, say, between 1980 and 1990, you can't solely check in the laws of economics or physics.
In this case, ironically, "Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists"" might be the explanation. Ma Bell was an enormous company with a quasi-governmental monopoly, so they could expect to be able to capture most of the value of even relatively pure and fundamental research ... and then anti-trust action broke them up into a bunch of Baby Bell companies who could only capture the value of research that was sufficiently applied and peripheral to turn a profit before its patent(s) would expire. By what may have been a wacky coincidence, but of course wasn't, Bell Labs got a ton of funding before the breakup and not so much after.
Despite my snark, I believe it's possible that the loss to research was exceeded by the gains of breaking up the quasi-monopoly. I'm old enough to remember land lines, and adding a second phone to the same line by just adding a splitter and running one cable to another room; a little further back in time, this would have required a call to The phone company to get permission and a technician and an extra monthly surcharge. It's easy to imagine that an indefinite continuation of this state of affairs in the USA could have crippled the nascent internet, which for years was only accessible to most residences via modems piggy-backing data over phone lines.
Ideally, handling the collective action problems of research without a giant monopoly (or, at least, with a giant monopoly we all get to control on election day) is what University research is supposed to be for; we try to give University researchers the proper incentives to try to come up with ideas that will be useful decades down the road, not just years. If we did that right, we should have been able to cut up the fabled goose here without losing out on all the golden eggs. To a great extent, University research works, even! I agree with your suspicions that we didn't entirely do that right, and with your explanations for why it doesn't work as well as it should, but I wouldn't want to come to any strong conclusions without trying to quantify those magnitudes somehow.
roystgnr
15d ago
There's constant opportunity for humans to fight humans, just not opportunities that a developer is going to be eager to take.
"Tolkein's orcs are a metaphor for black people" is some bullshit that woke people use to bump up publication and hate-click numbers and normal people ignore. "Tolkein's black people are a metaphor for black people" isn't quite true either, but that's a harder sell to normal people, and while I'm usually a strong proponent of facts over feelings, I'm not sure "Ackshually the violent ones are a metaphor for some North African muslims" is going to help here.
unless it's a big misunderstanding and huge tragedy that we will mourn for a thousand years
Yes, certainly. We can just add more entries to the list, then?
There's also dwarves fighting elves on a large scale, occasionally, and on a small scale the elves seem to have their share classically-fey annoying tricksters and the dwarves have selfish and greedy troupes; there's enough room for moral ambiguity. But I think the problem isn't that you have a bunch of factions who trust each other too much, the problem is the opposite of:
There's limited lore-natural small scale events. Everything is the big stuff.
In the LotR books we get a worms-eye view of one part of a larger conflict, which apparently leaves lots of room for smaller-scale events to fill out an MMORPG ... but as soon as you try to get into any big stuff you're limited by the fact that our worms-eye view was of the most important part of the larger conflict, and we know how that ends. After the end is a world with less conflict and less magic and less interesting opportunities for an RPG, but before the end is a world where your RPG can only tell the side quests, because you know how the main questline ends and it's not anything to do with you personally.
With a typical MMORPG, who cares, just retcon in some more high-fantasy epic stuff and squeeze it in somewhere, and trust that your players won't stress too much about how the dragon people and the panda ninjas and on and on fit together coherently ... but the whole point of licensing LotR would be to draw in LotR fans who might get skittish if you keep getting weirder and weirder.
I've never played LotR Online, but now I'm seriously wondering how they do it. I thought it got kind of sidelined by the WoW juggernaut, went Free-to-Play, and petered out, but now I'm reading that the latest expansion for this 2007-launched game was released in November 2024, as part of a roughly one-per-year release schedule that's actually sped up after a 2013-2017 lull. Is it really that good? It's got to at least have some kind of diehard fanbase to keep servers running and content creation continuing for 18 years.
roystgnr
16d ago
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Damn, I can't believe I was too lazy to be first to post this. Readers interested in space, don't just keep scrolling past the link here; it's exhaustively but brilliantly devastating.
"I’m a technical manager. I’ve had bad days. Who hasn’t? But I’ve never had a “we forgot to ask about docking for 13 years and now it’s going to cost us $2.5b to correct” day. Has this ever happened to you?"
I recently defended SLS here; I think it's indefensible in an absolute sense, but it at least holds its own in a "relative to Saturn V" sense. Both programs are justifiable answers to policy makers who keep asking the wrong question. But the cost and danger of Orion are just unconscionable.
(and, to be fair, Casey's view of SLS is also harsh: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/ )
roystgnr
16d ago
There was an MMORPG that was pretty well-received, but trying to compete with World of Warcraft was a losing proposition.
roystgnr
20d ago
Usually the mechanism behind toxoplasma is that only borderline cases go viral. This isn't a tweet, though, it's a news article in one of the world's top newspapers, whose quoted thesis is that literal first sentence, "It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it."
Even given the collapse in journalism, wouldn't you expect someone pushing that thesis to collect the most persuasive cases, not the most ambiguous? If Florida Methed-Up Chainsaw Man was something like the Rittenhouse shootings that had already gone viral nationally, that might make it an unavoidable choice of example to discuss, but right now the top Google hits for "Druzolowski" "de leon springs" are two Orlando TV stations, then after the WSJ article and a Daytona Beach TV station we get down to the dregs of a "Florida Man Friday" podcast episode.
roystgnr
22d ago
That's a good question. His final approval poll was 63-29, at the higher end of a presidency that went up and down around an average of 53. His retroactive approval went as high as 73-22 in 2002, and as of a couple years ago it was still 69-28, 2nd only to JFK among the 9 recent presidents Gallup asked about. The left-wing opinion still seems to be "Reagan screwed up the AIDS epidemic" so I'd have to assume that his support still leans right and he's at 70+ among Republican voters.
But this might be just one of those things that's uselessly sensitive to poll wording (YouGov says 44-29! Is that just because they emphasize their "neutral" option more?) or to poll methodology (Gallup says 90-8 for JFK!? Is it just getting harder and harder to correct for "only boomers answer the phone for pollsters" effects?).
roystgnr
22d ago
Resting on their laurels, or just using their best ideas first and having to fall back on their second-best later? Being a popular author has never been a safe career plan, so for those who try anyway it just makes sense to front-load hard and give their work the best chance of being seen at all. There's usually a countervailing effect, where any art improves with practice and later better implementations can make up for weaker concepts, but maybe kids' books have a higher ratio than most of inspiration to perspiration.
roystgnr
22d ago
Well, "no alignment" is so much worse than "no AGI" that anybody could afford to forgo it. But the USA would probably prefer a US AGI with "95%" alignment over a CCP one with "98% alignment", and they'd prefer a Chinese AGI with "90% alignment" over that, and so on, so nobody feels much incentive to be truly careful. Even within one nation, most companies would love to pull out far enough ahead of the competition to capture most of the producer surplus of AGI, and would be willing to take some negative-value risks out of haste to improve their odds instead of just taking a zero-value loss.
LaTeX also doesn't interpret repeated * symbols as a request to hide them both and italicize the text between them. ;-)
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