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Its funny to read these comments where people think that focus is something that they can attain.

Your secret weapon isnt the laptop. Your secret weapon is a combination of a) actually giving a fuck about what you are doing, and b) the vibe of the workspace that makes you enjoy doing what you are doing.

Focus comes from a reinforcement loop of happy hormones that come from doing what you are doing. You can't focus on things that you don't enjoy doing.


>but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly.

LOL

Im currently typing this on a work issued Macbook thats about 2 years old at this point, and 40% of the time, when I plug in a cable, it decides it wants to turn on and turn off hdmi output in rapid succession.


I always use DisplayPort over USB-C DP-Alt (or Thunderbolt on some displays) and I literally never have a problem across various LG, Dell and Apple Studio Displays.

MacBook Pro M1 Pro or MacBook Pro M5

Sounds like something is really broken in your setup?

On the other hand, sleeping/waking Thunderbolt displays on my ThinkPad with Linux regularly leads to kernel panics, across several kernel versions.


Recent thinkpads are a bit of shit-tier laptops, and linux doesn’t help much (it’s not linux’s fault).

for personal use I gave up after almost twenty years of thinkpad+linux and got a MacBook neo. So far it’s been great, much much better than my shit-tier ryzen-based x13g1 with 8c/16t and 32gb RAM. (Edit: it’s also more reliable when driving my 34” 1440p external display).


Even before vide coding this problem existed.

The truth is, only small companies build good stuff. Once a company becomes big enough, the main product that it originally started on is the only good thing that is worth buying from them - all new ventures are bound to be shit, because you are never going to convince people to break out of status quo work patterns that work for the rest of the company.

The only exception to this has been Google, which seems to isolate the individual sectors a lot more and let them have more autonomy, with less focus on revenue.


Remember when DOGE tried to cut out the inefficiencies and failed miserably? The "inefficiencies" and "bloated budgets" are there for a reason.

If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.


But that explosion would have cost one tenth the cost a single SLS launch and the next one would go a little further. And eventually you would be flying the most reliable rocket in history more frequently than any other rocket for one tenth the cost of the competition.

This works for getting things to LEO. This doesn't scale well as the distance increases. You can't keep launching shit to the moon, crashing it over and over, until you get it right.

They can absolutely be solved by science and engineering, people just need to stop being so fucking afraid to break the rules to do whats right.

What does inequality even mean? Everyone must be identical? The idea of removing inequality is dystopian.

Stopping the world's resources from being controlled and directed by a tiny fraction of its population isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron

Solving inequality starts with everyone gets the same upbringing. Imagine designing a boarding school where kids get placed at an early age, and get all the support that they need to basically learn how to have control of the environment around them, while also how to interact with other humans to act as a force multiplier in accomplishing bigger things).

You could do this right now with a lot less money then it seems, the problem is that you have to break ethical grounds - for example, you have to have police or support staff that forcibly take kids from their homes if the parents resist this sort of education for their kids. If you don't do this, then you essentially are back to square one.


You are obviously very invested in the fact that someone who is going against the grain of the obviously bad, overly buerocratic government agency MUST be correct (otherwise, in the case you actually gave a fuck about the truth, you would be researching statements from NASA and comparing the reports)

If that is so, put your money where you mouth is and place a bet on polymarket. If you are too scared to do so, then admit it to yourself, and understand that you don't believe this shit anyway.

Because you being a cuck for a contrarian for the sole reason that he is going against the grain is basically the same as Joe Rogan being anti-vaxx because its trendy and cool to think government=bad.


Fill in the blank:

"Maciej says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."


Maciej says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that has no correlation to whether NASA engineers did due diligence on reviewing the design and determining if its safe, because he does not know the explicit technical discussions, reviews, or other analysis that went on behind the scenes, or more generally, hasn't analyzed the evidence counter to this claim.

The most clear cut indicator of intelligence is the ability to present both sides of the coin, and even more so state the conditions which make either side true or false.


> place a bet on polymarket

Aww, it would make me sad if people were betting on astronauts dying.


I don't think "you're being contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian" pairs particularly well with "if you're so convinced then just bet on in bro" as an argument.

I never said he was being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. I said he was being contrarian because its trendy. There is a difference between hating big government because of facts, and hating big government because its trendy.

> place a bet on polymarket

Isn't that a platform for insider trading? Not sure it qualifies here.


Not only but also.

Anyone can write an article when the hindsight is 20-20. You can make all sorts of justifications about what happened.

Much different than predicting future.


The in the article I linked has a lot of other qualifications. Someone wrote a comment complaining about my misscharacterization, but deleted it before I could say sorry. Sorry for the joke!

If you have 2 or 3 spare hours, it's worth reading.

The guy got a lot of first hand information about the Challenger disaster. He analyzed not only what went wrong, that is in the 20-20 category, but also what could have gone wrong, that is in the speculation category.

But if you read that report after the Columbia disaster, it's almost a premonition. He didn't identify the exact problem that caused the explosion, but the decisions that made that posible were quite similar.


Starship is just obscene. The thing is never going to work for its designed purpose once you understand what the mission looks like (basically insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit)

> insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit

What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)


Also all those missions can be unmanned. If you want to get good at something then you do it a lot.

The only question is whether the cost of flying all those missions would be prohibitive: by the stated goals, starship should be able to do the refueling missions cheaper then an SLS launch.

Obviously if it can't then it's failed, but the point of it is cheap heavy lift to LEO which is very obviously quite valuable.

Building a big specialty rocket to get to the moon is waste.


People act like with Falcon, they basically just get it off the drone ship, fill er up, and she is good to go again. There is a shitload of repairs/maintenance that has to be done to Falcon vehicles after every launch.

In space, you can't do that kind of repair/maintenance, you have to make sure the refueling is PERFECT. And this is with deep cryogenic propellants that very much like to boil off and cause pressure increases in the tanks they are contained.

That problem hasn't even been touched yet. In order to make Spaceship X happen, they need to figure one refueling out, which is difficult given the fact that Raptors run on cryogenic propellant that likes to boil off, then they need to figure out how to do 10 in a row without any issues, which is exponentially difficult.

And then there is the whole thing about everything working well for trip to Mars, and back.

And if there is a configuration that exists that can do all of that, its very unlikely that a company under the leadership of someone as Musk can ever figure this out.

For interplanetary travel, things need to start from either orbit or the moon. This has been known for quite some time.


What makes you think so?

Going to the Moon or Mars is a trojan horse.

Starship's true purpose is to compete with airlines in trans oceanic flights.

Musk has said so many times but then he intentionally obfuscates it with all the Mars and Moon talk.

But remember that you heard this before it was widely realized to be true; Starship isn't about going to Mars. Starship is about going to China.


Far too dangerous and noisy for that to ever happen, surely.

And too fragile/explodey for niche military uses (long range troop drops?)


If you're thinking of passenger service, perhaps it is a bit unattractive in the short term. No good launching and landing spots.

But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places. This applies to civilian purposes as well. All kinds of use-cases for speeding up cargo.

The entire economics of Starship and rapid reusability was presented at the beginning of the Starbase work, way back when Hoppy was a thing. He's been sticking to the plan since then. You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.


> But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places.

Surely it's too fragile/explodey for military use - the whole thing's a very volatile fuel tank - could it survive being shot at, even a single high-powered rifle bullet (during landing, or even post-landing) without going boom?


It doesn’t have to be able to deliver in a combat zone to be able to deliver halfway around the world close to a combat zone. Or do you think the Hercules is worthless because it isn’t armored and doesn’t have weapons?

>You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.

Not very good on delivering tech though, which is what makes it more fiction than not.


Who makes the bar for "good at delivering tech" if the guy pushing spacex, starlink and tesla simultaneously doesn't reach it?

Many promises that never materialized or resulted in mediocre or bad products, from the Mars mission to the Hyperloop, and from Teslas dismal software and often promised, never materializing fully autonomous drive to the Cybertruck. Let's not go into the robot vapourware either...

Hyperloop is the only thing you listed that is accurate, although it was only a whitepaper + competition. It was open for others to pursue.

Tesla easily has the best vehicle software + OTA and has since the S in 2012. It still feels better than most new vehicles.

You can buy a Tesla (including Cybertruck) today that will do 95+% of drives with 0 intervention. It may not be 100% autonomous yet, but there isn't anything obvious limiting the last step.

The robots exist but are still being developed. Within 5 years, it is hard to imagine them not becoming super valuable within factory settings.



If you think Tesla is bad, you should look into GM or Ford.

There have been many accusations about sudden accelleration, but except for the Cybertruck's pedal-cover slide, there has never been a proven case of a Tesla autonomously accellerating into a crash. But these accusations come a lot, because people are always wanting to shift the blame away from themselves and the automaker seems like an easy target.


And yet SpaceX flies the most reliable rocket in history more frequently than anyone in the world has ever flown, takes astronauts to the ISS regularly, and does so for far less then any competition. Tesla changed the automobile from ICE to BEV in a way people wanted to buy and was practical as a replacement for any use, and created a charging standard so successful every US car company is switching to.

And the Mars missions so far are just delayed.


>And yet SpaceX flies the most reliable rocket in history more frequently than anyone in the world has ever flown, takes astronauts to the ISS regularly, and does so for far less then any competition

Yeah, after almost half a century, they passed 70s-era Soyuz numbers.

>Tesla changed the automobile from ICE to BEV in a way people wanted to buy and was practical as a replacement for any use

The magic of EV subsidies (for both Tesla and buyers).

>And the Mars missions so far are just delayed.

The magic of that statement is that it can be true at any point in the future!


> Far too dangerous

Falcon 9 is clearly proving that doesn’t have to be the case.


That sounds even stupider than using it to go to mars. I really hope it stays a fantasy like most musk projects.

None of that makes sense.

Transportships even reduce speed to reduce costs.

If the payload doesn't pay for all of this, it was a huge R&D investmen from the american people to Musks scifi ideas


The American people didn’t pay for the R&D if SpaceX, Musk did and then customers did. Customers (including the federal government) that saved millions on every purchase.

NASA gave SpaceX 400 Million just for the development of Falcon 9 and there is a video were Musk said SpaceX was bancrupt if NASA wouldnt have stepd in.

NASA also another 6 Billion upfront to SpaceX for Dragon and HLS.

So yes the american paid for the R&D of SpaceX.

SpaceX took the 'risk' but either succeeding or not in your main business is hardly a risk if you need to succeed anyway to have that business.


Yes, but recall that those contracts were made in a competitive marketplace where SpaceX was the lower bidder.

If not for SpaceX, the American People would have paid more to the ULA group for what has clearly turned out to be inferior results, since ULA has received far more money for far fewer services.

SpaceX was the underdog.


You aren't wrong for the most part, but this whole thing of "find me vulns" is not really accurately describing the space.

Finding vulns has almost become sort of like a vibe thing even before LLMs. There would be some security patch that everyone says is critical because it fixes a vulnerability, but the vulnerability is like "under certain conditions, and given physical access to the device, an attacker can craft a special input that crashes the service"... and thats it.

Even stuff like Spectre and Meltdown, which I highly doubt an LLM can find on its own without specifically knowing about speculative execution attacks, are incredibly hard to use. People made a big deal of those being able to be used from javascript, but to actually leak anything of importance you need to know memory layouts, a bunch of other info and so on.

So while an LLM can patch all the up front vulnerabilities, most if not all of those are completely useless to an attacker. Modern systems are incredibly secure.

On the flip side, the stuff that LLM doesn't know about, that can be exploited. For example, assume that log4shell hasn't been found yet, and that log statements by default can pull jni objects from the internet and execute them. The llms would happily write you code with log statements using log4j, and pass it through vulnerability checker, and I would bet that even at the bytecode level it won't ever figure out that vulnerability exists.

And overall, because of Rice theorem, you can't tell if the program is fully exploitable or not without actually running it in some form and way. LLMS can help you with this (but not fully of course) by actually running it and fuzzing inputs and observing memory traces, but even this gets very hard when you introduce things like threading and timed executions which can all affect the result.

And also, the LLMs themselves are an exploit vector now. If you manage to intercept the API calls somehow and insert code or other instruction, you can have the developer essentially put the exploit for you into the code.

So I would say the field is about even.


> Even stuff like Spectre and Meltdown, which I highly doubt an LLM can find on its own without specifically knowing about speculative execution attacks, are incredibly hard to use. People made a big deal of those being able to be used from javascript, but to actually leak anything of importance you need to know memory layouts, a bunch of other info and so on.

In fairness, i think part of the reason people made a big deal was the novelty of the attack. It was something new. The defenses weren't clear yet. The attack surface wasn't clear. It was unclear if anyone was going to come up with a novel improvement to the technique. Humans love novelty.


>One of the things macbook users praise the most is "build quality", which often means the solidity of the device, lack of flex, etc. These quality features are, in part, achieved by the same choices that make it hard to repair.

Lol what.

Nothing about apple design is a sacrifice to repairability. The only reason they make it hard to repair is because when your Mac breaks, you go buy another one. Can't afford it? Then you are not "classy" enough to own a Mac.

I swear, there must be some epidemic where Mac fans are losing their marbles even more so today.


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