And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.

A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?

Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?

It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.

There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.

And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.

You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.

The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.

I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.

If we're being clear, it's going to be a lot more than that.

Our comments here on HN are almost certainly going to live in fame/infamy forever. The twitter firehose is a pathway to 140-character immortality essentially.

You can already summon an agent to ingest essentially an entire commenter's history, correlate it across different sites based on writing style or similar nicknames, and then chat with you as that persona, even more so with a finetune or lora. I can do that with my gmail and text message history and it becomes eerily similar to me.

History is going to be much more direct and personal in the future. We can also do this with historical figures with voluminous personal correspondence, that's possible now.

It's very interesting because I think the era before mass LLM usage but also after digitalization is going to be the most intensely studied. We've lived through a thing that is going to be on the cusp of history, for better or worse.

Hepatitis C has effectively been cured. Obesity, sickle cell, and cystic fibrosis have all heard their death knell though not a complete cure.

Hep C regimens are getting closer and closer to "take a pill for a couple months" - no more interferon injections or multiple rounds of multiple drugs.

Trikafta is a functional cure for 90% of CF patients, I believe - not easy or cheap but normalizes what you care about bar the administration of the treatment itself.

Sickle cell has CRISPR treatments that are incredibly invasive and awful but do functionally cure the disease more or less permanently for a cool "couple million"

And everyone knows about GLP-1 drugs for obesity. The latest batch are as good or better than bariatric surgery without, you know, the surgery part.

Great list!

There's also Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that now has a (very expensive) gene therapy: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-12/fda-panel-endorses-gene...

Triplebyte was a thing for a little while, maybe it's time for it to live again.

We took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them.

It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.

I love watching them interact. I ended up ditching a show in Alaska to sit in a grocery parking lot and watched eagles quarrel for almost two hours. They're great.

And here I assumed they sounded like red-tailed hawks!

To expand and agree: turnips, beets, hard whole grains, if their baby teeth aren't visibly worn by the time they fall out, it wasn't hard enough.

Jaw and face bone grows by stimulation. It's not just a dental thing - it's sleep apnea, sinus infections, facial structure, voice timbre, and attractiveness.

If it's enough, they won't even need their wisdom teeth pulled - having your wisdom teeth pulled is substantially a standard american diet issue, not a human genetic issue.

Thanks, and 100% agree. We have never had to pull a wisdom tooth either and carrots were always the go-to roadtrip snack growing up.

It's funny because I mildly disagree with your core premise (orthodontics are unnecessary), they should just be necessary as a disability accommodation, essentially. If we had 10-30% of the population in wheelchairs because we didn't let kids walk I would find the wheelchair industry odious as well.

Right, most of the orthodontics websites say 70% of people need them. I understand wanting to justify a total market size but if people actually believe that, it's getting out of hand.

I've had carrots (and fruit and hard snscks) since I don't remember when.

My teeth have been crooked since forever. So?

The x-clacks-overhead of LLMs, perhaps.

Usually these relatively low height kinds of top-tank systems lose water for the entire apartment building, because there's one pump to raise the water to the tank, which then passively provides the pressure (usually through pressure regulators at each floor if I remember right).

Larger buildings tend to have multiple independent systems

My hobby pastimes have been gradually describing an interesting arc, starting from essentially the oldest human passtimes and advancing forward through time. I really need to stop and revisit flintknapping though. Wild edibles are a bit of a dice roll, and manual firemaking is actually quite a workout. Weaving is almost infinite in depth, and has a particular attraction to programmers for its historical connections. Woodworking and pottery are big wins, for people who are technical but want to get out of their own head. To quote Gibson:

"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible."

You can get very technical indeed in some of humanity's oldest industries.

I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve.

That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.