ak6te

> Were Martian environmental parameters less well-known (e.g., how gravity, air resistance / wind, and scree dynamics interact)? Bot performance in Martian environment (e.g., motor power output) less well-known? Were they being understandably conservative with their irreplaceable bot?

I haven't worked on the Mars rover programs, but I have worked on a NASA moon rover. Based on that experience I would hazard a guess that it's all three of these things.

Environment: We actually have quite a bit more experience roving on Mars so I expect the environmental uncertainty is a bit attenuated for the Mars missions, but one thing I was really surprised by during my time on the moon rover mission was just how little confidence our scientists had about the physical conditions at the specific landing site we are targeting (which is quite far from the Apollo missions for example)

Performance: Building accurate hardware tests on Earth for operations on another planetary body is incredibly hard. Of course NASA engineers are smart and can do this with fairly high confidence, but it's far from perfect. For the moon's 1/6th gravity, we couldn't just build a copy of the moon rover and test it on Earth because the suspension would collapse, so we had a whole separate copy of the moon rover mobility and suspension that was built to operate in Earth gravity yet mimic the performance the actual rover would have on the moon. That unit in and of itself is a feat of engineering that is definitely not immune to mistakes.

> That's not a good enough reason to recommend TOTP instead

In what way is TOTP an "instead"? My understanding of passkeys is that they basically replace the username/password combo, but do not provide any kind of second factor. I know at least one service (I think Amazon, but I'm not 100% sure) still requires TOTP when logging in with a passkey from an unrecognized device.

Not GP, but I also run a cheap VPS to host my personal website. I don't want to depend on GitHub or Cloudflare. I don't need better infrastructure or scaling, and $5 is ~0.03% of my monthly salary, which is indistinguishable from free. What benefit is there to using a more complicated platform to host a simple website?

Assuming we're talking about performing this transaction in a jurisdiction where prostitution is legal, how is it any different from any other business transaction? I don't think anyone is particularly mad about payment processors refusing to process illegal transactions, it's the refusal to process legal but morally controversial transactions that is problematic.

In SoCal at least, public chargers are barely cheaper than gas, even with gas at $6.30/gal. Electric only makes economic sense if you can mostly charge at home.

This used to be true, but gas is $6.30/gallon in California now with no particular reason to think it is coming back down. I haven't actually re-done the numbers, but I have to imagine the ~40% increase in gas prices over the last year have significantly moved the needle in CA.

What's your definition of "legacy auto company"? Wikipedia tells me Hyundai was founded in 1967.

This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.

The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.

And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.

>... oura lets me know when I do not.

Does your body not do the same? I really want to like sleep tracking as a feature, but I find that my body already has built in sleep tracking, and the tech version doesn't give me any actionable advice on how to improve my sleep that my biological sleep tracker isn't already giving me.

Absolutely nuts that this thing wouldn't be engineered so that at least a swelling battery causes the exterior to split so that the swelling is directed out rather than in.

I feel the same way about my Garmin watch's sleep tracking, but one thing I haven't been able to do is use that data effectively. It's an accurate after the fact representation of my sleep, but it doesn't tell me anything that my own body isn't telling me in terms of how I should adjust my sleep patterns/habits.

Do you find you change your behavior at all based on the sleep tracking?

Giving off strong edited-by-AI vibes, but still an interesting article. A large chunk of the premise seems to rest on cities expanding though and I have to wonder whether that's really the case over the timescales a newly built waste processing system will operate on. Most of the developed world is already below replacement fertility and it seems quite possible that the world population will peak within my lifetime.

The author also seems to drive an EX30. My mom bought one a year or two ago and I can attest that it is easily the shittiest software I have ever experienced in a car. Every single thing is half-baked. I'm sure that there are plenty of cars out there that can do this better.

What I don't understand is, isn't this what "thinking" is for? It can be as verbose as it wants while it's thinking as far as I'm concerned, but why can't it keep the verbosity there? Why does it always spill into the actual response no matter what I do?

I'm pretty sure this is just the LLM "thinking out loud". For some reason even when it has thinking enabled and does a thinking step before generating output, it still has to explain what it's doing to itself in the output, which often leads to it correcting itself in the output. I've pretty much stopped letting LLMs write code directly in large part because I cannot get them to stop injecting comments talking themselves through how the code relates to the chat the prompted it in ways that no human would ever write and will make no sense to anyone re-reading the code months later.

This is going to vary by age range, right? For anyone over the age of ~35, the percentage has to be way, way higher than the full population, regardless of technical capability.

Is that a good thing? One of the benefits to streaming for me is precisely that I don't want to get stuck being an old guy who just listens to music from when I was a teenager/young adult. 20 new bands per month is certainly excessive, but with the radio long-dead, how do you discover new music without some kind of streaming service?