parcec

Aren’t you supposed to edit grafana dashboards via the UI?

Organ donation is opt out. Do you consider that evil?

Aluminum already burns up on re-entry though. The only things that typically make it through are high melting point materials (like titanium and carbon), or low ballistic coefficient objects (like spent rocket stages).

Related to this (though maybe not directly applicable), in certain scenarios there is a difference between what can be reliably detected vs tracked. For example, in the context of debris orbiting the earth, our radars can take LEO census measurements down to 3-4mm, even though we can only reliably track things on the ~10cm size range.

We can therefore semi-confidently say we know how many 1cm objects there are out there, even if we can’t predict the trajectory of any single one. (Similar to atoms, really)

What's your criterion of being ready for live tests? Under what conditions is loss of innocent life okay?

People getting killed by drunk drivers didn't volunteer for it either. It doesn't matter how you spin it, the metric that matters (there is nuance, but put bluntly) is "How many innocent lives are lost in traffic related accidents from now until [year X]?".

If, given two scenarios:

1. We develop FSD very carefully. 0 lives are lost during FSD development. Ten million lives are lost by the time that FSD sees 100% adoption.

2. We develop FSD less carefully. 100,000 lives are lost during FSD development due to suboptimal performance before it is perfected. Five million lives are lost due to human drivers by the time FSD sees 100% adoption.

Would you really choose the former option? If your ethics board refuses option 2 in favor of option 1, it is they that are mistaken.

You hit the nail on the head. People often jump to reactions without looking at bigger picture.

It is entirely likely that Uber engineers evaluated this scenario, and (correctly) decided that it was safer overall to turn off reactionary breaking - and have that function performed by a human in the driver seat. If they hadn't, these cars might instead have been brake-checking people at 100x the rate.

It's easy to say things like "Uber should have waited until better safety features were available", such as the eye tracking suggestions mentioned elsewhere in this thread. But features like that take time - especially if they're development-only features that would have no place in the final product. Every additional safety feature pushes FSD deployment back.

Globally, 1.25 million people die from car accidents annually. That's over 3,000 people per day. For every day that you delay mass adoption of FSD, you are accruing massive amounts of fatalities that could have been avoided.

FSD does not have to be perfect, it's development will cost innocent lives - but if you're optimizing for minimal loss of life, it's the correct thing to do. Reactionary policies do the opposite of what you intend them to do - they cost more lives in the long run.

Depends on how you define concern.

For killing a spacecraft? Small debris. For creating more debris? Big debris.

1cm objects are currently essentially impossible to track.

I study orbital debris for a living - I'd like to assure you that you don't need to feel too worried about that. Orbital debris is generally consolidated in very thin altitude bands. Rockets on an escape trajectory spend very little time in these shells, only in passing. Compare that to satellites with lifetimes of 15 years.

Niel's statement is analog to saying "The LHC could create a black hole that kills us all". Yeah... I guess on some theoretical level it's possible... but it's extremely unlikely. Same concept applies here. I'm quite disappointed in him saying "There's a very good chance", because that is far from true.

To be fair, Falcon 9 stage 1 has never been to orbit either.