Haha, yeah the French totally do that.

I remember when I was a kid and my dad worked in the computer industry. He went to France for work somewhere around 1990. I remember he said that France likes to keep their language pure, not adopt English words, and in technology, where there were a lot of new words, they didn’t always have one for things. So for example, their word for “hard disk” translated literally to “spinning magnetic binary drive”. Whereas, the Japanese would say something along the lines of “harta disku”, which was at least more succinct.

Would you rather call it “official” or “certified” or “genuine” toner cartridges? Because that sounds worse to me.

I mean, they really do need some way to differentiate their product from others. Because they do guarantee that their cartridge works with their printer (and customers would hold them accountable if they did not). They really can’t guarantee that with any others. (simply because they didn’t design the others, haven’t tested them, and have no power to change them if there was a problem. All of which is perfectly reasonable)

Meh, I think it’s pretty straight forward. It’s just a description of the scenario.

Mario games are first party content, because they’re made by the same company that makes the console. This says nothing positive or negative about the game, just who developed it.

I’ve used printers that don’t have cartridges, instead they just have ink wells you can fill with any ink. You do have more freedom with ink choices, but they’re a different kind of hassle. It’s not simply a better solution.

(Speaking of solutions, sometimes the ink you buy is more of a suspension than a solution, and it’ll clump up and dry in the feed hoses, a real pain in the ass.)

Oh man, I have bad news for you about living languages…

But no, I know what you mean, I don’t like it either.

But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?

Is moderation difficult? What makes it difficult?

Oh my God, yes… So many things it’s hard to even consider how to answer…

What happens to the “spirit of discovery and genuine community” when moderation fails?

We have the Internet today. Because moderation has broken down everywhere, it has been defeated, engineered around.

Wow, I can’t believe this post has gotten so many down votes. It’s such a reasonable statement.

Probably the only thing in the whole post I could disagree with here is the word “understand”

AI can generate slop, but it can also understand, categorize, filter, moderate. It can also be slow to adapt to new attacks, or be analyzed and manipulated.

It comes down to this, maybe they can improve upon something. They’re talking about building something resistant to political trolling, hate speech, and misinformation. If they can do that, that would be valuable. I’m willing to wait and see.

I’m willing to wait and see, especially because Lemmy has no defense against that kind of thing. I think there’s probably less hate speech and misinformation on Lemmy than reddit right now, but if Lemmy became the dominating service, it would have massive problems, just like reddit.

I like the federation aspect of Lemmy, that feels extremely valuable, I’m not discounting that. But I think not being open to other options or ideas is plain stupid.

Apple has a history of being the good guys when it comes to issues of encryption. As a rule, they want to keep your privacy (and theirs). But they also want to continue operating in many countries, and when something like this happens, they may fight it in court, but if they lose, they won’t pull out of the region, they’ll find a way to comply.

In other words, this is a problem with national governments. They need to stop asking app and os developers to do unethical things, there’s enough pressure for them to do that already.

And who knows maybe it also shuffles these developers down a slippery slope… Maybe developers figure “if we must spy on users, we’ve already lost their trust, we might as well make a profit from it”. And that leads us to the relationship we have with technology today, our tech is untrustworthy, we feel the oppression of the surveillance state and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Yeah, the application kind of assumes a lot of industry though. I mean if there isn’t a lot of industry, what are you shipping off the moon? But still, 50 km of rail is a lot, but it’s far less than the 325,000 km of tether that a space elevator would need…

Spin launch would definitely be feasible for some cargo, theoretically it would be a bit easier in vacuum, though that would probably also present other challenges. However, with a reasonably sized spin launch system (like the size of a 4 story apartment building), the payload needs to handle forces around 3000 Gs (which is a lot even for cargo). Unfortunately, you’d need to go larger for lower G force. So this also requires a lot of industry.

Well surviving the acceleration is trivial. I figured a 50km track in the post up above, in 50km you can accelerate up to lunar orbit velocities at just 1g of constant acceleration. So if your probe can survive sitting still on earth, it can survive accelerating at that speed.

You’re right though, you do need a small amount of thrust when you reach the top of your arc, but really not much. 50 m/s of DeltaV would do just fine. In other words, opening a can of compressed air would basically do it.

Or alternatively, you could use a mechanical system; you could have the vehicle (basically a rail cart) separate from the cargo with a powerful spring, pushing the cargo up, and the cart down. That mechanical system is also more effective the higher the apogee is, so if you launched the vehicle into a higher, more elliptical lunar orbit, that small push at the top pulls your low end of the orbit up much higher.

Nah, it wouldn’t do much damage. The tether’s whole job is to be strong, but light. And being a long, thin fiber, it’ll have a pretty low mass to surface area ratio (high drag in atmo). If it did come down, it would likely mostly burn up, or mostly be slowed down by the atmosphere.

Additionally, the length of tether with the most tension on it will be the section nearest to the ground. If the tether snaps near the ground, the whole thing gets hauled up to orbit for good.

To be clear, I’m actually not in favor of space elevators in general, I think there are many much more practical ways to get to orbit. I’m just saying that a broken tether should not be the end of the world.

If you really want to build something like a space elevator though, you should check out the tethered ring concept: https://youtu.be/8B2iqiKehyM

Uh, well truth be told, you could probably use steel cable or carbon fiber for a lunar space elevator cable, but you would need some really insane quantities… Like I said, I wouldn’t recommend it, just go the mass driver route instead.

But why are you even bringing up Musk? Nobody is suggesting involving him…

Heh, yeah they should have kept trying to get the Delta clipper to work. But they notably ended development of the program…

Nobody thought it was impossible

Everyone thought it was infeasible, especially after the Delta clipper proved unproductive. After that, nobody even tried because it would just be an endless money pit there certainly wants any active development in that area I know of when SpaceX started.

Elmo fanboy detected.

I explicitly said the opposite. I’ll admit to being extremely impressed with what SpaceX has accomplished, but don’t confuse that with musk worship, the man needs to just stop doing… anything.

No… That doesn’t add up. The falcon 9 didn’t get as many subsidies as you might think (and it only got that during development, it gets no subsidies now). And Arianne Space has some extremely expensive rockets. SpaceX is launching for 1/10 the price of their competitors (literally), and then they’re reusing the first stages…

Anyone who thinks SpaceX isn’t in a unique position right now isn’t being honest to themselves. They’re doing what was previously thought to be impossible, about twice a week.

I mean don’t get me wrong, Musk is a monster, an irredeemable human being. But spaceX is not just Elon Musk. And what they’re doing is something nobody has been able to do before and they’re doing it very well. If they can succeed at making a fully reusable rocket with their starship, they’ll have accomplished something truly transformative. The first fully reusable launch vehicle will usher in a new era for human civilization, I’m not exaggerating to say it’s one of the most important things happening on the planet right now.

I mean… That’s basically how you accomplish this kind of thing. You throw educated people and resources at the problem for as long as it takes. Often you can do it faster with more people working on the problem. How is that not how it really works?

I mean you can certainly save time by looking over someone else’s shoulder, espionage and defecting engineers have of course led to local advances, but the process is generally the same. Development takes time and effort, and that equals money.

The moon rotates too slowly (about once every 30 days), you don’t want a space elevator for the moon, the tether would have to be ridiculously long.

But there’s no atmosphere, so you have another good option: a linear accelerator, or mass driver. Basically you make a very long, very straight rail and use electromagnetism to accelerate a craft right up to orbital velocity. The only complicated part is constructing 50 km of rail, but I mean, it’s more time consuming than complicated. This is actually way more feasible than a space elevator.

I’d do that… give me a letter of mark, a capsule and some inertial impactors, I’m ready to go.

This is… A whole lot of games.

I did love tunic, fantastic game, easily worth that price on its own.

I’ve never played cook serve delicious, but it’s been on my radar. I’ll have to give this a shot. Heh, there are some tabletop games and rulesets on this list, could be some hidden gems in there. Honestly, this is a big enough bundle to be worth just buying on principle, and sorting it out later. So what if I don’t end up playing 400 of these titles, if I end up liking 10, that’s a fabulous deal, and all for charity!

Yeah, it makes me think of Blizzard, now Activision Blizzard.

For decades Blizzard was a shining star, it had literally never made a bad game. They famously released games “when they’re done”, rather than just in time for Christmas. As a result, they had a perfect, spotless record of releasing only top quality, genre defining games that players nearly universally loved. But that streak ended with Diablo 3 in 2012, it was their first major release since Blizzard was purchased by Activision in 2008. For the first time their release was controversial and the game just wasn’t fun (in its current form).

I remember it actually made me very sad at the time, it felt like the end of an era. It also made me worry about the other PC gaming golden child, Valve.