Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.
"Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible."
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
It seemed obvious to me that this was bearing stiction and that manually rotating it during the start allowed the fan to spin on its own after that, but I could be wrong and maybe the fan was dead entirely?
Yeah, that would be my assumption too (based on my admittedly incomplete personal experience where I got my furnace running by manually spinning my draft inducer motor, which kept spinning).
As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.
That's not necessarily true. Even spaceships in LEO will perform temperature-driven rolls so as to distribute heat and radiation. I have to assume that long-term ships like interplanetary transport will do the same.
I've considered whether our current transformer-based AI could be conscious, as I understand it, which I deem to include some degree of self awareness combined with some degree of external awareness. I can see how theoretically something could be self aware without any external awareness, but I grasp at straws when I try to envision what that experience could be like.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
this reminds me, I grew up in an area of the US where the pinnacle of existence was spending the whole weekend doing chores such as very publicly washing your own car in your driveway
if you were an able bodied man there is no other duty. the same for shoveling snow, or mowing a lawn, cleaning up inside the house
these are all things I've rejected and exempt myself from
but I'm beginning to remember large swaths of society live under that regime, so driving to a car wash wouldn't be an option at all. you wash your car and have a separate desire to walk to the car wash for some other reason
I could see people thinking its a trick question, or just scoffing at the idea people wash their cars at the car wash and pollute the data for AIs in annotation work.
"Correct" is pushing it, the question is too vague if approached as a genuine question and not a gotcha. I've actually had literal experiences where I wanted to wash my car and walked to a car wash in the past. That was me collecting the car, and there is an argument that would be a valid walk answer.
If we require logical rigour there isn't enough context in the question. If we allow for informal language then there are absolutely situations where cars get washed and people walk 50 meters to the car wash. It is a reasonable guess that the car is already at the wash and you have a 2nd car, given the question is being asked. It's a slight leap, but it is an inference that makes the question meaningful and so it is one that could be made.
I'd assume the LLMs are just failing at spatial reasoning, because AFAIK they're terrible at it. But both answers are justifiable because we don't know where the car is and have to make assumptions.
I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.
The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
> it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored.
Sounds like me during a troubleshooting call trying to think of the wildest crap possible based on current available information, even if I sound crazy, sometimes my crazy question hits the nail. Never shun someone for trying to think of any crazy thing, sometimes they hit the nail on the head.
You really do want breadth-first exploration, because once a group has identified and explored a few scenarios of high likelihood, the brain is already biased towards those events and more exotic scenarios are less likely to be imagined.
Only after that first exploration should you narrow it down according to likelihood. Then, if those likely scenarios appear to be dead ends, you can circle back to the earlier less likely scenarios. But trying to come up with less likely scenarios after your brain has already explored a different scenario in-depth takes a lot more effort.
> If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.
Then you'd be doing it wrong. Valuing an idea (i.e. rating it in terms of relevance, likelihood, discernment, whatever you want to call it) is not part of the brainstorm, it's part of the post-brainstorm evaluation. Creativity and logic exercise the brain differently, trying to do both at the same time does not give the best results.
Sure, but give a group too long a leash and they will overindex on a tarpit idea. The reason why conspiracy theories are notorious is not because conspiracies don't exist, it's because they are non-falsifiable, fun to speculate about, and easy to understand so everyone can participate. Viral, in other words. Good leaders should steer away from tarpits (and privately ensure that they were scouted, just in case).
Of course, and I hold back the wilder theories ;) I usually let it rummage through my brain a bit first. I have a "hint" of ADD so my brain can jump all over, but I can get hyper focused on an outage, especially when trying to figure it out involves a bit of brain storming sometimes, and following a methodology to look under every rock.
> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.
(Assuming you are referring to last night's incident, not the 2016 one.)
No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.
A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move them.
There are rarely mentioned cases where you do actually want to be able to pierce a rocket with a bullet. Mostly related to recovery (or not...) post-flight.
Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.
> After ULA won an $11 billion block buy contract from the US Air Force to launch high-value military payloads into the early 2020s, Musk sued in April 2014.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
It was very likely the largest explosion in Florida spaceflight history. Considerably larger than when SpaceX blew up AMOS-6 in 2016, and that required a full rebuild of the pad infrastructure over 18 months.
I'm wondering about how it compares to AMOS-6. New glen is bigger than Falcon 9 & uses fully cryogenic propellant, so there would be definitively more energy involved.
On the other hand a lot of the damage on the Falcon pad was IIRC due to burning kerosene getting everywhere on the pad & melting everything.
In this case I would expect all the liquid oxygen and methane to either be involved in the explosion or quickly vaporize, possibly resulting in a different damage pattern on the pad.
You might be confusing cryogenic with subcooling - it is still cryogenic (or it would not fit into the tanks at any reasonable pressure), just colder and more dense (you can fit it a bit more than if its at a higher, still cryogenic temperature).
They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.
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