um, they've got 2 years before the basket is retired during which time they can always extend if they need to. why would they want to keep a less capable, more $/lb into orbit system going after Starship becomes a viable, reliable upgrade???

But they have already stopped taking orders, which means they’re already clearing their pipeline and it will take some time to restore. Launch contracts don’t happen overnight.

$/kg to orbit is not as important a deciding factor as many people assume it is. It’s typically a small portion of overall costs, and there are often cases where a launch provider that’s less expensive in terms of $/kg to orbit is actually more expensive in terms of total cost.

Starship is going to be a particularly weird one to adapt to. The “deploy out the side” design may make it straight up incompatible with a large subset of spacecraft. For those where it is workable, migrating commercial payloads to it may still require the development of new satellite buses, which is something SpaceX doesn’t seem to be working on for the benefit of anyone other than Starlink. And such a large rocket means most potential customers will have to plan on ridesharing with even more co-passengers, which means even more room for scheduling conflicts, compromises on initial orbit (and therefore cost to reach destination orbit), etc.

That’s just assuming Starship development goes smoothly from here on out. Which seems optimistic considering that, even by the standards of spaceflight, its development thus far arguably qualifies as cursed. Considering the gap between original design goals and reality is already historically large, I certainly wouldn’t be taking any cost estimates at face value right now. Like for any launch vehicle program, we won’t know its true capabilities and costs until it’s operational.

brilliant

sounds like you might appreciate the ethos behind https://frame.work/

Might not meet your spec reqs but have you looked into?

Yeah, I know about them. They look like MacBooks, and I really think the old ThinkPad design from the Yamato was perfect. I also miss the trackpad, as I'm a heavy keyboard user.

If there were an option to fund a clone of an IBM-era T43/T60, I'd gladly contribute to it. :D

Thanks anyway for your help!

I'm going to predict right now, as I weep into my coffee, massive centralized AI traffic monitoring is the only way that we fix this. The attack surface is effectively infinite as you look across all of the home routers, Keurigs, iot's, and mobile devices - and security has historically ranged from reactive to uninterested by people, companies, and government. I see no world in which my parents proactively do anything other than unplug the router to help protect against the coming wave of exploits. So the only way I see us getting a handle on protecting that infinite uneducated and soon-to-be helpless landscape is through centralized inspection and policing nodes. And dear God, what a dystopian future that looks like to me (˃̣̣̥ᯅ˂̣̣̥)

you REALLY need to start working on your own local models, no not because your 4080 on a pi harness with qwen 3.8 will be mediocre today, but because in a year when OpenAI and Anthropic have fully enshittified there will be NO regulations and they'll have your chestnuts in a vice and you'll be glad you can tell them to rm -rf

til: ≥(1/3)==lot

If it isn't a lot then you'd accept a 1/3 reduction in your pay, right? Like if it was for an objectively good cause that you support?

lol was thinking the exact same, named some ML projects Jeeves along the way...

I've been reading the theoretical papers on Wi-Fi as a tracking system (https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000185756) but dang now Comcast is actually selling this?!?! And people believe this is a good idea?!?

Here's an article that explains it in a way more understandable for f&f: https://www.core77.com/posts/145192/How-Wi-Fi-Can-Track-Your...

Wonder if Flock is starting a wifi router business...

It's part of the Plume mesh wifi platform. If you get them from any ISP, you can enable this in the app.

very interesting thought experiment here. I wonder how much it would take in a monthly subscription to offset the money they make in ads? picturing an Instagram without drivel and the crap and the manipulative behavior, that I would pay for simply to escape for 15 minutes. Curate the good content, heck create AI content I don't care I'm there to just mentally check out for a bit. Time lock it based on my prefs so that it respects me as a human being, doesn't try to feed off of me as a data source and I'll pay for that. I agree with you why is no one doing this? I can hear an argument about economies of scale, that it's just not worth the hassle, big guys too entrenched, but isn't that what we're all here to do... create new ways to disrupt?!?

If you pay a premium price, you're an even more interesting target for others premium brands, so the best target for advertisers. And they are too greedy to leave you alone.

very nice response idle_zealot, it's this level of human decency in comments that keeps me coming back to HN

same — that was an unexpected little moment on HN. Honestly appreciated the answer as it caused me to stop and examine the phrase I've been using/hearing without never really thinking about it.