• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
rss

  • Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.

    The Space Shuttle was a marvel of engineering. But while it was reusable, it wasn’t actually good at it. Reusability was supposed to bring down cost and turnaround time and it did neither. And not just that, it was actually much more expensive than competing expendable rockets. Plus, it had lots of other issues like being dangerous as fuck. You couldn’t abort at all for major parts of the ascent and there was the whole issue with the fragile heat protection tiles, both of which caused fatalities.

    I think part of the reason why people aren’t impressed by the Shuttle anymore is because it flew 135 missions. It’s 40 year old technology. And it’s not like SpaceX are just doing the same thing again 40 years later, they’re reusing their rockets in a completely different way, which no one else had done before. And in doing so they seem to be avoiding most of the disadvantages that came with the Shuttle’s design.

    Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.

    Sure, I wouldn’t say that no one else could do this with a similar amount of money (and the will to actually do it). Whether you want to call it revolutionary or not is subjective, but they’re definitely innovating a lot more than any other large player in spaceflight. The Falcon 9 is a huge step forward for rocket reusability and SpaceX have also been the first to fly a full-flow staged combustion engine as well as the most powerful rocket ever. They’re making spaceflight exciting again after like 40 years of stagnation and I think that’s what resonates with people.


  • I’ve never used Twitter a lot and I’ve mostly stopped using it, but Mastodon is just not a viable alternative for most people. I used Twitter to keep up with things. I made a Mastodon account like two years ago, but almost none of the people or organisations I care about are on there. And most of the ones that are on it aren’t posting. So I’m basically never using it. The same is true for Bluesky. Threads may be better but I’d rather avoid anything from Facebook.




  • I haven’t used Python since around the time when type hints first became a thing so I might be completely wrong here, but isn’t this because Python just generally ignores type hints? If you ran a static type checker like mypy over this it would complain right?

    Also, if you actually did anything with the list that you couldn’t do with a bool (e.g. len(value)), it would throw an error too because Python is actually pretty strict about types, just only at runtime. That’s why it’s usually considered to be strongly typed, although people don’t seem to agree what exactly that’s supposed to mean.




  • Don’t listen to the people saying you should just quit. Talk to people first, especially the DM. Tell them about what kind of game you’d like to play. This is something that groups should generally do before they start a campaign (in what some people call session 0), especially if they’ve never played together. It’s possible that the DM isn’t consciously designing the sessions like this and is willing to change it up. Maybe they’re even happy to get some feedback and the other players might also enjoy some more roleplay. Maybe the DM can’t see themselves running a game like that, but another player would love to.

    If it becomes clear that the kind of game they want to play and the kind of game you want to play are incompatible, then it’s perfectly fine to say “this isn’t for me” and stop playing with them.