That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.
Orbit is a global public commons, how is it not a political issue? It can be a political issue AND an engineering marvel, regardless of what other organizations are doing
Plenty of programs from many places can reach orbit, im not really sure what you're talking about. And yes. It still is, unless a sole individual can claim ownership of a global orbit, which i imagine even some of the most capitalist-minded people would find absurd.
So the US owns the moon? Or does Neil Armstrong?
I'm a bit sassy today just kinda tired of certain arguments.
Well it soothes me to know that the people who actually took us to the moon didn't have such territorial obsessions:
> Some Americans anticipated possible controversy over planting the United States flag on the Moon, since the Outer Space Treaty prohibited territorial claims to any extraterrestrial body. Since it was made clear the United States had no intention of making a territorial claim to the Moon, no serious controversy materialized. Four months after the Apollo 11 landing, the United States Congress passed a bill in November 1969, which was signed into law by President Nixon, stating:
> The flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft ... as part of any mission ... the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States. ... this act is intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.
I find myself often trapped (enticed?) by how fast and inexpensive it is to build software nowadays and also to learn new things.
Today, was thinking about 1) what do I actually want to build AND maintain? and 2) what do I want to build and maintain that if I didn't do it, someone else probably wouldn't and I'd be really annoyed that it didn't exist in the world?
I dunno, just two current questions I thought you might find interesting, not sure if it adds anything new to the discourse, may be a challenge throughout different parts of human history :-D
> Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say, is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.
With the discussions of p(doom) in AI development, I wonder if we can learn from, and build upon, what some of the world's leading scientists and intellectuals did during and after the development of the nuclear bomb.
This manifesto led to the development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which "provided background work to the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), the Biological Weapons Convention (1972), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993)," possibly the groundwork to end the Vietnam War, and also the reception of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Joseph Rotblat in 1995 [0].
They believe the tech is currently powerful and may become super super powerful very soon, and powerful tools can help us and can hurt us. Nuclear fission can provide so much energy to power our society and kill millions of beings.
So, i think they're hopeful for the help and terrified of the harms and are maybe trying to slow down on the amplifier of those effects for now.
I wonder if this is a root of the complaints across fields, how AI is ruining the greater picture and process in writing, acting, drawing, filming, coding, and more.
It's also known as "commodification of labour", and AI is just the latest and greatest tool to do it.
Luddites complained that the trajectory of technology was to allow less skilled workers to mass produce goods via machines owned by factory owners, as opposed to helping skilled workers build up and use their skills while passing them on.
Now we have a lot of money and time focused on LLMs owned by a few companies, making it easier for them to monetize low skill labour(prompting versus art/research/artisanry)
> Luddites complained that the trajectory of technology was to allow less skilled workers to mass produce goods via machines owned by factory owners, as opposed to helping skilled workers build up and use their skills while passing them on.
And their complaint was valid from their perspective, but the end result of that process is that now you can have functional and pretty clothing for pennies.
It's true that a lion's share of the gain was pocketed by people who owned the mechanized looms. Now imagine how much more of an advantage it would have been without those people.
Same thing here. We can - and should - get rid of all the megacorp leeches. But the benefits of cheap automation remain regardless, and it's still the same equation - removing the gatekeeping harms those who relied on it to keep the products of their labor priced high, while benefitting everyone else.
Suppose that tomorrow we learn that AI just exploited a bug in Lean and the proof is, in fact, bullshit. Or suppose it is the case, but we never learn that.
And the fear was visible and public. We watched planes hit our tallest buildings live on TV and the horrors that ensued. It was publicly visceral in a way that an invisible virus, which has had people struggling in relative privacy and obscurity, hasn't been.
the news media also played it on endless loops for months
in my life I've been notably traumatized first by the endless loops of the Challenger tragedy and then 9/11, I often wonder what the next event will be
I should also point out we also killed a million people in Iraq in response to 9/11 who will never ever have a memorial, Bush/Cheney would never ever have had the military enlistment to invade Iraq if it wasn't for the hype of 9/11 by the media, even Bush has mentioned it himself
Fair point, we don't televise their deaths especially in such a visceral and repeated way and therefore it can feel more distant.
I still think if we showed people dying from covid in the more gruesome way, it may have changed our response to it, just as if we show any human or being dying in a gruesome way.
« we don't televise their deaths » — Wikileaks did, at least tried to, but bravely filling in these gaps in the footage had regrettable consequences. Assange had to stay a couple years imprisoned in am embassy till they struck a deal. Bradley Manning got a different deal, involving castration.
I dont think it existed nearly at the same level, not even close. And honestly, even now, i still think it's a handful of actors doing a lot of it.
Kinda like when women say that men harass them in the bars and a lot of men seem confused because we don't think we harass them, when it can be like 1 guy harassing 20 women in a bar on the same night.
Yup, if i claim everyone is corrupt, then i can be corrupt. Ironically, if im corrupt, i probably honestly assume everyone else is, or at least superficially assume that, because if i don't, i might think other people are good and i am bad.
You actually can’t, because of the nature of incentives. If everyone else is corrupt and you’re not, you fall behind and get pushed out. This is how systems work.
We see the same thing with companies. If everyone else is using, say, shady dark patterns you’re not, you lose market share and go out of business. The only result then is that everyone must use dark patterns, it stops being optional.
If everyone is corrupt, how will you compete with the amount of money needed to campaign and maintain incumbency? You won’t.
The only solution is to make corruption systemically difficult or impossible. Individual solutions and morals will go absolutely nowhere, because they’re ineffective at a structural level. Corruption is contagious by construction, the very nature of our political structure makes it so.
I think it's what can happen when we shift more towards an exchange orientation and away from a communal orientation. Or in other words, as we see the world more win-lose and less win-win.
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.