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).
A typical test stand would have maybe a thousand channels of relatively slow data (pressures, temperatures, flow rates, valve states, etc), and maybe up to a few hundred of channels for essentially audio data from vibration sensors. This amounts to sub-gigabit per second data rate overall.
If very high speed video / multiple video cameras are used, this could generate massive data rates, but unless something interesting happens it is not clear how important this data is.
In flight, the telemetry data rate from the entire Falcon-9 used to be measured in megabits per second per stage, plus the video stream. It was not a huge amount of data. Presumably now with Starlink they send a lot more telemetry from Starship, but in flight the engines typically have far, far fewer sensors compared to the ground testing.
It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book.
Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he... : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour."
Mark Kurlinsky's "Paper" covers the early history of printing presses in Europe in great detail. Printers and their presses followed, or instigated, the local paper making industry. There is less focus on the evolution of moveable type there, but I'm also reading "Thinking With Type" by Ellen Lupton which hits the highlights in the history of typeface design.
I was fortunate enough to be chosen to talk to astronauts on the ISS from the ground and ask them a question, and as far as I can tell from searching this awesome resource, I think my question was unique.
I asked Ann McClain and David Saint-Jacques what experiment or module they would add to the ISS if they could pick anything. They both agreed that a rotating wheel that simulated gravity would be helpful for experiments and quality of life.
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