Yeah, it’s a messed up position. It’s made more complicated by then being half right. People do often like having fewer choices. Making a streamlined OS that doesn’t allow them access to the kernel or crucial components, that they literally can’t break by accident, that is indeed an appealing feature to many. But it’s not appealing because they’re stupid, it’s appealing they’re rational.

This has always been Apple’s method, make everything intuitive, easy to use for anyone and their mother. And a big part of that is removing all the extra clutter from the interface, all the options users would rarely if ever use. This is also the contentious part, removing the advanced options that power users might want access to.

But at least initially, they understood that the reason for doing all this, their goal, was to make their products better. These days it seems like they’re less clear on that goal. The idea that they’re “dumbing down” their products and controlling everything because their users are too stupid, this is a new attitude, and it shows a misunderstanding of the principals their company was built on. Apple was only successful because they made very good products which were comfortable to use. They certainly never won popularity through competitive pricing or having the most powerful machines…

Personally, I think it’s a foolish move to be this controlling over their iOS ecosystem. This is really making the product inferior. Sideloading apps will not destroy their walled garden, it just gives power users the options they want. Apple should be afraid of losing more market share, they don’t have all that much to lose…

Nah, not stupid. But yeah it’s hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.

But programmers tend to use some form of a “versioning” system like git. This will record everyone’s changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.

Not with that attitude!

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you’re relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Sure, but you can safely deorbit something from Leo with like 100 m/s of Delta v, you just need to dip into the atmosphere and then drag does the rest. Getting something to a sufficiently high graveyard orbit is more like 2000 Dv split between two burns. You’d need to stay with the trash for half an orbit and then do the second half of your burn, and then presumably you’d need to travel back to your original point, costing another 2000 Dv.

All together, going up could take 40x more propellant than going down.

If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?

That’s a fair point. Keep in mind though, it takes a while to get a whole constellation up in orbit and get all the kinks worked out, Starlink was first usable in 2020. So in total it took them in the area of 14 years from start to finish. It’s also worth noting, that nobody in the space industry has really ever been able to move as fast as spaceX, they’re something of an anomaly, not the norm.

So could a new company do it in 14 years? Yeah, that’s definitely possible. It could happen by 2039, but I wouldn’t put money on it. 25 years seems more likely.

Again, the only possible player that could do that any time soon is blue origin/Amazon.

Stoke Space is working on a fully reusable rocket though, I’m really impressed with their rocket concept, some very smart design choices were made. They do have working hardware and have demonstrated their core engine. But I have no idea how close they are to first launch tests, I expect it will be a while

That’s a fair point. The alternative is taking things up to a “graveyard orbit” somewhere between LEO and GSO, to a particularly unpopular altitude, where nobody’s fighting for real estate. Satellites can sit there indefinitely, you could even clump them up in a big ball, the tiny pull of gravity they have is actually enough to keep them bunched together.

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I’m not sure how to make that feasible.

Yeah, it’s a bad situation. I’m against monopolies, but I also see how filling the sky with redundant satellites is a terrible plan, so I don’t like the idea of lots of competition either.

I think low orbit satellite communications is a pretty awesome concept. It has the potential to become like a second Internet backbone, but a backbone that can bring data directly to users without the additional router hops that local ISPs introduce. On paper, it’s amazingly efficient and can distribute service to all of the world… But in practice the business and management side is deeply problematic. One company should absolutely not be in charge of global Internet service. And one country would not be any better.

The only solution I can see is to make it safe and feasible to have way more satellites operating in low earth orbit. I’m really not sure what that solution might look like…

Here’s an off-the-cuff idea though: One solution could be an extremely robust low earth orbit maintenance and “pruning” system. All satellites would need to be monitored by third parties. And those third parties would need the authority and ability to quickly deorbit (prune) any satellite that deviates from its exact expected orbit. If satellites can ensure no deviation from their path and can safely maneuver to avoid collisions, it could be possible for many more satellites to safely share an orbital altitude.

Well this wouldn’t be that. It would be a competitor to space junk, so increase the number of satellites in orbit by say 25%.

Well yeah, blue origin has already successfully orbited their rocket. Their rocket which has a 45 ton to low earth orbit payload capacity, about the same as the Saturn V (so actually impressive as fuck).

So the head start is what keeps Honda from out competing them. They’re at least 10 years ahead of Honda (but likely more). And BO is solely focused on space, Honda on the other hand isn’t going to prioritize that arm of development over others. So I can’t really see Honda winning that sprint, if they’re not totally committed to the race.

Time for the AI teams to suddenly have tech issues.

“Sorry, the whole codebase is just gone! We have no idea what happened!”

“Must have been the S3 storage”

Is this a coherent thought? (Actual question)

My thoughts exactly.

I can’t believe how much progress the right to repair movement has made! It’s one of the few areas of societal change that I’m actually happy to hear about these days.

I’m also curious, I thought hydrogen was the worst in this regard.

I like your theory on hydrogen reacting as it moves through materials.

Well, different. You’d have highly compressed hydrogen in a cylindrical pressure vessel.

The Hindenburg just burned, actually it was mostly its highly flammable paint that caught fire. When a pressure vessel is ruptured, it explodes in a big way, or it quickly removes itself from the vehicle like a mini rocket.

Unfortunately, the next competitor will be Amazon…

And then we’ll see what happens next, getting a whole constellation up is no small feat, I can’t see a third company getting a system working before 2050.

Yeah, they could have a product ready by 2045! (If they hurry and make it a priority)

I thought Rockstar was going to launch GTA 6

No, they’re the playing card company.

Yeah, tail numbers are a lot like license plates.