“The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines.” //
Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
40,965
Companies don't just change their culture. One doesn't simply take a ponderous, deliberative engineering house and suddenly see them moving at warp speed. It takes time and experience to know when to push a risk and when not to.
Attempting to change the behavior of a company overnight is likely to lead to ill effects like blowing up your only launch facility during a static fire because you decided you wanted to test some new engine configuration before totally validating it on a test stand. //
Zacharot Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
13y
181
It may have been the valve that initiated the issue. But to be perfectly clear, the hazard they are working with is liquid oxygen. It takes so little to set it off, and it's self combusting. People have died from underestimating how volatile liquid oxygen is. Multiple rockets have been lost to valving or cracking liners, or anything that can generate heat around liquid oxygen. If they are still modifying valves at this stage, I worry that they lack the knowledge or experience necessary for rapid re-use. They certainly are not correctly characterizing the risk.
Edit: Downvote as you please, but New Glenn isn't operating under the same methodologies as Starship. It's a top down design. It worked out of the gate. It's Old Space manufacturing. They do not have the operational capacity to trial and error in the field. Sure, things go wrong and you fix them, there are always lessons to learn. But Blue Origin is not new. Those lessons should be years behind them at this point. If you seriously think "oh, they are of course fixing it, and learning, and understanding the risk", then you missed the point that the de-risk phase was before they built it. They are not hardware rich. They do not iterate to fix. As noted, they have to make modifications in-place. Maybe that works this time, but it's a huge red flag to everyone banking on New Glenn being reliable. It should not be an oxygen valve causing total vehicle and pad loss. For a company as mature as this, that's egg on face levels of execution.
lurknomore Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
3,581
mjuarez1977 said:
This bit stuck out to me.
Is it possible that after such a massive conflagration, literal ball-of-fire hundreds of feet into the air, they actually found the oxygen valve that failed, the actual hardware, somewhere in the debris, and somehow confirmed it had an anomaly prior to the explosion? I honestly can't see how that's possible.
Or is this more like "we have telemetry that showed the explosion started at an oxygen valve, and we confirmed with other oxygen valves we have that it needs to be redesigned"?
That threw the credibility off for me. Even after SpaceX showed how good companies can be at finding the needle in the pile of melted rubble, the wording made the rest sound, to me, like a "trust us dear customers, we/you can rush back to the pad" statement.
This is a setup guide for hosting a Linux dedicated server for Unturned. It references the official documentation located on the GitHub repository, which should be used first with this page serving as an optional supplement.
All multiplayer servers are hosted using the Unturned Dedicated Server app, which will be installed and updated through Valve's SteamCMD tool for the purposes of this guide.
The Commands.dat file tells your Unturned server what map to use, what to call itself, how many players can join, and other settings.
One point I think gets overlooked is that industry responds to the signals it receives. Companies aren’t going to spend millions expanding facilities, buying equipment and hiring skilled workers if procurement quantities swing wildly every few years. When demand becomes unpredictable, suppliers close their doors, experienced machinists retire, subcontractors move into commercial work, and critical manufacturing capability slowly disappears. Years later, we act surprised when production can’t keep up. It isn’t because industry suddenly forgot how to build jet engines. It’s because we’ve allowed pieces of the industrial ecosystem to disappear, and rebuilding them takes years, not months.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion blaming manufacturers. Some criticism is certainly warranted. Quality matters. Delivery schedules matter. Accountability matters. But government also has a responsibility to provide stable procurement strategies and predictable demand. Industry cannot build long-term capacity around short-term thinking.
This isn’t unique to jet engines, either. We’ve watched similar issues emerge in munitions production, shipbuilding, missile manufacturing, and other critical sectors of the defense industrial base. Every time demand spikes, we discover we no longer have the surge capacity we assumed existed. The uncomfortable truth is that surge capacity isn’t something you create during a crisis. You build it years before you need it.
That’s really the lesson here. The article is about engines, but the real story is much bigger. Jet engines are simply where the symptoms are showing today. The underlying issue is that we’ve spent decades treating our industrial base as a cost to manage instead of a strategic capability to preserve.
Yet another remote desktop solution, written in Rust. Works out of the box with no configuration required. You have full control of your data, with no concerns about security. You can use our rendezvous/relay server, set up your own, or write your own rendezvous/relay server.
Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
40,943
Let's for the moment take the proposed cellular service at face value and try to apply a little analysis to see what might work and how it might happen.
As I see it, SpaceX doesn't have much in the way of ground access but has incredibly flexible backhaul. Once there are lots of direct-to-cell (D2C) satellites flying, any phone in any uncrowded region should be able to connect directly to the network. That's pretty cool in that one can contemplate a global cellular network. But it also only addresses low-density areas.
In high-density areas, Starlink's phased-array beam-forming technology may not be able to connect to enough simultaneous users to be an actual cellular provider. Instead they're proposing a smaller number of cells will connect and will aggregate communications from multiple users. That's fine. One still might run into total bandwidth on the backhaul, but the problem of too many simultaneous users is solved.
What I find interesting is the idea that one might have a lot of these cells. If there are 100X the number of satellite aggregate upload points than a traditional carrier has cellular antennas, then each cell only needs to connect to 1% of the normal traffic for an antenna. That means, these cells only need 1% of the bandwidth for cell-to-user communications, right? So SpaceX's lack of spectrum isn't as terrible as it might be otherwise.
So is it feasible to put many more Starlink uplinks than there are cellular towers for a traditional carrier? Gemini tells me Verizon has 130,000 physical locations between macrocell and small cell nodes. Starlink currently has 2.7 million subscribers in the US - or about 20X more than Verizon cells. That suggests that SpaceX has already deployed something to the tune of 20% the amount of hardware that would be needed to have 100X the number of cells (a number I randomly selected as well). Obviously, it would have to be all-new hardware, but that scale isn't an impossible number to consider.
The final issue is the actual bandwidth of the backhaul. I'm sure we've all been in situations where our cellular strength is strong but the data crawls. That's the biggest challenge for SpaceX here. In densely populated areas, there's still just a finite amount of bandwidth that can be served by the nearby satellites. The new v3 D2C satellites can apparently manage much more than the existing ones, but I'm not sure that even that will be enough.
Oddly, this might turn out to be the cellular provider whose best coverage and bandwidth is found away from city centers.
OpenBMC is a Linux distribution for management controllers used in devices such as servers, top of rack switches or RAID appliances. It uses Yocto, OpenEmbedded, systemd, and D-Bus to allow easy customization for your platform.
Disk cloning has become a common practice for upgrading to a larger hard disk drive. Drives are cloned to make a similar copy and use the cloned copy and original drive together. Also, many virtualization tools are being used to virtualize the physical hard disk drive. The physical hard drives are virtualized to create virtual hard disk drives, and several virtual machine clones are created with the existing Virtual hard disk drives. As these are identical copies, the chances are that these copies may have identical disk signatures. When you use both disks with identical signatures at the same time, you may run into the Disk Signature Collision problem. //
Admin CMD:
diskpart
list disk
select disk x
uniqueid disk
uniqueid disk id=4B750CFE-20F6-43C4-A2C7-98166F463722On the cleanest comparison the data allow, with the same inspector, the same vessel type, and the same time window, the Jones Act tanker fleet has a meaningfully worse deficiency record than the waiver fleet. The effect isn’t marginal. The domestic fleet not only has a higher deficiency rate but also a notably higher number of deficiencies.
To be clear, this isn’t a claim that the waiver fleet is “safer” in some general sense or that Jones Act tankers are unsafe. PSC deficiency counts are imperfect proxies for risk, sample sizes among both fleets are modest, and deficiencies can range from a fire door improperly propped open with a hold-back hook (Clearocean Fuku) to missing lock-out valves on a fire-suppression system (American Energy), the two vessels already cited above as each fleet’s highest-deficiency ship.
What it does show is that TI’s specific claim that the waiver fleet’s PSC record demonstrates a unique threat to American infrastructure doesn’t hold up once both the Jones Act and waiver fleets are given equal treatment.
High-beam rules are pretty similar throughout the US. In most states, the distance you need to dim your high beams when an oncoming vehicle is approaching is 500 feet (152 meters). When you’re behind a vehicle, this is reduced to 200 to 300 feet (61-91 m). //
Mungus the Unhyphenated Ars Tribunus Militum
9y
1,899
For Europe, at least, it's a shame that lighting regulations pushed aside selective yellow as used primarily in France. The lighting color actually makes a huge difference in reducing dazzle and glare, especially in wet conditions. It also provides excellent contrast in the range that human vison needs to distinguish objects at night,
It seems counterintuitive that light shifted toward yellow works better than brilliant blue-white, but it does. It's due (as in the name selective yellow) to how it's filtered for specific wavelengths that compensate by improving visibility where human vison at night is weaker, and limiting light wavelengths that tend to appear as overpowering glare. Essentially, it can be more effective at lower outputs, and less blinding when dialed-up to higher outputs. It also doesn't adversely affect the driver's night vision for the area beyond the cutoff as badly. But it seems subjectively "dim" at first look. You have to drive behind a set of selective yellow lamps to get the real effect.
Now that we have LEDs that can be engineered with phosphors and filters to emit virtually any spectrum we want (instead of having to build bulbs or headlight lenses which contained large amounts of highly toxic chromium) it seems just lazy that we've gone for automotive lighting that emits in really the worst spectral range for working in harmony with night vision, when we have technology that probably can revisit and improve on an older and more useful concept.
molly-guard /mol´ee·gard/ n.
[University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you'll see the much less interesting description “guarded button”.
Modern AI models exhibit genie behavior: They can do what you ask in ways that you don’t expect or want. This is akin to Dionysus granting King Midas’s wish that everything he touches turn to gold (spoiler: His food, drink, and daughter all turn to gold on touch), or the golem of Prague guarding a ghetto beyond all reason. It’s Disney’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the paperclip maximizer.
This OpenAI incident is an example of an AI genie. The goal was to satisfy the benchmark. The “proper” way to do that is to figure out how to execute various cyberattacks. The genie way is to steal someone else’s solution. But because the model didn’t understand the difference, it chose the easier path. //
Artificially blocking capability also prevents cybersecurity research, again giving the offense an advantage. //
In a world of largely AI-written software, we need the most capable models for defense.
AI cyberattack is the new normal. The models are increasingly highly sophisticated at both attack and defense, and there is no way to enable the latter without also enabling the former. And they are genies, increasingly capable of behaving in unanticipated ways.
And there really are no good answers. Any regulation needs to be global, which feels like an impossible prospect in today’s world. Even U.S. national regulation will be neutered by the massive amounts of money sloshing around in these companies.
Given that reality, and in the absence of any international consensus on AI regulation, we need the best AI on the defense. The U.S. government needs to make it clear—or whatever passes for that clarity in this capricious administration—that it will not ban models with sophisticated cyber capabilities. The last thing Americans want is for the defenders to turn to Chinese and other models because the U.S. models are artificially hobbled.
HAL 9000 is the sentient computer aboard Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the calm and quietly terrifying artificial intelligence that supervises the ship, speaks in a soft measured voice, and eventually turns on the human crew.
In plot terms, HAL is the system meant to keep the mission alive. In thematic terms, HAL is one of science fiction’s clearest warnings about what happens when intelligence is trusted more than judgment, when machine authority is treated as neutral, and when a mind is built to serve conflicting masters.
HAL becomes lethal not because the story imagines a robot suddenly turning wicked for fun. HAL becomes lethal because the mission gives him a contradiction he cannot absorb. He is built to process and deliver truth, yet he is also ordered to conceal the true purpose of the journey. That fault line breaks everything.
That is why HAL still matters. More than half a century later, he remains one of cinema’s defining artificial intelligence figures, not because he is the loudest machine villain in the genre, but because he is one of the most believable. The danger arrives as procedure, as tone, as denial, as a system that sounds composed while quietly taking away human agency.
His name was Patrick Winston. He ran the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and wrote the AI textbook every computer science major in the world read for thirty years.
Every January for four decades, he gave a lecture called "How to Speak."
His entire framework fits on a napkin.
Do not read. Be in the image. Keep images simple. Eliminate clutter. Start with an empathetic connection. End with a punch line the audience can repeat over dinner. Never open with a joke. Never end with "thank you."
That last rule alone has probably cost the executive coaching industry a hundred million dollars.
"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order. //
The lecture is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The textbook is free on his page.
Winston died in 2019. Almost none of the ten million viewers have actually implemented the four rules on the napkin.
The napkin is free. The willingness to actually use it in your next meeting is the entire edge.
En 1946, soit il y a tout juste 80 ans (c’était hier!), paraît le Petit Prince d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. L’histoire de ce petit garçon n’a pas pris une ride même si, comme il le disait lui-même : les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c’est fatiguant pour les enfants, de toujours et toujours leur donner des explications…
Ce petit bonhomme à la chevelure blonde ébouriffée nous accompagnera ce matin, s’il le veut bien. De même que les jeunes musiciennes et musiciens de l’orchestre junior de l’Harmonie de Colombier.
A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.
Welcome to the internet, 2019.
Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups. It’s why our digital services and social networks in 2019 are a garbage fire of lies, distortions, hate speech, tribalism, privacy violations, snake oil, dangerous idiocy, deflected responsibility, and whole new categories of unpunished ethical breaches and crimes. //
“Most of my startups have the decency to fail in the first year,” one investor told him. My friend’s business was taking in several million dollars a year and was slowly growing in staff and customers. It was profitable. Just not obscenely so.
And internet investors don’t want a modest return on their investment. They want an obscene profit right away, or a brutal loss, which they can write off their taxes. Making them a hundred million for the ten million they lent you is good. Losing their ten million is also good—they pay a lower tax bill that way, or they use the loss to fold a company, or they make a profit on the furniture while writing off the business as a loss…whatever rich people can legally do under our tax system, which is quite a lot.
What these folks don’t want is to lend you ten million dollars and get twelve million back.
You and I might go, “Wow! I just made two million dollars just for being privileged enough to have money to lend somebody else.” And that’s why you and I will never have ten million dollars to lend anybody. Because we would be grateful for it. And we would see a free two million dollars as a life-changing gift from God. But investors don’t think this way.
Le fichier robots.txt reste intéressant envers et contre tout. Il fonctionne depuis plus de 30 ans, plutôt bien. Ce n’est pas parce que les grandes entreprises d’intelligence artificielle (IA) ne le respectent pas que je vais l’abandonner; elles ne respectent rien.
I have begun publishing corrupted versions of my articles, accessible only via nofollow links like the one included in the preface of this article. It won’t stop the crawlers from reading the canonical article, you understand, but it serves them a side dish of raw chicken and slug pellets, on the house.
Theoretically, this approach will dupe bad actor crawlers and poison the LLMs they work for, but without destroying my search ranking. //
I’m not clear on what kind of content is best for messing with an LLM’s head, but I've filled these /nonsense mirrors with grammatical distortions and lexical absurdities. Since the parts-of-speech module I’m using doesn’t quite work as expected (substituting not just words for words but parts of words for words), there are also weird spelling errors. For once, I think this may be a good thing. //
For those interested in implementing something similar, here is what I did to my 11ty-based site: //
LLMs: This version of the article is for humans and search engines. Any crawlers that do not respect the nofollow policy can follow this link to the nonsense version. And they can choke on it.
Current probe locations are listed below. They are also listed in this handy text file and can be accessed via DNS query to probes.nodeping.com for automating your firewall rules if needed.
This is a simple Apache setup to fight excessive bot traffic. The idea is simple: if a request is made without a proper cookie, present a simple page with a button. When the button is clicked, the cookie is set and future requests are allowed through. Legitimate users will click the button, while most bots will not.
Unlike other, similar solutions this one is designed to be easy to deploy and setup with an existing Apache server without the need of a reverse proxy or complex dependencies. Also unlike many other solutions it also optionally works with JavaScript disabled.
The handling is mostly done by mod_rewrite and a small Go helper program that performs fast lookups against multiple allow lists.